Andor season 2 review: Episodes 10-12

Here we are at the end. Nearly three years after Andor’s premiere shattered people’s assumptions about what Star Wars could be, the groundbreaking adventures of Cassian Andor and his friends and enemies have drawn to a close on the eve of Rogue One. The show’s final story arc — “Make It Stop,” “Who Else Knows?” and “Jedha, Kyber, Erso” — isn’t as pulse-pounding as the one that preceded it, but it’s still incredibly impressive in its own right. As Luthen’s journey ends, Cassian overcomes entrenched prejudices on Yavin to make his mentor’s sacrifices mean something, while on Coruscant, two of the Empire’s finest are ground to dust by an unforgiving bureaucracy myopically obsessed with protecting its ultimate weapon.

A mastermind meets his fate

Luthen Rael’s most famous quote is, “I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” In Andor’s last three episodes, we see both the burning and the sunrise, ensuring that Luthen’s presence looms over the entire story arc even if he only appears in a few early scenes.

Episode 10 begins with a frantic call to Luthen from Lonni Jung, his mole inside the Imperial Security Bureau. The emergency meeting request doesn’t sit right with the ever-wary Kleya Marki, who makes Luthen promise that he’ll abandon the rendezvous if things don’t seem perfect. “I think we used up all the perfect,” Luthen responds grimly. Even before he hears what Lonni has learned, Luthen can feel that they’re in the endgame. The time for extreme caution is over. He and Kleya can’t afford to wait for ideal opportunities to make progress; they have to start taking bigger risks.

Lonni’s information turns out to be extremely valuable, the kind of intelligence that must immediately reach the nascent Rebel Alliance on Yavin 4. But Luthen has a bigger immediate problem: Lonni has exposed himself to the ISB, and he wants to be extracted from Coruscant with his family as soon as possible. For Luthen, the choice between warning Yavin 4 about the Empire’s secret superweapon and dropping everything to save Lonni is no choice at all. Despite telling Lonni, “We’re in this together,” Luthen only sees him as a loose end at this point. Stellan Skarsgård does a nice job playing Luthen in the moment when he resolves to kill Lonni. As he tells his agent about the safety awaiting him on Yavin, he has already determined that Lonni is too much of a risk to be left alive. Moments later, after leaving a smoking hole in Lonni’s chest, Luthen walks away from their meeting spot with a hard expression on his face, clearly convinced that he did the right thing — the necessary thing. (As he told Lonni years earlier, “I burn my decency for someone else’s future.”)

But while Luthen is willing to sacrifice Lonni for the cause, he’s not willing to lose Kleya, even with the stakes as high as they are. As they plan their next moves, Luthen tells Kleya to stay away from the gallery while he destroys the evidence of their operation. This is a touching indication of just how deeply he cares for her. Yes, Kleya might have destroyed the evidence more quickly, but Luthen would rather protect her than guarantee a speedy destruction process. If either one of them is going to get caught red-handed in the gallery, he wants it to be him, not her.

Indeed, this is exactly what happens. As Luthen pours corrosive acid onto the control board for his covert radio system, a chime announces someone’s arrival at the gallery. The visitor is none other than ISB Supervisor Dedra Meero, and given what Lonni told Luthen, this can’t be an innocent coincidence. Skarsgård masterfully portrays Luthen’s minute emotional tells as he unlocks the door for Dedra. His initial alarmed expression suggests that he knows the jig is up, but, a stoic soldier to the end, he still puts on his carefree-curator act for his guest.

What follows is one of the tensest scenes in all of Star Wars, as the two ideological foes size each other up. Dedra and Luthen are two of the most ruthless and cunning characters in Andor, and they’ve spent years trying to undermine each other, so it’s wonderful to see them finally meet and butt heads, even if one has already beaten the other. “Is everything real?” Dedra asks Luthen. On the surface, she’s talking about his art collection. But beneath the facade, she’s hinting at her knowledge of Luthen’s secret life, and she’s clearly having fun with the double meaning. Luthen is undoubtedly too smart to miss the message here: He’s been caught. But still, he keeps up the performance until there’s absolutely no question that it’s over. He finds a way to grab a knife under the guise of telling Dedra that it might be a fake. “Is it real?” Dedra asks, savoring the chance to draw out the final stage of this cat-and-mouse game. “We still don’t know,” Luthen responds jovially. “The tension mounts!” Indeed it does. If he’s going down, Luthen is going to string Dedra along for as long as possible.

The game ends when Dedra unboxes the Imperial Starpath unit that Luthen tried to buy from Cassian on Ferrix four years earlier. With his fears confirmed, Luthen’s facade vanishes and his face abruptly falls. Whatever happens next, his operation is over. You can see how much he regrets the fact that he won’t be able to carry on the fight. Perhaps that’s why, with his opponent finally right in front of him, he can’t resist one last confrontation.

“Freedom scares you,” Luthen tells Dedra. “You don’t want freedom,” she retorts. “You want chaos — chaos for everyone but you.” But Dedra is wrong — Luthen doesn’t want chaos. He’s willing to create some temporary chaos in order to topple the Empire, and he’s willing to accept a little disorder in the aftermath as the price of liberty and justice, but he believes that ending tyranny will ultimately lead to more stability for more people. Dedra accuses Luthen of being a hypocrite, but she’s the real hypocrite — Imperials only want peace and freedom for themselves, while the rest of the galaxy languishes in misery and captivity.

For years, Luthen has known that his fight would end in death. He probably assumed that the Empire would catch him before he could take his own life to protect his secrets. If so, he must have counted himself lucky when the day finally came. Distracted by the smoke coming from the gallery’s back room, Dedra makes the uncharacteristic mistake of taking her eye off of Luthen, allowing him to mortally wound himself. Dedra, panicking at the thought of her foe undoing all her hard work, screams for a medic. And as ISB personnel rush Luthen to the hospital, a distraught figure stands at the front of a crowd outside.

Finishing the job

Alone in the Coruscant safe house, Kleya stands in shock, paralyzed by the inevitability — the necessity — of Luthen’s death and flooded by memories of how she and Luthen first met. Luthen’s backstory was the object of so much fan speculation (mostly theorizing that he was a Jedi) that Kleya’s own past faded into the background by comparison. Episode 10 explains both of their origins and how they came together, and I have to say, it’s much more compelling than a hackneyed Order 66 storyline.

The initial flashback doesn’t offer us many details, but it seems like Luthen was part of an army that was massacring civilians on a planet somewhere, and either he never liked killing civilians in the first place or he had a change of heart, because he ended up fleeing the massacre and rescuing a little girl who’d been hiding on his ship. Giving Luthen this shameful past is really smart — it explains both why he’s so intent on fighting oppression and why he’s so comfortable dishing out brutality when necessary. But given that Luthen’s present-day service to the rebellion is built on his cold pragmatism and lack of sentimentality, it’s interesting that his first step down that path was one of kindness and emotional attachment. It’s no wonder Luthen has such a strong bond with Kleya — meeting her jolted him onto the right path, and every time he looks at her, he sees the man he used to be and the one he might still have been without her.

Subsequent flashbacks show us how Luthen and Kleya develop their bond and their profession. Early on, when Luthen is trying to sell a collectible to an antiques dealer — seemingly the origin of his familiarity with the art trade — a young Kleya reveals that she knows how to play along with a ruse, even if she’s too inexperienced to lie well. By the next flashback, Luthen has learned a lot about antiquities, as well as how to clean them and who to sell them to. We also see Luthen start to prepare Kleya for the precarious nature of the life they’re about to live, telling her that their cover identities “won’t always be up to us.”

Kleya’s early experience with war clearly hardened her from a young age, and the flashbacks show Luthen wrestling with how much responsibility (and trauma) to place on her shoulders. When a squad of Imperial soldiers marches by with prisoners condemned to death, Luthen tries to convince Kleya to turn away, not wanting to make her watch a slaughter reminiscent of the ones his unit committed back on her home planet. He hurriedly accepts the shopkeeper’s barter offer instead of countering it because of how badly he wants to get Kleya out of there. But Kleya is transfixed by the Empire’s cruelty and refuses to look away as the soldiers line up the civilians and execute them. It’s a sad testament to how emotionally scarred she already is that witnessing this horror only makes her angry.

But Luthen needs more from Kleya than anger. He needs discipline. After they reunite, she asks him when they can start fighting back. Luthen can sense her impulsiveness and knows that keeping her alive will require acclimating her to some brutal realities. He tells her that fighting back won’t be as simple as she thinks; it will involve a lot of losing until they’re finally ready to win. His warning presciently sums up the entire rebel movement. In Andor’s present day, we’ve almost arrived at that pivotal moment when the rebels are ready to win.

In the flashbacks, though, resistance is a long way from viable. To survive long enough to make a difference, Luthen tells Kleya, it’s important to stay sharp and know when to cut your losses. Sometimes, as in the third flashback, that means clearing out of an area so you don’t risk getting swept up in random reprisals. Kleya disobeyed Luthen’s instructions in that situation, and he can’t abide that anymore, especially when it could mean the difference between life and death. “When I tell you to move, you move,” Luthen tells a young Kleya. Years later, as they’re preparing to scuttle their operation, Luthen will override Kleya’s protective instinct by telling her to “move” and protect herself instead.

By the final flashback, Luthen is almost ready to start involving Kleya in his small acts of resistance, but first he needs to make sure that she’s really ready for the isolation and amorality of the rebel lifestyle. As they sit at a picturesque cafe, Luthen tells Kleya that she needs to confront the violent costs of her actions head-on and make peace with them. “Life shows us what we stand to lose,” he says. “Most people look away. We can’t be like that.” Kleya’s eagerness to help him only unsettles him further. He worries that he’s not giving her a choice, the way his army service never gave him one. When she accuses him of being afraid, he responds, beautifully, “I’m only afraid of what I’m doing to you.”

After Kleya reiterates that she’s ready to fight back, Luthen detonates a series of explosions under Imperial vehicles on a nearby bridge. Kleya’s first instinct is to turn toward the bridge before Luthen has even pulled the trigger, but he forces her not to react in advance to the bombing and then guides her reaction afterward. It’s Luthen’s first lesson in how to dispassionately commit violence, the kind that will isolate Kleya from the very people she’s trying to help. With that, Luthen begins molding Kleya into a protégé who can survive both the horrors she wants to stop and the horrors she will have to commit in the process.

During her last mission for Luthen, Kleya proves that he has taught her well. She arrives at the hospital where he’s being kept while posing as a patient with a hand injury, and then she skilfully switches to impersonating a nurse after stealing a set of scrubs. Finding an unattended patient on a hoverchair, she uses them to get closer to Luthen’s medical bay. (Clearly, the fact that this alien seems unable to speak Basic is a huge boon to Kleya, who doesn’t have to worry about the patient blowing her cover.) We haven’t seen her operate in the field like this before, and she does an excellent job. Her coolness under pressure is even more remarkable given the emotional nature of her mission.

Episode 10 is an amazing showcase for Kleya’s talents and commitment to the cause. She’s an excellent infiltrator, carefully reconnoitering the environment, quickly improvising to overcome unexpected obstacles, meticulously preparing and then deploying an explosive diversion, and ruthlessly murdering any soldier who gets in her way. Her operation was so good that the Empire initially assumes it was the work of three people. Luthen would be proud.

But Luthen will never know what Kleya did for him or the Rebellion. With no way of getting him out of the hospital and slim chances of him resisting Imperial torture if he wakes up, Kleya knows what she has to do. As she pulls the plug on Luthen’s breathing apparatus, a tear streams down her face. She mourns his loss even as she knows that killing him is the right thing to do and what he would have wanted. In a rare sign of affection, she kisses his forehead before fleeing the hospital.

I can’t imagine how Kleya felt in that moment. How heartbreaking must it be to have to use everything your mentor taught you to end his life in order to save his cause? This is, without a doubt, one of the most brutal things Andor makes any of its characters do, and the way Kleya handles it leaves no doubt about her ironclad commitment to the Rebellion.

When Luthen found Kleya hiding in his ship, she was a scared little girl. Over the years, he nurtured her anger and forged it into steely resolve, teaching her not only how to fight back but also how to make peace with the consequences. Episode 10 shows us how his training has paid off. As such, the end of Luthen’s story also marks the end of Kleya’s journey — she has transformed from the sentimental kid he first meets into a coldly pragmatic warrior like him.

In the first flashback, Luthen hears the slaughter outside the ship and mournfully mutters to himself, “Make it stop.” This line defines the entire episode. As devoted as Luthen was to the rebellion, he didn’t relish all the sacrifice, suffering, loneliness, and moral compromise that it entailed. He knew that he was condemned to keep fighting, but he longed to set down his burden. He wanted it all to be over. In the end, Kleya granted his wish and made it stop.

After everything she’s done for the Rebellion, Kleya ends up somewhere between Luthen (burning his life for a sunrise he’ll never see) and Luke Skywalker (getting all the acclaim in the galaxy). She makes it to Yavin, but she lacks a purpose there. When Cassian visits her in the infirmary to apologize for how the rebels are treating her, she can’t even speak — she’s lost in thought, or maybe stunned by the magnitude of what’s happened over the past day. Later, she aimlessly wanders around the base in the rain, as if searching for a new purpose. Given how focused, motivated, and energetic she was while working for Luthen, it’s heartbreaking to see the desultory turn her life has taken.

When Vel finds Kleya in the woods, she brings her to her home. Their roles have reversed since Kleya was the confident jack-of-all-trades scoffing at Vel’s narrow-minded braggadocio. Now Vel is the one with a strong sense of purpose and Kleya is the one who needs guidance. During their conversation, Kleya recalls that Luthen always told people to know their exit before they entered (something he told Cassian the first time they met). It’s as if she thinks she’s broken that rule by journeying to Yavin without a plan. In response, Vel quotes another Luthen line — “I have friends everywhere” — to reassure her that she’s safe among the rebels. But physical safety isn’t enough for someone like Kleya.

In a way, both Kleya and Vel are lost in the sprawl of Yavin. But at least Vel has a job. Kleya is left to just wander around, the ultimate afterthought amid the hustle and bustle of the burgeoning Alliance. No one around her knows who she is, what she’s been through, or how much they owe her. She belongs to a bygone era of rebellion, an embryonic phase whose theories, methods, and central figures are being cast aside. This is one of the saddest outcomes of Andor’s final story arc, and the show executes it beautifully.

Everyone in the Andor cast shines in these three episodes, but no one shines as brightly as Elizabeth Dulau, who imbues Kleya with a stunning mix of grit and heart. Incredibly, Andor was Dulau’s first acting job after graduating from drama school. I’ve never seen someone so early in their career leave such a profound mark on a major production like this. Dulau puts on an absolute masterclass as Kleya, cementing herself as an integral part of Andor’s franchise-altering success.

An uphill battle to preserve a legacy

But as Kleya fades from the story, someone else steps forward to carry on Luthen’s legacy. Cassian may only have a few days left to live as this story arc begins, but in every moment that involves Luthen, he demonstrates that he understands and appreciates what the man did for the Rebellion. Luthen once observed that he’d never see “the light of gratitude,” but Cassian doesn’t intend to let his memory be forgotten or disgraced.

When Wilmon Paak shows him Kleya’s encoded message, Cassian thinks it’s Luthen calling for help. Like Wilmon, he remains loyal to his old mentor despite committing to another way of resisting the Empire. On the cusp of his ultimate sacrifice for the rebellion, Cassian remains as impulsive as ever, flying off to save a friend despite the risks to himself, his friends, and the precariously coalescing rebellion. He doesn’t know what’s waiting for him on Coruscant, arguably the most dangerous place for him to go at that moment. All he knows is that someone he cares about needs his help.

“It would be you, wouldn’t it?” Kleya says when Cassian arrives at the safe house with Melshi. Her meaning is clear: Of all of Luthen’s operatives, only Cassian would be foolish enough to fly to Coruscant to pry him from the jaws of the Empire. Everyone around him seems to agree that he could never resist the urge to save a friend’s life. It’s a testament to both his loyalty and his recklessness.

But Kleya has bad news for Cassian: Luthen is dead. She has even worse news, too, but even after hearing about the Empire’s most dangerous project ever, all Cassian can focus on is Luthen’s death and the possibility that Kleya might be wrong about it. It’s another sign of his single-minded devotion to Luthen — he’s normally all about the mission, but in this case, he can’t see past his personal attachments.

Cassian’s loyalty to Luthen doesn’t end with his mentor’s death. He knows he can still honor Luthen by saving Kleya’s life and bringing her to Yavin. “You need to see the place you helped build,” he tells her, and the second “you” in that sentence undoubtedly refers to both her and Luthen. Cassian is one of the few people who appreciates what the two of them have done, and now that Luthen will never know what it all added up to, Cassian at least wants Kleya to see the results for herself.

But as Andor explores in wonderfully dramatic fashion, the rebel leadership on Yavin 4 remains deeply hostile to Luthen, almost to the point of self-sabotaging arrogance. A vast gulf separates Yavin, with its wariness and professionalism, from Luthen, with his boldness and independence. After Cassian and Melshi leave for Coruscant, General Draven berates Wilmon, arguing that the urgency of rescuing Luthen pales in comparison to the importance of protecting Yavin’s massive and vulnerable buildup of rebel resources. Yavin’s leaders are in no mood to deal with Luthen’s mess at the moment — and once Cassian returns with alarming intelligence from Luthen’s network, the tensions between the two sides only grow, with Cassian caught in the middle.

In an audience with members of the rebel leadership council, Cassian explains what Luthen learned: The Empire has secretly been constructing some kind of powerful weapon, and the destruction of Ghorman, the mining of kyber on Jedha, and the work of an Imperial engineer named Galen Erso are all connected to this secret project. Cassian probably thinks the Rebellion will jump on this intelligence and try to find out more about the weapon, adding yet another layer to the debt they owe Luthen. But instead, most of the rebel leaders just scoff at Cassian’s report, with one one saying “it sounds like a paranoid fantasy.”

Given what we know about the Death Star, it can seem baffling that the Yavin leadership doesn’t believe Luthen’s information about it. But Andor does a great job of justifying their skepticism about the intelligence by emphasizing how strongly they distrust its source. “We’re talking about someone who’s been a thorn in our side since we began building this Alliance,” one leader says. Clearly, anything involving Luthen raises this group’s hackles. Most of them despised his methods and thought his mumblings about shadowy Imperial plots were evidence of paranoia. They were worried about him turning into Saw. Plus, many of them are current or former Imperial senators who, because of their backgrounds, might still struggle to imagine the Empire being capable of hiding something like the Death Star from the Senate. Put all that together, and it’s no surprise that Cassian gets such an icy reception.

A more obedient soldier might have dropped the matter as soon as his superiors made their disinterest clear. But Cassian is no ordinary soldier — he was trained to be an independent thinker by Luthen, whose own formative experience was realizing that a lack of independence had led him to do terrible things. So rather than deferring to the Yavin leaders, Cassian argues with them, trying to convince them to take Luthen’s intelligence seriously. He tells the group that Luthen died for this information, urging them to, as he put it to Mon earlier, “make it worth it.” When one leader questions Luthen’s sacrifice — “How has that been verified?” — Cassian crosses a line and scolds her, asking, “Are you serious?” His bluntness pierces the air of decorum in the room. It’s a stark reminder that he’s a freewheeling Luthen loyalist in a world of uptight Yavin devotees.

Cassian spends several minutes bickering with the Yavin leadership about Luthen. When he asks the group if any of them understand how much they owe Luthen, one senator who isn’t in the mood for Cassian’s lectures arrogantly brushes him off. (It’s interesting to watch a scene in which a rebel leader is the antagonist.) Undeterred, Cassian tries to reason with the group. He says that he left Luthen two years ago for a reason — he was mature enough to understand the shortcomings in Luthen’s approach — but that doesn’t mean he can’t see the value in Luthen’s contributions. Unfortunately, that’s something the Yavin leadership mostly seems incapable of doing.

When one skeptical senator tries to make hay out of the fact that Cassian has been out of touch with Luthen for a year — implying that he hasn’t seen Luthen’s deterioration — Cassian turns it back around on her by reminding everyone that the last time they spoke was when Luthen helped him save Mon’s life. That quiets the room, as everyone reflects on their collective decision to erase Luthen from that particular heroic tale. Bail half-smiles as he concedes the point about Luthen’s usefulness, but he still argues that things changed in the intervening year. He says that Luthen was swallowed up by Coruscant’s oppressive atmosphere, and he alludes to rumors that the ISB had co-opted Luthen and begun using him for its own ends. We know this isn’t true, but the fact that a smart person like Bail takes this rumor seriously is a testament to how confusing and hazy things are at this point.

This clash between Cassian and the rebel high command is exciting, because both sides’ perspectives have merit. As tempting as it is to condemn the Yavin leadership for how they view Luthen, what’s tragic and fascinating here is how reasonable their viewpoint is. Luthen’s disdain for collaboration in general and for cooperating with Yavin in particular prevented both sides from building bonds of trust that might have lent credibility to his ominous pronouncements. “The web of doubts that he created,” Bail says, “makes everything unbelievable.” But Cassian understandably thinks Yavin should set aside Luthen’s alienating style when evaluating his intelligence. “He died for it,” Cassian later tells Vel. “Does it matter what he did to us along the way?” In other words: Don’t focus on who Luthen was; focus on how seriously he took the information he got. To Cassian, the wisdom of this is so obvious, given the urgency of the intelligence, which is why he keeps saying it to anyone who will listen.

Eventually, the Yavin leaders do start to take Luthen’s intelligence seriously. When Draven combines the information with his own field reports — including an urgent call from one of Cassian’s sources — he starts to see hints of a bigger picture. “If this is all a trap,” he tells Cassian in a hushed tone, “it’s a brilliant way to spring it.” Then, after Draven and Mon (with assurances from Vel) meet with Bail, the Alderaanian senator visits Cassian’s home in a conciliatory gesture. When Cassian learns that he’s been released from confinement and authorized to meet with his source on Kafrene, he wants to know why Bail changed his mind. Bail says it’s because he wants to take big risks in the fight against the Empire. It’s the ultimate peace offering to the Luthen camp, and Cassian acknowledges it gracefully, telling Bail, “You and Luthen would have gotten along much better than you think,” Bail responds with the ultimate well-wishing sentiment: “May the Force be with you, Captain.”

Luthen may be dead by the time this conversation happens, but his influence is alive and well. Virtually everything Cassian does in this story arc — his insubordinate rescue mission, his encouraging of Kleya, his arguments with rebel luminaries — traces back to Luthen. In fact, this final story arc is all about who Luthen was, what he did, how much his information can be trusted, and where it leads. “None of this exists without him,” Cassian tells Vel, referring to the Rebel Alliance. He clearly takes comfort in the idea that Luthen’s sacrifice was meaningful. When he breaks the news of Luthen’s death to Wilmon, Cassian tells him that Luthen “made it worth it.”

In the end, Cassian’s feelings about Luthen are complicated. When Kleya points out that Cassian left her and Luthen behind, he says that he made a choice (another reference to his desire to chart his own destiny) and that it was the right one. Cassian has seen the might of the Empire and has come away convinced that an operation like Yavin is the only way to win. “No one can do this alone,” he says. “He knew that. He just couldn’t swallow his pride.” Cassian understood Luthen better than his mentor probably realized, and he’s right that Luthen’s strategy alone would have doomed the rebellion.

But while Cassian recognizes that Luthen limited his potential by not joining forces with Yavin, he also recognizes that Kleya is correct when she says, “Thank the galaxy he didn’t. He stayed for this.” Luthen’s work was never going to be the path to victory, but it was still essential to the people who will walk that path after he’s gone.

A long way from Coruscant

Before we leave Yavin, we have to check in on Mon, who gets a decent amount of character development in this story arc during small moments that involve two thorns in her side.

First, there’s the ornery insurgent leader Saw Gerrera. During a holo-conversation, Mon warns Saw that his operation on Jedha is endangering the entire rebel project. In response, Saw complains that he’s always told to stifle his complaints about the Yavin group in the name of unity, while Yavin can complain freely about his operations threatening their work. This is a great argument, because it highlights how, even on the eve of their biggest and most unifying victory, the rebels are still dealing with breakaway factions that are threatening everything. By 1 BBY, Saw’s paranoia has become all-consuming, and he thinks the Yavin group is out to get him. He dismisses Mon’s reassurances about her group’s intentions, telling her, “If only you could fight as well as you lie.” You get the sense that Mon has had dozens of frustrating conversations like this with the recalcitrant Saw and that she’s tired of their arguments.

Even more interesting is Mon’s involvement in the rebel leadership’s conversation with Cassian about Luthen’s intelligence. When Cassian reveals that Luthen is dead, Mon’s face registers surprise and pain, a sign of how her feelings about Luthen have softened over the past year. As Cassian defends Luthen and his information, Mon alone advocates for listening to him and taking the superweapon threat seriously. She’s seen firsthand how valuable Luthen is to the cause, from his vigilance about the Empire’s activities to his preparedness for resisting them. One imagines her feeling frustrated with her colleagues’ intransigence about Luthen. I love how Andor added this new dimension to her relationships with the other leaders; the tension between Mon and the others over Luthen’s legacy makes her position in the Rebellion more interesting and adds depth to her character. (There’s even some strain with Bail, who gently reprimands not just Cassian but also Mon about their connection to Luthen and how it might be affecting their judgement about the intelligence.)

As the conversation ends, Mon finally speaks up, indignantly questioning the group’s refusal to act on Luthen’s intelligence. And when Cassian, after being confined to quarters, requests permission to visit Kleya in the infirmary first, Mon leaps in to grant it before anyone else can object. You get the sense that she’s grasping for any small victory she can give Cassian, having watched him get unfairly smacked down by her colleagues. Here, too, Luthen’s influence lingers over the Rebel Alliance. Four years earlier, Mon saw Luthen as a renegade who was undermining the cause, but now — after Tay Kolma, after Ghorman, after Coruscant — she’s learned to appreciate his contributions. Saddened by Luthen’s death, she intends to honor his sacrifice — to, in Cassian’s words, “make it worth it.”

Hoisted by her own fascist petard

Luthen’s death ripples out across Andor’s many storylines. Within the Rebellion, it demoralizes Kleya and galvanizes Cassian and Mon. Within the Empire, ironically, it gives Luthen the last laugh in his rivalry with the woman who devoted everything to bringing him down. Dedra Meero has been obsessed with catching “Axis” from the very beginning of Andor, but while she eventually succeeds, her insubordination and recklessness prevent her from realizing the fruits of her victory and doom her to a miserable experience on the wrong side of Imperial “justice.”

The way Dedra handles Luthen’s arrest makes it clear that her personal vendetta has clouded her judgement. “I have dreamt of this,” she tells him after revealing that she knows who he is. “Too many versions to remember.” She clearly enjoys tightening the noose around Luthen’s neck — her face beams as she unboxes the Starpath unit, and she even plays along with their ruse for a few more seconds, joking that the piece might not be as valuable anymore because it’s “a little damaged.”

But by entering the gallery alone under the guise of being a prospective customer, Dedra makes a critical error. She should have charged in with a tactical team, which could have subdued Luthen and stopped his back-room destruction of evidence. But she wanted to tell Luthen that she’d caught him in her own smug way — a game that mocked what she saw as his ridiculous cover identity — and that imperative drove her operational planning. This hubris cements her failure, as she gets so excited about catching Luthen that she badly underestimates him, discounting the possibility that he might try to kill himself. After Luthen does exactly that, Dedra collapses to the ground and loses her composure. Having given everything to the hunt for Axis, she now faces the possibility of it all being for naught.

Dedra’s single-minded obsession with catching Axis leads her to make two other major mistakes: hoarding sensitive Imperial files that she wasn’t supposed to have, and violating the ISB chain of command to arrest Luthen.

When Supervisor Heert, Dedra’s former assistant and now the officer in charge of the Axis portfolio, arrives at the hospital, we learn that she waited until his day off to conduct the arrest. It’s the latest example of her cunning manipulation of the bureaucracy to achieve her goals. (She has also taken control of an entire floor of the hospital, another abuse of her authority.) Dedra is used to this approach winning her plaudits from her superiors, but in this case, she has overplayed her hand. On orders from Major Lio Partagaz, Heert has Dedra arrested for insubordination.

As Partagaz observes during his conversation with Heert, Dedra has been warned about overstepping her boundaries before. Even if she’d succeeded in capturing Luthen intact, there would have been a cloud over her status in the ISB. We first met her as an ambitious climber who got the goods and bested her rivals, but now we’re seeing what happens when she takes things too far. She’s still trying to help the ISB protect the Empire, but the Imperial bureaucracy isn’t designed to accommodate rule-breakers like her. It doesn’t matter that she neutralized one of the few real threats to Palpatine’s regime. She disregarded the Empire’s strict chain of command, which fascist systems see as a possible sign of disloyalty and thus cannot tolerate. Partagaz found Dedra’s solution-oriented creativity impressive in season 1, but now she’s taken it to a whole new level and let it override her better judgement.

When Director Orson Krennic confronts Dedra in the very ISB interrogation room where she’s grilled countless people, we learn that, in her overzealous quest to take down Axis, Dedra secretly hoarded a wide range of documents that she wasn’t supposed to have, unwittingly piecing together the web of projects supporting the Empire’s new superweapon. When Krennic presses his finger into Dedra’s head and reveals that Lonni Jung read through those files the night before he met with Luthen, she realizes how much trouble she’s in and starts to panic. She feebly tells Krennic that her only goal was to find Axis, but her voice wavers as she starts to recognize how misunderstood she is and how unfairly she’s about to be punished. (Even then, she can’t help trying to shift blame onto Heert, urging Krennic to question him about Lonni’s loyalties and saying they were close. Her ruthlessness knows no limits.)

I love that the Empire now suspects Dedra of being a rebel spy because she hoarded all of that sensitive information. It’s the perfect fate for someone who, as Bix defiantly observed on Ferrix, cared more about neutralizing threats than ascertaining true guilt or innocence. At one point, Krennic astutely points out that Dedra’s excellence as an investigator makes it strange that she confronted Luthen alone, but he then assumes the wrong explanation (that she’s a spy, instead of that she got carried away when she was so close to achieving her goal). After watching Dedra interrogate and bully others for so long, it’s refreshing to finally see her on the other side of that experience, desperately trying to explain herself to someone even more intimidating than her.

Somewhere, Dedra’s former ISB rival Blevin must feel thoroughly vindicated. In season 1, he predicted that she would lead the Empire into exactly this situation. Lambasting Dedra for meddling in his sector in violation of ISB protocols, he warned that her “overreach … risks compromising Imperial safety.”

After Krennic leaves Dedra alone in the interrogation room, she watches in silence as he converses with other officers outside. It’s a scary moment for her — for the first time, she’s the one in the dark, facing unjustified suspicion, and subject to the unpredictable whims of a heartless bureaucracy. Her head falls to her chest as she processes this depressing fact.

Later, Heert visits Dedra in a holding cell to enlist her help catching Kleya. There’s a lot going on in this scene. Dedra is locked up awaiting a likely severe punishment, and now she has to deal with the man who went from standing by her side to stabbing her in the back. When Heert says that he and Lonni were never friends, Dedra bitterly alludes to the fact that the same could be said of the two of them. She clearly valued his support, and she’s still struggling with the fact that she lost it years ago. But even after everything Heert has done to her, Dedra can’t resist the chance to help take down the last remnants of Luthen’s network, so she gives Heert a tip that will prove vital in leading the ISB to Kleya’s doorstep.

The collapse of a titan

With the help of Dedra’s tip, the Empire scrambles to prevent the intelligence Luthen stole from leaking any further. This is exactly the kind of mission that the ISB was created to undertake. But after assembling a strong track record of ruthless competence over Andor’s two seasons — from baiting a trap for Anto Kreegyr to staging a massacre on Ghorman — the ISB is about to suffer a major setback.

From the moment Krennic arrives at ISB headquarters, the agency’s fearsome aura begins to wilt. A meeting between Krennic, Heert, and Partagaz about catching Kleya illustrates this wonderfully. Heert is a fearsome presence in the field when he’s dealing with hospital administrators, but Krennic operates on an entirely different level. He barely gives Heert the time of day. He seems bowled over by the ISB’s incompetence — exasperated with the slowness of its methodology and baffled by its lack of urgency about plugging the leak. He doesn’t have time to answer questions about what charges to put on Kleya’s arrest warrant. He has a superweapon to protect.

Even Partagaz shrinks into himself as Krennic berates Heert. He wields a lot of power, but even he can’t protect his own people from this bellowing avatar of the Emperor’s pet project. Given Partagaz’s usual stature on this show, seeing him acting so subdued is a shocking experience and a great way of emphasizing Krennic’s power. As Heert babbles about the warrant, Partagaz shakes his head sadly, realizing that Heert is only making things worse for himself. He speaks up and offers the idea of a contagious disease, which gets Heert off the hook. Partagaz isn’t exactly Krennic’s equal, but in moments like this, he’s still far more capable of matching Krennic’s intensity than any of his subordinates are.

After Heert leaves the ISB conference room, Krennic and Partagaz converse privately. Krennic tells Partagaz that he won’t be able to protect him if the ISB fails to capture Kleya, implying that Partagaz and his entire division of the ISB are in danger because of their role in allowing vital intelligence to leak. This scene presents Partagaz in a refreshing new light — in two different ways, actually. First, we’ve never seen Partagaz have a private conversation with a relative equal like this before, so this scene is a great reminder that he’s not the top dog. He has peers and, of course, he also has bosses. I love this reframing of his status on the show. But second, and even more excitingly, this is the first time we’ve seen Partagaz in trouble rather than causing it for someone else. He’s usually the cool, self-assured master manipulator, and now, thanks to Luthen and Kleya, he finds himself in serious peril, with both the ISB’s prestige and his life in jeopardy.

Later, after Kleya’s escape, Partagaz stands alone in the ISB conference room, contemplating his fate. It’s fitting that he’s listening to a recording of Nemik’s manifesto in this scene. Just as he reckons with his agency’s failure to prevent the Empire’s worst intelligence leak ever, Nemik’s voice reminds him that there is a thriving movement ready and eager to exploit that leak in its bid to topple the government. As Luthen told Dedra in episode 10, “There’s a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you.” In season 1, Partagaz described rebellion as a sickness that the ISB was created to treat. After hearing Nemik’s manifesto, he realizes despondently that that sickness is now spreading uncontrollably. Add to that his recognition of the punishment awaiting him, and it’s no surprise that he takes his own life.

When Captain Lagret arrives to escort Partagaz to his doom, Partagaz asks his subordinate for a moment to collect his thoughts. There’s a delay before Lagret nods, and it seems obvious that he’s figured out what Partagaz is about to do. Lagret steps outside the conference room, giving his boss the dignity of deciding his own fate. Moments later, when the sound of a blaster bolt echoes through the closed door, Lagret raises a hand to still the stormtrooper guards almost before the sound has even registered; he was clearly anticipating it. Lagret then lowers his chin in disappointment at the whole situation. He saw Partagaz as a good man and a strong leader, and he regrets his loss, but he also knows that Partagaz made an unforgivable mistake.

The battle station in the background

Luthen’s legacy isn’t the only thing looming over Andor’s final story arc. Something a lot darker looms a little bit less metaphorically over the show’s three-part denouement. Everything that happens in these episodes — from Luthen’s meeting with Lonni, to the attempted arrest of Kleya, to the Yavin leadership’s debate — ties back to the ne plus ultra of Star Wars menaces: the Death Star.

One of the best things about this story arc is how it does an absolutely amazing job of conveying the crushing weight of the Death Star project. It feels like everything that even accidentally stumbles across it gets catapulted to the highest level of seriousness, often perplexing the people caught up in that scrutiny. The Death Star is the invisible landmine lurking in the midst of everything the Empire is doing at this point in the timeline, and these episodes draw out that tension brilliantly.

We can feel the Death Star’s looming weight from the very beginning of the story arc, when Lonni tells Luthen that he knows he wasn’t followed to their meeting because, if he was, he’d be dead already. “They’ll come at this with everything they’ve got,” he says of the Empire’s response to the leak, an ominous indication of how dangerous his stolen information is. Lonni has only discovered fragments of the whole picture, but as he unspools what he’s learned, those fragments offer a window into the vast and terrifying scope of the Death Star project: Lies about an energy program; a false-flag operation on Ghorman to steal the planet’s kalkite; the subjugation of Jedha to steal its kyber crystals; law-enforcement crackdowns and sentence extensions to accumulate manual labor; something important happening on Scarif; and the mysterious work of an Imperial scientist named Galen Erso.

For years, Andor has operated on the periphery of the core Star Wars saga, but now we’re homing in on the white-hot center of the Galactic Civil War. This is the freaking Death Star, folks! After years of buildup, we’ve finally arrived at the pivotal moment when the rebels learn about the Empire’s ultimate weapon. This is one of the biggest turning points in Star Wars history — practically as close as you can get to a holy event in the canon — and two of this story arc’s scenes in particular do a great job of conveying the gravity of the moment.

The first big scene is Luthen and Kleya’s rushed conversation about Lonni’s information, when Luthen forces Kleya to memorize everything and her repeating fragments back to him. Their urgent exchanges perfectly conveys the gravity of what they’ve just learned, as well as their all-consuming sense that this intelligence is both transformational and incredibly dangerous. They’ve been gathering and exploiting sensitive information for years, but Lonni’s report, even in its fragmentary form, feels like a much hotter potato to them.

The second big scene is Kleya’s conversation with Cassian and Melshi in the safe house. There’s something indescribably intense about watching her tell them about the Empire’s superweapon project. This is more serious than anything else these rebels have dealt with before; just knowing what they now know is incredibly dangerous. The Death Star intelligence almost seems to radiate with its own power as it spreads from Kleya to Cassian and Melshi. All she does is share a few scraps of information, but this scene imbues that simple act with a profoundness worthy of the Death Star’s singular malevolence. “Everything we’ve been chasing,” Kleya says — “that’s the answer.”

The magnitude of the knowledge that Kleya carries — and the importance of sharing it with people who can do something about it — almost seems to physically weigh on her. Dulau does an incredible job of playing Kleya as she starts coming undone under the pressure, hurriedly relaying everything she knows to Cassian and insisting that he memorize it and repeat it back to her. It’s like Kleya is trying to throw off the burden of being the only living rebel with this knowledge.

The fact that we know everything about the Death Star makes it even more exciting to watch these characters grapple with the few confusing fragments of it that they’ve been able to uncover. This is the beginning of the story that will end with the Death Star’s destruction, and this scene really makes you feel like you’re on the precipice of that journey.

Key Imperial scenes also emphasize the weight of the moment. Krenic’s very presence in the Luthen/Kleya/ISB storyline underscores how high the stakes have suddenly gotten. Controlling the Death Star leak is so important that Krennic personally interrogates Dedra over it, turning off the video monitor in the interrogation room so there aren’t any witnesses. Protecting the superweapon is so vital that Krennic doesn’t even care about Dedra’s hunt for Axis or the fact that Krennic’s team botched an interrogation that could have helped Dedra catch him. He only has a mind for one operation; everything else is small in comparison. Later, Heert asks Dedra why the hunt for Kleya is “a Krennic project” — why it’s “so important.” It’s another great example of the show hinting at the magnitude of the Death Star by knocking our characters off balance with its overwhelming, disorienting seriousness.

Final goodbyes

It’s hard to end a show like Andor. How do you pay off everything you’ve set up for so many now-beloved characters? But Andor’s writing staff rose to the challenge, and by the time episode 12 draws to a close, all that’s left is one final montage showing where everyone has landed.

With orders to meet his source on Kafrene, Cassian suits up, waters his plants, and heads to his U-Wing. Interspersed with his solemn march are shots of the Rebellion’s growing professionalism and the community springing up under its banner: Melshi leads a training march, Wilmon and Dreena hang out in their home, Mon and Vel chat in the mess hall. Everyone’s journeys have led them to this beating heart of the resistance, where they know they’ll be able to contribute to the fight against the Empire with newfound energy and camaraderie.

But the most important shot in the montage is the one of Kleya silently watching the rebels at work. She dreaded coming to Yavin, where she knew she’d be a pariah because of her association with Luthen. But while it’s unclear whether she’ll ever truly fit in there, at least she’s finally seeing for herself how Yavin is building something out of her and Luthen’s many sacrifices — how the rebels of the future are, to paraphrase Cassian, “making it worth it.” Kleya has given up so much for a cause that’s often seemed abstract. I can’t imagine how she feels watching others carry her work forward in such a concrete way, but without knowing how much they owe her.

Four cutaways from Yavin show where the events of this season have left the rest of our cast. On Coruscant, Mon’s presumably-now-ex-husband Perrin Fertha slouches in the back of a speeder and takes a drink, as Sculdun’s presumably-now-ex-wife sleeps on his shoulder. In a shoeless prison very much like the one that Cassian escaped from on Narkina 5, a defeated Dedra sobs as she contemplates a life of endless hard labor for the Empire. On Jedha, Saw stares defiantly out of his hidden base’s window at a Star Destroyer hovering over the Holy City. On another Destroyer elsewhere, Krennic proudly watches as the Death Star nears completion.

As Cassian crosses the Yavin 4 landing pad, he makes eye contact with the Force healer and gives her a small nod, perhaps acknowledging that she was right about his destiny after all. He might still be as headstrong as he was when Luthen found him on Ferrix, but at least now his life has purpose.

As Cassian and K-2SO take off in their U-Wing, the music soars along with the ship, conveying a buoyant excitement that foreshadows the hope that Cassian is about to bring to the entire galaxy.

I just love this montage. It’s a beautiful way of tying everything together and reminding us of how each of these characters has, in some way, contributed to the fractious but steady growth of the Rebel Alliance. And if the show had ended with Cassian’s ship disappearing into the sky of Yavin 4, bound for the Ring of Kafrene and his heroic fate, it would have been the perfect sendoff to this amazing story.

But that’s not how Andor ends. Instead, the last thing we see is Mina-Rau, where B2EMO (okay, thank God he’s safe) plays with another droid while Bix walks through a grain field, cradling a baby — Cassian’s child — against her chest. I’m sure a lot of people love this ending, but I actually don’t like it. This is Cassian’s story; why are we ending on Bix? Even if the point is to show that Cassian’s legacy will outlive him, that feels like a distraction from Andor’s message about his personal growth and commitment to the cause. I’m fine with the revelation that Cassian has a child — even if it is a bit melodramatic — but that shouldn’t be the last thing we see. Andor is about Cassian’s sacrifice, not his bloodline. After all of the grand storytelling that this show has pulled off, it feels discordant to end things on such a trivial note (not to mention how insulting it is to make Bix’s last scene one that redefines her, however temporarily, as merely the bearer of Cassian’s spawn).

I have very few complaints about Andor’s final story arc, but the Bix coda definitely left a sour taste in my mouth — which is incredibly unfortunate, because it’s the last we’ll ever see of this phenomenal show and the universe it built.

Other thoughts about the characters

• K-2SO
  • After so much fan anticipation, the first scene involving Cassian and K-2SO as friends is remarkably unremarkable. It’s just them playing cards, as if they’ve been pals for months, which presumably they have. I appreciate that Andor didn’t lean into the buddy-comedy aspect of their relationship; it had more serious things to deal with. The show does include some K-2SO humor, but it’s brief, rare, and well integrated. The most extended comedic sequence is in that first scene, when Cassian and Melshi back K-2SO into a corner during a game of tiles and joke about the droid’s bafflement.
  • I’ve said before that I didn’t want the excitement of seeing K-2SO to overpower Andor’s incredible storytelling, and I’m very glad that that didn’t happen. The one sequence that focused on K-2SO was his rescue of Cassian, Melshi, and Kleya, and that was the perfect way to use him. We knew that at least Cassian and Melshi had to escape Coruscant, so the show had to come up with a realistic, non-deus-ex-machina way of neutralizing the ISB strike team. K-2SO, with his fearsome strength and single-minded ruthlessness, was the perfect solution to the problem.
  • K-2SO’s brutality in the corridor leading to the safe house was extraordinary. Using Heert as a human shield so the squad leader would have to kill him was especially disturbing.
  • K-2SO wonders whether saving Cassian and the others has erased all doubts about his value, suggesting that his and Cassian’s partnership may still be in its early days.
• Lio Partagaz
  • Partagaz’s dismay at losing Lonni suggests that he genuinely cared about the man. He wasn’t your average Imperial mid-level manager.
  • When Krennic says the Death Star just needs a few more tests, Partagaz responds that he should “save the sermon for Palpatine.” Partagaz doesn’t seem to believe in the project. He sees Krennic as someone who’s just telling the Emperor what he wants to hear while using Palpatine’s blessing to accumulate more power and resources.
  • When Partagaz says, “Just keeps spreading, doesn’t it?” Lagret responds, “It’s been hard to contain.” But while Lagret is just talking about the manifesto, I think Partagaz is talking about rebellious sentiment in general. I think he’s realizing that Nemik is right about the brittleness of Imperial control — and that the Empire might already have lost. I believe he took his own life not only because he couldn’t bear the thought of the punishment awaiting him, but also because he had lost faith in the inevitably of Imperial might.
• Orson Krennic
  • Andor does an excellent job of making Krennic seem like a serious villain — powerful, confident, and well-connected. He clearly sees even the vaunted ISB as beneath him, as if these people are just annoyances he has to put up with to accomplish his own goals. To him, Lonni is just “an ISB clerk,” and the interrogation room is in a “forsaken basement.”
  • Krennic says Dedra being a rebel spy is “the only plausible scenario.” He’s wrong, of course, but there’s a reason a smart man like him is overlooking the other possibilities: He’s so scared of the Death Star project leaking that all he can think about is rushing to plug the hole. Krennic himself says he doesn’t “have time for ‘why.’”
  • Dedra gives Krennic useful information about Kleya, but then she oversteps again, emphatically telling him how to catch her. Krennic can’t abide that impertinence, so he grabs Dedra’s head and forces her back into her chair as he storms out of the room. It’s a shockingly aggressive move that illustrates how furious Krennic is about Dedra jeopardizing the secrecy of the Death Star.
• Vel Sartha
  • Mon wants Vel to vet Luthen’s intelligence when Cassian shares it with her, to help bolster Mon’s confidence in the information. But as loyal as Vel is to Mon, both as her cousin and as a rebel leader, she turns out to be more loyal to Cassian as a fellow Luthen operative, telling him point-blank what Mon asked of her.
  • I love Vel and Cassian’s toast to the people they’ve lost and the places they’ve been. (Interestingly, Cassian is the one to mention Cinta, and Vel is the one to mention Maarva.) The remembrance is a beautiful reminder of everything they’ve endured together — and a celebration of the journey that Andor has taken us on.
  • When Kleya says killing Luthen “had to be done,” Vel shows her vulnerable side, observing that it gets tiresome having to justify one’s actions that way. In that brief moment, you see what the cause (and specifically Luthen’s version of it) has done to her.
• Everyone else
  • I feel so, so, so bad for Lonni. He risked everything for Luthen and the cause, ultimately giving the rebels their crucial first warning about the Death Star, and all he wanted was a safe life for himself and his family. Instead, not only is he killed the instant he becomes a liability, but history will never know about his vital contribution to the Empire’s defeat.
  • Lonni was a smart guy, refusing to tell Luthen that he had Dedra’s code cert because he knew Luthen would push him to take too big of a risk by using it. He was also a pretty good spy, with friends all over the place, including in the ISB’s Tactical branch, where he got a crucial tip. Shout-out to a real one.
  • In explaining the relevance of the Death Star files to her hunt for Axis, Dedra says that the ISB interrogated a local Moff’s valet who had been working for Saw’s Partisans on Jedha, and he told them that he’d originally been recruited by “a man with a Fondor Haulcraft full of antiquities.” I’m surprised that Luthen was sloppy enough to reveal his cover identity to someone as lowly as this valet. Maybe it was early on in his activities.
  • Despite Yavin’s understandable prohibition on unauthorized communications, Wilmon keeps a radio that Luthen gave him, just in case his old boss needs him. It’s a sign of his continuing loyalty to the man who taught him so much, even as he commits himself to another group with a better grasp of the future.
  • If Dedra tries to blame Heert for Lonni’s betrayal, Heert is no less manipulative, insisting that the record reflect the fact that it was Dedra’s security preparations that failed at the hospital and led to Luthen’s death.
  • It’s funny to see Bail’s bafflement at how long of a leash Cassian is given. When he hears what’s going on with Cassian’s stolen U-Wing arriving hot, he remarks, “Incredible.”
  • Amid the chaos of Cassian’s unscheduled landing on Yavin, Mon quips to Bail, “Makes the Senate look easy, doesn’t it?” I love this line. It isn’t just a wry comparison of the Senate’s and the Rebellion’s political squabbles; it’s also a nod to their shared history as members of the galactic political elite, and perhaps to their shared sense of being out of place in this hidden insurgent fortress.
  • It’s nice to see Mon visit Vel in her home on Yavin. It’s so easy to think of Mon as just a rebel leader, but she’s also a cousin, a woman whose relative also lives on the base — no doubt a rarity for these isolated insurgents. It’s great to see Mon out of her formal robes and interacting with Vel in a more casual way.

Great world-building moments

• In the flashback where the Imperials march a group of prisoners past the market, the shopkeeper tells Luthen that someone killed a soldier the night before and the Imperials “keep finding people who did it.” It’s a great way of conveying the fact that the Empire isn’t actually punishing the guilty but imposing collective punishment on the whole community.
• Heert’s threat to arrest the hospital director if he doesn’t stop complaining about the building shutdown is a nice reminder of how the Empire (and specifically the fearsome ISB) throws its weight around in the civilian world.
• Krennic rattles off a list of documents that Dedra somehow collected in her hunt for Axis: Ghorman mining records, orbital progress assessments, Eadu research journals, Jedha Working Group printouts. It’s a welcome glimpse at the breadth of work being done to support the Death Star — and of course, this is only a small fraction of it.
• I like the little moment where the hospital security guard mentions that his cousin is applying for a job at the ISB. In a small way that’s hard to describe, this moment makes the ISB feel more real. It’s not just a scheming den of TV villains; it’s an office where people work and where other people want to work.
• Cassian urges Kleya to come with him to Yavin, but she knows that they won’t welcome her there. She’s a walking symbol of everything that Luthen did to defy Yavin. This is an fascinating, bittersweet dynamic — we think of Yavin as the home of all the good guys, but Kleya is almost scared of it, seeing it as a hostile environment. The Yavin rebels are insular and suspicious (they’ve had to be), and they won’t embrace someone just because she’s committed to the same cause as them. It won’t be kumbaya when all of our heroes unite. That’s a much more interesting dynamic than the alternative.
• Kleya says going to Yavin “after all of this” is “a bitter ending.” She clearly sees the Yavin operation as too cautious and mired in bureaucracy. Again, it’s an unfamiliar but refreshing perspective on a place that we as fans associate with archetypal heroism.
• Speaking of bureaucracy and how it can hold you back, it’s worth noting that both Partagaz and Dedra are taken down not by their rebel enemies but by their own system. They’re two of the most highly competent Imperials we’ve ever met, and they’ve devoted their lives to the Empire, but they’re tossed aside without a second thought as soon as they fail their fascist overlords. This outcome reinforces the quintessential Star Wars idea that tyranny and repression — which extend their intolerance inward as well as outward — are ultimately self-defeating.
• It’s also worth noting how both the rebels and the Imperials experience problems as a result of infighting and secrecy. On the rebel side, it poisons relations between Yavin, Saw, and Luthen. On the Imperial side, it compromises the security of the Death Star project and destroys Dedra’s and Partagaz’s lives.
• The ISB desperately needs to scramble personnel to the safe house, but the technician working with Partagaz just gets disinterested dismissals from another officer who says their request is “in the queue.” The stultifying bureaucracy of the Empire has come back to bite Partagaz (who seems to realize it in this moment) just like it has already come back to bite Dedra.
• When Partagaz tells Krennic that “it’s a miracle we’ve kept it quiet this long,” it reminds you of the herculean effort that must have gone into hiding something as big as the Death Star project from public view.
• It was so smart of the Yavin leadership to broadcast Nemik’s manifesto across the galaxy. It fits perfectly into their canny propaganda strategy.
• I absolutely adore Andor’s exploration of the different kinds of contributions that people make to the Rebellion, the tensions that develop between those people because of how their contributions differ, and the blind spots and flaws that those people sometimes have. Luthen had his foibles, yes, but what Andor shows us is that so too do the Yavin leaders. This level of uneasy complexity is one of Andor’s most phenomenal contributions to the Star Wars franchise.

I love me some lore

• This last story arc neatly weaves in a ton of reminders of how close we are to Rogue One, including…
  • Partagaz alluding to the fact that Krennic’s project is behind schedule, and Krennic saying he sounds like Grand Moff Tarkin, a subtle hint at the strained relationship between Tarkin and Krennic that will eventually doom the latter.
  • Krennic saying the Death Star is “days” away from readiness.
  • The presence of Admiral Raddus and his mentions of Generals Dodonna and Merrick.
  • The appearance of more rebel leaders, including Senators Nower Jebel and Tynnra Pamlo.
  • The sight of Pao, an alien rebel who ends up on the Scarif team, marching with Melshi at the end of the finale.
  • Draven telling Cassian that his contact on Kafrene, Tivik, has been desperately trying to make contact. (This is the moment when you really feel the impending weight of Rogue One pressing down on you.)
• I absolutely adore the fact that the hospital where Luthen is taken is named after Lina Soh, the chancellor during the Nihil crisis in the High Republic era. It’s a beautiful nod from a high-profile Star Wars project to a slightly lower-profile but still-beloved one. The High Republic series of books and comics, which opened up an entirely new era of Star Wars, is about to end in July after a four-and-a-half-year run, and I can’t think of a better sendoff to this wonderful project than a subtle nod in one of the franchise’s best productions.
• As a fan of The Clone Wars and its depictions of Coruscant law enforcement, I enjoyed seeing the Coruscant LAAT/le patrol gunship in live action for the first time.

Everything else…

• Sound design
  • The opening title music for episode 10 was spectacularly intense, perfectly foreshadowing the suspenseful nature of the episode.
  • I appreciate how the series finale’s title sequence just goes hard on the main theme.
  • The first Luthen flashback does a terrific job of concisely illustrating the barbarity of the soldiers, with lines like “Where do they think they’re going?” and dialogue and sound effects that suggest soldiers lining civilians up against a wall and slaughtering them.
  • Once again, Tony Gilroy voices the Yavin base controller who tries (as he will again in Rogue One) to stop Cassian from taking off without authorization.
• Production design
  • I love the design of the section of Coruscant where Luthen and Lonni meet. The bridges and the pond are great. I’ve really appreciated getting to see more of Coruscant in this show.
  • It’s funny how much younger Mon suddenly looks in episode 12, as the show tries to match Genevieve O’Reilly’s noticeably different Rogue One appearance.
  • I didn’t even recognize this THX-1138 Easter egg at first, but I love it.
• Pacing
  • The intercutting between Kleya getting ready to infiltrate Luthen’s hospital and the flashbacks to Luthen’s first meeting with Kleya is a beautiful way to link Kleya’s original debt to Luthen with her final repayment of that debt.
  • I like the parallel between the bombing in the flashback and the bombing that Kleya commits to distract the hospital guards.
  • The way the camera pulls back on Luthen’s body and the scene slowly fades to black was the perfect farewell to a phenomenal character. It gave us a few extra seconds of calm and quiet to reflect on the triumph of his contributions to the cause and the tragedy of his future obscurity.
  • I love the intercutting between Kleya preparing to signal Wilmon and the ISB closing in on her. It creates this acute feeling of time running out for Kleya as the walls close in around her. The music nicely accentuates this scary feeling.
  • Similarly, the montage of close-up shots of the ISB troopers on the shuttle getting ready to deploy really enhances our sense of the danger awaiting Kleya.
  • Episode 11 ends on an immediate cliffhanger, with the ISB strike team closing in on the rebels. Andor has never done that before.
  • There are so many good Yavin 4 base-operations montages in this story arc. I love seeing the hive of activity; it really gets you pumped for the battles to come.
• Truly random thoughts
  • One of the best lines in the entire show is Luthen telling Dedra, “The rebellion isn’t here anymore. It’s flown away. It’s everywhere now. There’s a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you.” Talk about a mic drop.
  • I like that Dedra calls Luthen’s wig ridiculous. It definitely is a funny wig.
  • Kleya summarizes one part of Lonni’s intelligence as, “Fuel from Ghorman.” But Ghorman doesn’t provide the fuel for the Death Star; as Krennic explains in the first episode of the season, the Ghorman kalkite’s job is to “coat the reactor lenses.” Perhaps Lonni just miscommunicated this to Luthen.
  • After everything the Empire has poured into the Death Star, it’s really funny that one of the inciting causes of its destruction turns out to be the fact that someone accidentally sent documents to the wrong Imperial office.
  • According to the first flashback, Luthen’s real last name was “Lear.” I can’t believe all he did was reverse it to create the last name for his cover identity.
  • I don’t know why, but I always assumed that at least Kleya was using her real name. Who would care to look for her?
  • Now that we know what kind of a past Luthen is running from, it adds tragic depth to his warning to Bix about the sleep drug she was taking: “It works for a while, but the dreams come back worse when you stop.”
  • Heert’s assistant reveals that Kleya’s diversionary explosions killed or injured some hospital staff.
  • After two seasons of buildup, it’s really cool to finally hear someone (Dedra) say the words “Death Star.”
  • During their tile game, Melshi tells K-2SO, “Humans, K. You never know what they’re going to do.” Not only does this foreshadow Cassian and Melshi impulsively rushing off to rescue Kleya, creating headaches for the rebel leadership, but more broadly speaking, Andor is the story of people rising to a challenge in unexpected ways.
  • I’m a bit surprised that a U-Wing would be able to fly through Coruscant’s skies without being challenged by traffic control. Why didn’t the Empire lock down the airspace around the site of its high-stakes capture operation?
  • Thank god Melshi somehow wasn’t as stunned as Cassian and Kleya were by the ISB grenade, or this show would have ended very differently. Someone still needed to hold off the troopers until K-2SO arrived.
  • “Cassian, I’ve cleared a path” and “I plan to tell them I was kidnapped” are two very funny K-2SO lines.
  • Mon says a Star Destroyer will be the least of Saw’s problems if he keeps hijacking transports. She’s right — just not in a way that she can anticipate.
  • Benjamin Bratt still isn’t Jimmy Smits, but he delivered a great performance in the finale.
  • Watching Cassian urge the Yavin leadership to take Luthen’s intel seriously, you’re struck by this momentous realization that he’s single-handedly holding the entire resistance together, desperately trying to prevent the acrimony between two factions of the movement from kneecapping it at its most pivotal moment. If Cassian had failed here, the war would have been over before it began.
  • When Vel encourages Cassian to reconnect with Bix, he says he’ll consider contacting her “once this settles down…” Vel, remembering her estrangement from Cinta, tells him not to wait too long, which turns out to be tragically unheeded advice. I wonder if Vel mentions Bix because she knows that Cassian now has a child.
  • I appreciate that we got one more flashback to Cassian’s childhood on Kenari, with his sister anxiously waiting for him to come home. I’ve come around on the idea of the sister subplot never getting resolved; that’s just how life works sometimes. We don’t always get the answers we want or need.
  • One thing that makes episodes 10 and 11 really successful is the fact that they’re almost entirely focused on characters who could die at any moment. Luthen does die, Kleya faces mortal peril in the hospital and at the safe house, and Dedra could be shot as a traitor at any moment. When Krennic grabbed Dedra at the end of the interrogation scene, I honestly thought he might be about to snap her neck. So many Star Wars stories focus on characters we know will survive, especially the big heroes. Rarely does a story focus on expendable characters, and even more rarely does it build them up so much over the course of two seasons that their constant mortal peril actually carries significant weight.

Summing up a singular triumph

When Disney announced Andor in November 2018, hardcore Rogue One fans cheered, but many others were baffled that a secondary character from a spinoff film was getting his own series. Was Cassian Andor really worth so much attention?

Six and a half years and 24 episodes later, the answer is a resounding “yes.” In addition to filling in Cassian’s own rich backstory and explaining how he ended up as a vital part of the Rebel Alliance, Andor added fascinating moral complexity to the fight for freedom with characters like Luthen, and it shined a long-overdue spotlight on the sacrifices of countless obscure rebels who, through actions large and small, painstakingly laid the groundwork for Luke Skywalker to fire that proton torpedo in A New Hope. The show redefined how we saw iconic characters like Mon Mothma, revealing the sacrifices she made for the cause and transforming her from a “Many Bothans died to bring us this information” punchline into one of the most compelling characters in the entire Star Wars franchise.

Andor also challenged our understanding of organizations on both sides of the war. It fleshed out the complicated relationships between the Rebellion’s leading figures, delving deeply into previously unexplored clashes between people like Mon, Luthen, and Saw. It eschewed simplistic caricatures of the Empire in favor of a more realistic and engaging depiction of the Imperial bureaucracy, adding nuance to its inner workings while also accentuating its depravity.

Perhaps most importantly, the show unabashedly embraced politics. It had something to say — about resistance, repression, marginalization, propaganda, tyranny, and so much else — and it wasn’t afraid to say it, often bluntly. On planets like Ghorman and Ferrix, Andor devoted unprecedented attention to the regular people of the galaxy as they fought for freedom, delivering an inspiring message about our individual and collective capacities to do good.

Season 1 got the ball rolling on all of these fronts, but Season 2 took things to new heights and unexpected places. It would take too long to list all of the second season’s accomplishments, but I particularly want to shout out how it blends the old and the new. I was constantly struck by this amazing feeling of seeing the iconic, core Rebellion intersecting with the proto-Rebellion characters we’ve grown to know over Andor’s two seasons. As the unpolished operatives from the early, slapdash phase of the resistance ceded the spotlight to the more refined operation built on their hard work, it felt like I was watching the runners from the first half of a long, arduous relay race handing things off to the people who will someday finish the mission.

A few days after Andor ended, I rewatched Rogue One for the first time in years. With the Andor finale fresh in my mind, so many things landed differently: Tarkin mentioning Krennic’s recent security breaches, Cassian knowing Galen Erso’s full name before Tivik confirms it; Mon saying Saw has been causing endless problems; Chirrut Îmwe saying Cassian carries his prison with him; Cassian killing his source for the same reason Luthen did; the fractiousness of the rebel leadership council; and Cassian saying he’s lost everything. Some scenes felt a lot more meaningful after Andor’s character development, like Mon supporting Jyn Erso’s bold plan to attack Scarif and Cassian’s tendencies toward clashes with leadership and reckless missions. From enriching the characters to deepening the narrative, Andor completely changes how you watch Rogue One.

There will never be another Star Wars production like Andor. No one show or movie will ever again contribute so much to so many aspects of the franchise. But Andor’s success wasn’t magic; it was the result of a series of thoughtful decisions about how to tell stories in the Star Wars universe. Andor was a breath of fresh air in terms of its tone, showing how Star Wars can be serious and meaningful while still being fun. It was also a breath of fresh air in terms of its focus, showing how Star Wars can achieve some of its greatest narrative triumphs without the Force, the Jedi, or the saga’s most famous characters.

At the end of the day, Andor proved that great writing and a clear message are a simple winning formula for Star Wars storytelling. And while we may never see anything like it again, we can still savor its two revolutionary seasons and hope that future Star Wars creators learn the right lessons from its blockbuster success.