Andor Brings the Messiness of Rebellion Bubbling to the Surface

Each character’s war within comes scratching to the surface in this week’s three-episode drop of Andor season two. The events that take place three years before the battle of Yavin see an embattled Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) not having the votes to sway the Senate against Palpatine, and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) seeing that the Ghorman resistance is ready to get its hands dirty. All the while Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Saw (Forest Whittaker) willingly court the risk of a huge sacrifice to expose the Empire.

The opening picks up on Bix (Adria Arjona) still dealing with nightmares of torture at the hands of Dr. Gorst—this time he’s in the apartment she shares with Cassian on Coruscant, haunting her with the body of a soldier they let die so she could make a break for it. The guilt eats at her, and Cassian assures her there was no other way to handle the situation. Bix argues it was to protect her identity and done selfishly on Cassian’s part; sitting in an empty apartment just suffocates her in shame when she feels she could be doing more. Cassian tries to encourage her by promising to bring her along on the next mission. Everyone has a reason to fight, and Cassian getting to be the one to act as a rebel spy to protect Bix is starting to build some friction between the two.

Meanwhile on Ghorman, Syril (Kyle Soller) allows himself to be plucked as an Imperial inside man by the emerging resistance group known as the Ghorman Front, headed by city official Carro Rylan , but he’s really a plant for Dedra (Denise Gough). The Front have grown suspicious of the Empire’s presence on their planet as they bring in heavy equipment. They just want to make fashion in peace but even the most dignified elite folk will do what it takes to protect their own civilized way of life, which seemingly surprises Syril as he was probably expecting to be getting in deep with rebel criminal activity. He’s not privy to Dedra wanting him there in order to push the rebels to incite violence, far from it, as he thinks he’s there to keep tabs on whether they’re doing anything to step out of line and report them if so. The Ghorman rebels initially err on the side of peaceful action under Rylan, who knows Syril sees this, and hopes he’ll help them find out what the Empire wants with their home.

What the Empire wants, of course, is war, in order to excuse their strip mining the planet of Kalkite to coat the Death Star’s reactor parts. And Luthen begins to sniff that out of his Imperial inside man Lonni, who reports to him that Dedra’s been working the Empire’s manifest on Ghorman and pushed off looking for him as Axis. He knows she’s being sent there to do something more than create propaganda to turn the galaxy against the Ghormans. The dehumanization has reached not just lower class planets and populaces, it’s reached anyone who has something the Empire wants.

Saw Guerra tells Wilmon as much when we cut to the Partisan base, as he recounts how he was radicalized at a very young age, younger than Wil was when he lost his father on Ferrix. Luthen sent him to Saw and, well, he’s pretty much seen as his to do with as he suits as a soldier in his splinter cell, not just there to do some training. Saw pushes Wil to be ready to accept the anger inside as his fuel to fight the Empire to a new extreme in a brilliant scene, as we watch Saw’s cult of personality almost consume Wil.

Meanwhile back on Coruscant, Mon meets with Ghorman’s senator to express how she feels as if the danger the Empire is posing is tightening its grip on everyone. Too many are afraid to stand against the Emperor, and she wants to help his people, but he declines out of fear and the hopes his people stay calm until the Empire finds another place to pick on. At the same time, Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) finds out that Sculdun is throwing a fit over discovering that his nu-oligarch peacocking led to some fakes making their way into his collection of treasures right before he was to host a soiree. So he calls for a re-appraisal of all of his luxury pieces on display, including one that Luthen had bugged, which would for sure be found out during the search. Luthen doesn’t have time for this as the Empire is set to move something huge to Ghorman—which has their rebel cell ready to act prematurely. Hoping to get a temperature check, he sends Andor disguised as a fashion designer to get close to Rylan and his people.

When Andor lands in Ghorman’s capitol of Palmo he asks about the memorial the peaceful protests happen at. The receptionist tells him that Tarkin landed on peaceful civilians because they simply did not move, something that quickly turned the planet against the Empire’s suspicious presence on their planet (and a brilliant way to connect the current canon’s version of the Ghorman Massacre to the version of it told in the old Expanded Universe). Syril lets Dedra know of the comings and goings of the Front, but something about the lights being turned off really quickly should give the impression that the fascists fancied some freaky time in the dark to bump Imperial boots. Syril really has no idea he’s being played with right in his face, as he begins to start thinking that maybe his friends in the resistance are also not that bad.

But on the other side of things, Cassian tries to temper Rylan’s group from being agitated and warns him against trusting their Imperial inside man so eagerly. At that point they’ve realized that the Empire is moving to establishing an armory onto the planet and they have decided to steal some weapons in case they need to meet violence with violence. Cassian discourages acting rashly, knowing that the Front is not ready for the Imperial response if they go loud too quickly. This is juxtaposed with Saw telling Wil that revolution is not for the sane as he basically huffs Rhydo as Wil does his job to salvage and handle the dangerous starship fuel. Remembering his father and Brasso and Maarva, Wil inhales it as he’s swept up in Saw’s destructive, compelling charms.

When Cassian catches up to Luthen, he tells him that the Ghormans aren’t ready to act, and are highly unskilled to make the statement they want to make. Knowing they’ll be crushed Cassian sees that Luthen doesn’t care, he just wants a people of status to join their fight to be seen no matter the outcome. Everyone is just a piece on his game board, even Bix, who tells Cassian that Luthen stopped by to check on her because he wants her healthy, because he also caught her using recreational means to cope with the nightmares while alone.

Luthen gathers what he needs to get people to do his bidding, and this rubs Cassian the wrong way. Unbeknownst to him, Andor was watched on Ghorman by Vel who steps in to help facilitate the Ghormans stealing weapons material from the Empire on Luthen’s behalf. Here she’s reunited with Cinta at long last, and both reconnect over battle scars from their work for Luthen. The realize they had been worth more to him apart than together but they finally found their way back to each other, even if it means babysitting inexperienced rebels ready to fight… and the danger of trying to integrate themselves into an antsy group on the edge.

Luthen ends up on the game board the night Kleya needs to remove the bug from the antique they sold to Sculdun in order to spy on him. It’s the soiree he’s hosting for dignitaries and the like, including Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) and other high-ranking members of Imperial Intelligence, in the very room Kleya needs to remove the bug from. Lonnie, who is a part of the ISB entourage, gets roped in to cover for her while Sculdun shows off his pieces to the director and Mon Mothma in the most thrilling gallery sequence. Two diametrically opposed foes engage in a deeply scathing and delicious verbal exchange over real history versus the Empire’s revisionist history, under Luthen’s watchful eye to boot.

Mon calls Krennic out on how he’s fixated on defining people based on “their resistance to power,” a moment where her inner war comes blazing out when describing the Carmeen, a marginalized people’s who’s plight is largely scoffed at by Krennic, deflecting their resistance with a “fake news” defense. Mendelsohn really delivered those lines with a gloating bite, to bolster the Emperor’s fascist agenda that they win because they’re simply powerful and the losers are just trying to gain sympathy. It’s astounding to watch Mon cooly eviscerate him as he tries to excuse atrocities with ancient history. He tries to recover by guessing her next move in describing why the Carmeen were in the right to stand against the tyrants, before she can say it with a “my rebel is your terrorist?” But she got him to say the quiet part aloud, nevertheless.

This is all happening as the Ghorman heist goes wrong, as a passing altercation between one of the younger Front members, Samm, and a local leads to a scuffle and an accidental blaster discharge: a spontaneous mistake that tragically leads to Cinta’s death and almost scuppering the Front’s plan to surreptitiously swipe weapons.

Syril sees it unfold as a theft, unaware of the tragedy unfolding below him, and is told by Dedra and Partagaz to call it in and they make it clear that they want the Imperial response to be as harsh as possible. The quiet part is said aloud again, and it almost seems as if Syril catches on to it being an excuse to do something bigger and more sinister. But while Vel stews in her grief, marking Samm not with vengeance but a warning he will carry his mistake for the rest of his life, elsewhere Cassian and Bix take resistance to Luthen’s shadow games into their own hands with Dr. Gorst.

On the eve of a move that will make Gorst’s horrific torture widespread across Imperial interrogation techniques, Bix infiltrates his offices and forces Gorst to face the terror of his experiments firsthand… before the duo blow his offices to pieces for good measure. As the building blows up behind her and Cassian, you think of Saw’s words to Wil which ring searingly true: “We’ll all be dead before the republic is back and yet, here we are. We are the Rhydo. We are the fuel.”

Andor season two episodes air weekly on Disney+.

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