The Andor Special Edition: One Year Later / Sagrona Teema / Harvest

The first time as tragedy; the second as farce

The first thing one notices when watching the first “chapter” of the second season of Andor (meaning: a belly-busting episode drop, at 9pm on a weeknight, of a Star Wars mini-movie longer than Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker) is how funny it is.

It’s funny in all directions: slapstick (Cassian pinballs a TIE Avenger around the interior of a hangar bay so recklessly that he makes Finn and Poe’s escape from the Finalizer look smooth by comparison); sitcom (Dedra meets her mother-in-law, and quickly out-mother-in-laws her); and as always, in the baseline self-important silliness of the average human being (Syril Karn describing his discovery of a data anomaly at work like he genuinely thinks he blew up the frickin’ Death Star).

This latter type of a laugh gets a lot of mileage in Andor‘s framework, and is one of the critical tools in showrunner Tony Gilroy’s strategy. It’s howlingly funny that bride-to-be Leida Mothma reveals to her mother that she’s had her first fight with her betrothed because “he’s a child,” and then gives as her example his refusal to hold her hand, like they’re incompatible 7-year-olds at recess. It’s then immediately tragic to watch Mon Mothma understand for what must be the zillionth time that she’s put her daughter in a position from which she is in no way prepared and from which she will never recover, and that it’s too late to do anything to pull her back.

This rope-a-dope approach to the daily indignities of life under fascism is the trick here; it recurs again, and again, and again in Gilroy’s writing. We chuckle, and then it sinks in. The good guys are under greater and greater pressures (ICE raids and blackmail and the ways that resistance movements tear themselves apart from the inside, long before they can even land a shot on the enemy); and the bad guys are looser, happier, feeling more like themselves. Freed from the narrative burden of having to fail recursively for the entire two-hour runtime of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic (my favourite character name in Star Wars) gets to be something more like what he was probably intended to be all along: a smug, intolerably self-satisfied son-of-a-bitch. So it goes, with fascists. It’s not enough for them to beat you; they have to convey to themselves and everyone around you that your suffering is comedy to them.

What the hell are we doing here?

Look, I know. I said (or strongly implied) that I was hanging up the gloves, re: writing about Star Wars. But I just can’t help myself.

Here’s something: Star Wars Celebration was last weekend, and I came out of it pretty bummed. Not that a “starfighter movie” (whatever that is) starring Ryan Gosling might not be fun; it’s just that, when the creative team behind that picture is — like the one behind The Mandalorian & Grogu movie, and the one behind the second season of Ahsoka — just about the dullest group of product-makers I can personally imagine, we are a long way away from the chancy creative verve of Lucasfilm a decade ago.

Yes, a decade ago. Before the firings — before the Disney-Lucasfilm experiment flew too close to the sun — before the alt-right incubator trained on Gamergate descended on the best Star Wars movie in decades, on their way to destroying the entire American government and economy eight years later — Star Wars under Disney was a murderer’s row of exciting, visionary projects. A Rian Johnson movie and a Miller/Lord movie, under the same big tent? A prequel heist movie for the Death Star plans, with nary a Jedi in view? Luke Skywalker standing on that lonely hill, his lip trembling, as Rey holds out the lightsabre and invites him back to the fight? We had no idea how good we had it.

That this past weekend’s days-long feeling of “meh” preceded, by a couple of days, the return of the best Star Wars thing in forty years — likely, the signature accomplishment of Kathleen Kennedy’s entire era at Lucasfilm, no matter what else happens while she’s there — was not lost on me. Especially given that said best-Star-Wars-thing-ever will also be, as of three weeks from now, over forever.

One hates to prognosticate in situations like this; we never actually know what the future will bring. But from where I’m standing today, this might very well be it.

So, shit. I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

Here’s how it’s gonna go: my regular newsletter will probably keep up during this timeframe, and will continue to drop on Fridays. A few days later — I like Sundays for this, but time will tell — I’ll email out my reactions to the previous week’s Andor episodes. After today, it’ll be a paid-subscribers-only thing, meaning it won’t appear on my blog (except as an invitation to subscribe). And after Andor is over, I’ll still occasionally drop paid-subscribers-only content into the feed, whenever I feel like something fits the model.

If that sounds too not-figured-out-yet to you, that’s cool. But since it’s 2025, an annual paid sub will only cost you five damn dollars. You’ll get all the free stuff and all the paid stuff, for the price of a flat white. And it lasts a year.

Logistics

The first three episodes of Andor season 2 are dense — almost too dense — intercutting between two major, and one minor, lines of narrative.

The first major line of narrative is Cassian’s story, in which I am also including the business on Mina-Rau involving Bix, Wilmon, and Brasso, because that planet, and his Ferrix found family, are Cassian’s destination. Cassian gets waylaid on (what turns out to be) Yavin IV, caught between two squabbling factions of Lost Boys, including one who genuinely parachutes into Star Wars from the secondary cast of SoCal-set Never Have I Ever, in case you need a clue as to how these miscreants behave.

The minor line of narrative involves Dedra Meero and her (now) live-in boyfriend (or fuckslave!) Syril Karn (!!). It centers first on Dedra getting a new assignment, which will put her front and centre on Ghorman; and secondarily, on Dedra dealing with her mother-in-law, Syril’s obsequious miniature mommy tyrant, Eedy.

The largest line of narrative in these episodes overall, though, takes place on Chandrila, with Mon Mothma’s family going through the three-day ritual of marrying their daughter Leida off to the pasty-palmed scion of the Sculdun criminal empire. It is in this portion that we can see how hard Tony Gilroy is working to elegantly refresh the audience on all of the principal characters and tensions of Andor, and to do it within the storytelling, rather than clip reels, or “previously on,” or any other mechanical contrivance. We can see this because (only somewhat improbably), if any character isn’t part of either of the other two narratives listed above, they’re all here.

Luthen and Kleya are here; even Cinta makes a late-game appearance to whack Tay Kolma, who is also here. Of course Perrin, that magnificent lush, is here (and gives an eye-turningly good wedding speech, betraying surprising self-awareness about the oppression-enabling choices he has made), as are Leida and Davo and poor miserable Vel, who’s in love with Cinta to a probably greater extent than she’s in love with being a rebel, and so has basically chosen to just be miserable, all the time, always… and shows it.

I admire the sheer writing craft to put a series of sequences like this together and to find a way to cram in pretty much everything the audience needs to remember about the rebellion from season one, along with all of the series’ key players: how Mon Mothma is funding the rebellion with her family’s wealth but had to broker a marriage with a crime boss to cover her tracks; how Luthen is secretly puppeteering an expanding rebel cell that (this week) includes Cassian stealing a prototype TIE fighter from Sienar Industries; how Kleya and Vel loathe one another (but should probably fuck); how absolutely everybody (audience included) assumes that Mon has been sleeping with Tay, except (oops!) it seems like the poor sots haven’t actually found the time to do it yet. And like so many things across this weekend from hell, now it’s too late.

Tay is not, sadly, the stalwart Mon thought he was last season. His businesses have turned sour, and he’s recognized a point of leverage with Mon Mothma given what he knows about her “secret foundation” and its true purpose, and — because he’s privileged or stupid or both — he hasn’t actually clocked that threatening the secrecy of a clandestine resistance organization involving some of the most powerful people in the Galaxy is absolutely going to get him killed.

The more affecting scenes, though, are the ones — one in each episode — where Mon Mothma weighs the emotional cost of agreeing to marry Leida off to Sculdun’s nitwit son. She knew she was doing something horrible when she brokered the marriage last season; now she’s watching it play out in miroscopic moments, too late to stop it (although, at least once, she tries), and it’s brutal.

The emotional tenor of each story thread ends up dominating my sense of the episodes, which is a nifty outcome for something that could have seemed so plotty. Leida and Stekan will be miserable; Vel is already miserable; Cass and Bix are heading for misery no matter what happens, but I’ll take this moment to reiterate my plea to LucasBooks: please let me write a YA novel about young Cassian and Bix on Ferrix, which could now be intercut with the backstory of how they got together in their year on the run between “Rix Road” and now. It would give me a chance to fuck around in the prefab farmstead on Mina-Rau a little bit, which I’d enjoy, because that planet is now, beyond a lifetime of competitors, the #1 Star Wars environment I’d most like to live in for the rest of my days. I’d have to disappear the general store guy into a grain silo once I got there, but it’d be worth it for that view, and the quiet.

There’s only one couple in these episodes of Andor that seems to be doing reasonably well under the circumstances — fitting, given we’re living under tyranny, and they’re tyrants — and it’s the pairing that gave me the greatest magnitude of shock when I realized that the show had actually gone there. The fact that delusional sadboy Syril Karn somehow got the girl after declaring, last season, that he had fallen hopelessly in love with her from afar (generating inordinate disgust on her part) is… really somethin’. Seeing Dedra Meero touch someone — even if it’s a half-tender, half-domineering grip of the chin to steady Syril against the specter of his mother’s visit — reads almost perverse, in light of how physically phobic and painfully constrained she seemed last season. (Denise Gough gave interviews saying she didn’t think Dedra had ever been touched.)

One wonders, in vain, at the further dimensions of their relationship. (Syril flopping on his bed and powering down, like an overstimulated five-year-old??) Andor may have coarsened Star Wars‘ langauge, but I doubt we’re ever going to see what these two Space Nazis get up to in that bed, whether it’s a more bromidic vision of whips and chains, or the more entertaining phantom of Amy Brookheimer banging her fiancé.

Big Tent

Regarding coarse language, I gather from my social media feeds that the predictable brigade of YouTube grifters are angry that Andor used the word “rape” for the first time in Star Wars, which (they claim) is a premise that has no place in Star Wars. As is inescapably the case with these con men, it’s a bad-faith argument from the jump, given they’re talking about a franchise that has contained the threat of sexual assault (or, in Jabba’s case, the heavy implication of execution upon the threat) from the get-go.

But I suppose my use of that example, too, serves their (self-serving) point: a giant space slug licking his lips before a “yadda yadda yadda” star-wipe to the princess dressed in metal bondage gear, about which nothing is ever said, leaves the enterprise firmly in the place where the fanboys get to eroticize the act without bearing any cost. It didn’t “happen,” it just happened. When Bix stands up on Mina Rau and tells the stormtroopers that Lt. Krole tried to rape her, though, it’s both ugly, and canonical. She’s still wearing all of her clothes, and we’ve watched her (barely) fight the bastard off, and all of it — from the moment he rolled up and began calculating how to press his advantage — is as ugly and predictable and vile as we know it in life. Those CHUDs must be inwardly seething that they don’t get to merely lick their lips and move on like they like to do. It happened, it didn’t just “happen.”

Additional to portraying the predictable use of sexual assault in war and oppression, Gilroy is braiding other new strands of the expression of tyranny into these episodes. We have characters who are undocumented migrants and must flee the law enforcement that treats them as simultaneously necessary and expendable (“Use us up; turn us in”). We have a table full of elite Imperial yobbos planning — over canapés! — the forced displacement of a people who live on resource-rich land, whose existence is inconvenient to the machine of empire. The Imps are going to do the latter with propagandist weapons — the “Bureau of Enlightment,” new to Star Wars as far as I know, was a nice touch — to ensure that no matter what happens, the Galaxy ends up believing that the Ghormans had it coming.

All of this was planned and written years before the American president started musing about using the shattered Gaza strip as the foundation for a new Riviera. Tony Gilroy, who’s on the record as saying he’s the type of wearisome old white man who consumes history books chock-a-block, doesn’t need to rely on today’s atrocities to stock his Galaxy. He’s merely ventilating the established patterns of all the things that happen when these things happen, throughout the long chain of the history of time. This year of all years, it’s tiringly clear that we’re stuck in civilization’s time loop, even as TikToks show me Gen Z-ers gasping at how the Star Wars prequel trilogy “predicted” the rise of American fascism in Revenge of the Sith.

It didn’t; Lucas was writing about the fall of Rome. Gilroy is writing about Weimar Germany, and Stalin, and any number of recent “never forget” examples that should loom larger in our cultural understanding, and don’t, because living complacently is, fundamentally, easier.

But these repeating patterns occasionally break the other way, too. In the season’s very first scene, we meet Niya (Rachelle Diedericks, excellent), a technician working on the TIE Avenger, who turns out to be Cassian’s “in” at the Sienar base, and has chosen to help him steal the ship. Niya is about to break good — and consequently flee the base, and this life, forever — and we don’t find out what happens to her after the twelve-minute head start she asks of Cassian, and I doubt we ever will. Like Kino, last season, I’ll probably spend more than a few idle hours dreaming out what the rest of her life might have been like.

Cassian gives Niya a much-needed, last-minute shot in the moral arm, as she weighs the enormity of the change she’s about to make by no longer living complacently. Managing people without seeming to manage them is basically Cassian’s superpower: he did it with Kino and he did it with Nemik and he’ll do it with Jyn Erso, and he’s evidently done it with a whole rebel cell he’s built out of his salvaged friend group from Ferrix. (He does it so easily with the warring Maya Pei factions on Yavin that it almost doesn’t seem fair; he barely seems to be looking at them as he expertly manipulates their internecine strife.)

Here, Cass needs something from Niya; so inevitably, he’s manipulating her. He’s also saving her, her soul if not her body, her heart if not her rational mind. He’s using his gift to pay forward the knowing that came to him so suddenly last year, when he returned to Ferrix like a gathering storm. That moment of realization, of who he really was and what his life really meant. He describes it to Niya as “coming home to yourself,” something queer folks can’t help but feel a certain way about. He’s talking about becoming a revolutionary; but he’s talking about that moment, whenever and for whomever it comes. The moment when you finally decide you can’t live the other way anymore.

Two years ago last week (!) I was standing in an art gallery staring at a Meryl McMaster piece I quite like, and a set of words floated into my head, and they were “step off the edge, into the wild sky.” And that was the moment I came home to myself, even though I didn’t have those words for it till Cassian said them just now. It was the moment I couldn’t live the other way anymore. A lot of things changed after that. I left a lot behind. (I, too, had fun there, before.) It isn’t good or bad, this changing. It’s something so much more than that: it’s rare. It’s grateful. It’s necessary.

Stray observations I couldn’t fit anywhere else, and/or (Andor!) the miscellany

• Chandrilan fashion has leaned (what is in our world) Japanese on this series, which (in the Star Wars world) means Jedi, and I find that fascinating.
• The groom chopping off the bride’s braid with a dagger, lining up to the tradwife chants about the safety of the braid last season… Yucckkkkkkkkkk.
• The Ghorman flugelhorn joins the entire marching band ensemble from Ferrix in the “boy, I wish I could buy some of these space instruments to display in my home” wish list. Ghorman, in general. We’re really on our way somewhere with that.
• Cassian’s gun rules so hard that when he kicked open the compartment on his ship and whipped it out, I actually whooped!
• If they aren’t selling disco ball droids in Galaxy’s Edge by midsummer, someone at Lucas Licensing deserves to lose their job.
• I can’t recommend Alexander Freed’s Reign of the Empire: The Mask of Fear highly enough, re: Mon Mothma, this season, and this year so far. Crazy that as I write this, Revenge of the Sith is in theatres again, containing Genevieve O’Reilly’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it first appearance as Mothma. What an incredible elaboration upon that character we’ve been treated to, these past twenty eyars.
• Here’s a great interview with Tony Gilroy, about these episodes. No spoilers!

Soldiers down

• Brasso Brickwielder. One of my favourite performances in season 1. “Brother” to Cass and Bix. Chuckles as he tells Kellen he’s going to kill him for ratting them out. A real one.
• B2-EMO, who is left to play with the children on a farm full of wheat where the good dogs go, except for real, rather than what they did to my dog Shannon when I was three.

The miracle

I know what you’re thinking: “Hey Lia, what do you think about this thing where Andor is now only 2 seasons, instead of the original 5?”

(For those who forget: when originally commissioned, Andor was intended for a 5-season run, with each season covering a year in Cassian’s life prior to the Battle of Scarif. This plan changed during production on the first season, when Gilroy and Luna realized that at 2.5 years per season, they’d be doing this for a decade and a half. The change in series order was communicated prior to the launch of season 1.)

Well, here’s what I think:

a) Gilroy and Luna are absolutely right, and had no obligation to give 15 years of their careers to Star Wars

b) Obviously, five twelve-episode seasons that notched detail and nuance at the same pace as season 1 would have been incredible

c) It never would have happened. The entire nature of the streaming industry transformed/collapsed midway through production on season 2. Season 2, in the original 5-year plan, would still have debuted around now; and then Andor would promptly have been cancelled, in early June of this year, due to cost.

No one, and I mean no one, is spending $300 million per season on a show like this anymore, unless it’s Stranger Things or House of the Dragon. That Andor has been made at all — that it has been given luxurious and fullsome production for all 24 of the episodes we’re getting — is a miracle of timing. If season 2 hadn’t already been in production by the time the streaming bubble burst, I absolutely guarantee you, we wouldn’t even be getting this much.

And — per the above — given what’s on the horizon for Star Wars, generally, I seriously doubt we’ll see a project like Andor again for the remainder of Filoni’s tenure as Chief Creative Officer, which possibly means for the rest of my life. It’s not the kind of Star Wars that Filoni likes to make; it’s not “lore Star Wars,” which rewards lorekeepers with systems of knowledge to understand the rules of mystical ephemera of this semi-magical universe. (Note Filoni’s next project: explaining the Mortis Gods.)

There’s no magic in Andor, so no need to explain it; and the characters behave confusingly, i.e. like real people, whose personal, political, and material needs are frequently at odds with one another. It’s refreshing as hell and it’s the kind of shit that drives lorekeepers, who need everything to be a science — a clear number on a D20, plus a pre-established modifier — nuts. It widens and deepens the potential of the franchise it’s built within — Chris Ryan, in the podcast linked above, says that it proves Star Wars can be “load-bearing” — in a manner that, simply, feels too good to be true.

Andor‘s the best Star Wars has ever been — part of a rarefied echelon of projects that have happened only a handful of times in the franchise’s nearly-50-year lifespan. It’s a miracle that we got it at all. You can hear it in the sheer joy in peoples’ voices as they speak about it, write about it, this week. That’s me as well.