Andor season 2 review: ‘The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil’

Tinker, tailor, soldier, antiques dealer?

So Andor season two has wrapped up, and reviews are everywhere. I’ve never seen anything get so many reviews, commentary, and accolades. I smell marketing money.

Does it merit the accolades? 

The simple answer is yes. Andor's a highly relevant and incisive social commentary masquerading as a sci-fi political thriller.

Major caveat: Andor is not a Saturday afternoon serial you’d catch at the matinee. Those serials, particularly Flash Gordon, were a major point of inspiration for Lucas. You can see it in the franchises’ DNA, as well as in Lucas’ other big hit franchise, Indiana Jones.

Lucas has said repeatedly and emphatically that Star Wars, in his vision, is for children. It’s not meant as an all ages franchise. It’s targeted at kids, and it’s meant to sell toys. Personally, I think the first two films of the original trilogy qualify as General Audience. They’re not patronizing or dumbed down like kids films are.

Andor, however, is not meant for kids. At all. In any way, form or manner. Nor is it a swashbuckling show. It’s a political and character drama. The characters are not simplistic, superficial archetypes you find in action films: they’re complex, nuanced and not easily bucketed in categories like ‘sassy princess’, ‘charming rogue’, ‘wise wizard’, or ‘earnest farm boy’. 

Archetypes are a form of short hand, and they’re best used in stories where the focus is on action and adventure or comedy. They let you get into the action quickly, without having to spend a lot of time explaining who the heroes are. 

Andor takes its time, weaving out a complex narrative with multiple story lines, and builds slowly. It’s more like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy than Moonraker, or Zorro. 

Frankly, I’m surprised, even baffed, that it ever got made. Kudos to Kathleen Kennedy and Tony Gilroy for taking this leap into more mature material. I don’t think George Lucas would have allowed it, given the flat out hostility he’s expressed at the idea of Star Wars being aimed at an older audience.

The series wraps up fabulously. It’s incredibly dark, and the characters reap the consequences of their actions. The Rebels that survive trudge onward because they must, and their sacrifices weigh heavily. Dedra, like Syril, soar to the ecstasy of triumph… before suddenly plummeting into hell. 

Typical of fantasy stories, Cassian, Dedra, and Kleya are orphans; Syril, for his part, has an absent father and overbearing mother. All of them are the product of their upbringing: Cassian is motivated to save people because he lost his sister, Kleya hates the Empire because it murdered her family, Dedra serves it because she was raised in an Imperial Kinderblock, and Syril yearns for approval from the paternal law & order patriarch embodied by Palpatine. 

Syril and Dedra are obsessives, and it proves their undoing. Syril’s pathological hate of Andor leads him to self-destruction; he might have survived his disillusionment otherwise. Dedra disobeys orders and indulges her inner rebel to satisfy her personal grudge with Axis, yet in pursuing Axis outside of official channels, she snoops where she shouldn’t, and her discoveries are then pinched by the Rebel spy Lonni Jung. 

Cassian spends more time than I would have liked telling Luthen that he's out (take a shot every time he does, that's the Andor drinking game), he's like a space age Godfather. They cycle through that loop repeatedly. It's not as interesting as the other facets of rebellion that Gilroy touches on.

Tony Gilroy is very knowledgeable about world, particularly revolutionary, history, from Stalin’s train heist to fund the Russian Revolution to the ISB eating its own. During The Terror in the Soviet Union, the Cheka (later the KGB) went through leader after leader, from Yagoda and Dzerzhinsky to (finally) Beria. All of them were executed by the state they once served. Corporations do much the same thing: they get one poor sap to fire a large group of employees, and then they fire the firer, who goes out into the job market despised by many of his former colleagues. The Cheka was a little more final. 

Oh, what a poetic reversal this is.

I was sorry to see Partagaz go. He was a great villain: competent, calculating, and ruthless, but also professional, paternal and contemplative, like a professor presiding over a graduate class. He maintained his inquisitive bent right up to his suicide, listening to the Rebel Manifesto and asking a subordinate what his thoughts were. The ultimate problem with Partagaz is that he was amoral: he was about doing his job, and doing it well, but he didn’t care at all for the human consequences.

Far better a villain than the laughable Hux, or the temperamental man-child Kylo Ren. That pair was more a meta commentary on Star Wars fanboys than they were serious in-universe villains, much as Barclay was a sneering criticism of Star Trek fans by the show’s smug writers. 

Partagaz and Tarkin are believable in their ranks whereas Hux and Kylo are not. I can accept laser swords sooner than that pair managing a McDonald’s, much less an empire. A space opera requires grand and imposing antagonists; you can make competent villains despicable and avoid fascist fetishists in the audiences idolizing them by other means, which Andor demonstrates with aplomb. Underestimating your enemy is the biggest mistake you can make, and I believe that is borne out repeatedly in politics. 

Mon Mothma, Luthen, Drellen, Kleya, Bail Organa and Saw exude authority and competence, on the Rebel side. Yes, Saw is wonderfully bonkers, but he has a mesmerizing kind of batty charisma you’d expect of a cult leader, like Che Guevara (on whom it wouldn’t surprise me Saw is partially based. Che was both a monster and nuts). You don’t know if Saw is going to hug you or shoot you. They all make for very capable, believable foils. We need such competent characters for a political drama (as opposed to a comedy) about rebellion to work: a Galactic Empire managed by hyperventilating imbeciles would collapse of its own accord.

The other character death that disappointed me was Luthen’s. I get narratively why he had to die, it fits, but I suspect his earlier life will be explored in other media in future. Ultimately, Luthen’s speech in season one bore out: he never saw the dawn, but in a highly symbolic scene at the very end, Kleya steps out into it.

Lonni’s death was one of the most shocking low points of the series, at least for me, on a personal level. Obviously the massacre on Ghorman looms larger, but here’s a guy who’s thrown his lot in with the Rebellion, lives a double life, constantly on edge, and he brings Luthen intel that’s crucial to understanding the threat of the Death Star, ultimately leading to the Rebels stealing the plans and empowering Luke to blow it up. He’s absolutely key to the Rebellion’s survival… and he’s rewarded with a blaster bolt to the heart for it all. 

That’s not how heroes are typically supposed to behave.

But that’s the Andor show for you. 

And from a ruthless spy craft POV, I get it: the Imperials were already on to Lonni, and if he fell into their hands, they’d torture and squeeze him for every ounce of information they could get. Luthen couldn’t even save himself. What bothered me is that he didn’t even try. 

I don’t think I’d make a very good secret agent. 

At least we can see more material with Kleya, Bix, and perhaps even Dedra, if she ever sees the light of day again. 

The strongest character arcs in the show, funny enough, belong to the villains: Syril and Dedra. 

The greatest arc on the rebel side belongs to Mon Mothma, who had to make peace with the cost of Rebellion, and the violence inherent in it. Yet man-boy Syril’s journey had more dramatic heft. This is at least partly due to the nature of Mothma’s reserved and controlled demeanour. 

Her pithy speech in the Senate, however, was absolute killer. ‘The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil’… nothing in the entire franchise history has ever, ever been so topical or powerful. 

Why, it could be said today, on the floor of a certain Senate not so far away...

I'm sure Maarva would approve

Andor season 2: 2 BBY (episodes 7-9)

Well this doesn't look good...

The 2 BBY (episodes 7-9) set is phenomenal. All the painstaking buildup in episodes 1-6 pays off, and then some. 

Was there some arguably extraneous material in the build up? I'd say yes, more so than in season 1, but if it'd been all focused on Ghorman, it'd have been too obvious. Ghorman needed to emerge from the noise.

Multiple storylines and characters converge wonderfully: Cassian, Mon Mothma, Dedra, Syril, and Luthen all overlap or directly connect this set. The scope is fabulous, comprehensive, and internally consistent; the sets and action sequences are feature film level. 

My only gripe is that the show was a tad too on the nose in leveraging a French Resistance vibe, right down to the berets, accents and cafes. But that's a minor gripe. Yes, I know, the Empire are Space Nazis, but their garb at least has a distinctive futuristic twist.

The writing was on point, and we got the great speeches we've come to expect from Andor: Mothma delivers a fantastic, and disturbingly relevant speech, and Saw waxes eloquent about vaping toxic fuel.

Bix, tilting on the brink of a new arc, writes herself out of the show. I get it, the show's about Cassian. Silver lining: at least she wasn't killed off. Perhaps we'll see more of her in the future.

Syril's story comes to it's inevitably unfortunate end, which works incredibly well. From soaring high on secret agent shenanigans in 3 BBY, here he comes crashing down like a brick, his entire world view annihilated. In his last few minutes, he realizes the Empire is not what he thought it was, that he's been used and is just another pawn... it might have led to a realignment of his world view, except... he sees his arch nemesis (Cassian, natch) and enters a homicidal frenzy: Kill Andor!

It's a sad end for poor, sad sack Syril; everything tracks, and it's dramatically fitting. His confrontation with Dedra (anagram for 'dread') was quite unsettling, too. That said, I'd have liked to see him live at least a little longer, if only to see if he can pull together his shattered psyche, and what he'd have done next if allowed time to process. How does a law & order fetishist survive in a dictatorship when they actually really do believe in justice? Unfortunately, that'd take time, and this is Andor, not the Syril Karn show, and there are only 3 episodes left. 

So Syril had to say sayonara. 

Personally, I am, as a general principle, against killing off interesting characters unless absolutely necessary. You never know when you'll want to explore their journey again. I believe this preference is borne out by all the resurrected characters in Star Wars, Marvel, etc. Just don't kill them in the first place, that way we don't get all these hackneyed, convoluted resurrection plots. "Somehow, Palpatine returned." So did Darth Maul, and he got bisected and fell a thousand feet down a shaft. 

Shafts in Star Wars are way less deadly than Russian windows.

In some cases, as with Darth Vader (or, for the most part, the Emperor), the villain's death is essential to the overall story. You can't avoid it... yet look at all the prequel material covering Darth Vader. It's practically endless. The writers (and more importantly their corporate masters) can't get enough of the Vademeister.

I hope there are no more deaths, so these characters can be further explored in other media. Like Rogue One? Oops.

Episodes eight and nine have a particularly strong narrative flow, and I watched nine right after eight, against my better bedtime judgement. With all the dominoes were falling into place, how could I not? 

This has been an absolutely stand out set of episodes; they cover key events and do so in a very grounded (for a space opera with laser swords and space wizards) way. I loved it. 

Andor's grounded approach bears further mention: it's an aspect of Star Wars, going back to the original, that helped cement it as relatable: rather than everything being new and shiny, the universe is worn and lived in, and the characters whine about not being allowed to hang out with their friends, pick up power converters, or attend insufferably long weddings. The mundane mixed with with the fantastical reinforces the suspension of disbelief.

It's a fantastical galaxy you can believe in.

The last three (9-12) episodes lead right up to the three days before Rogue One. That sets Andor himself (and possibly Mothma) on a very narrow path, dealing with intel on the new Death Star, which makes me wonder: does the show have any twists left to throw in front of them?

Given Andor's journey is largely set, I'm more interested in what happens to Luthen and Dedra. Luthen's been a big part of setting up the Rebellion; many are arguing that means he must die because he's not seen later. I'd rather he just continues working in the background, along with Lonni and Kleya. 

Will Syril's death hang over Dedra? Will she attend his funeral and clash with the Queen of Passive Aggression? She's already failed at Ferrix, will she be used as the fall guy for Ghorman? Or would that be the Empire admitting they did anything wrong?

And given how huge a failure it was for the ISB to allow Mothma to speak to the galaxy, I'm expecting a few Imperial heads to roll, and for an intense crackdown to follow. Will Luthen and team be able to evade it? Where was Partagaz in all this? 

What about Saw? I'm expecting him to come back, as he's been left dangling. 

We shall see. 

Oh dear

Andor season 2: 3 BBY (episodes 4-6)

"Am I getting more screen time or what?"

The second wave of Andor season 2, possibly the most political sci-fi show since Battlestar Galatica, continues to focus on Ghorman, a planet out of the old WEG Star Wars Role Playing Game. It suffers a very ugly fate.

Simpering Syril is on now planet as head of the Imperial Standards branch, while Cassian gets dispatched there by Luthen to evaluate a local rebel group.

Dedra is watching over the Ghorman operations from afar, and Mothma argues with Krenick over Ghorman at an art show. 

It’s all slice of life material, focusing on the day to day of anti-fascist movements (and their antagonists) in a galaxy far, far away. 

This is part of the problem I have with this season: the previous season saw Cassian become a rebel, Luthen plotting a great robbery to fund the rebellion, and the Imperials plotting to catch them. This season? Not a peep about all the money Luthen stole, or the plans that might have been hatched out of it. Luthen is reactive, attending weddings, dispatching Cassian places, and worrying about listening devices being revealed. He doesn’t feel very proactive, unlike last season. He doesn’t seem to have any plan now, and while his assistant mentions having many balls in the air, we don’t see it. 

Gilroy is taking a different tack here, and it looks like everything is built around the horrors that the Empire has planned for Ghorman. As such, Luthen’s other plans fall outside of the main narrative focus, whatever my irrelevant wants and wishes might be.

The theme of sacrifice, on the part of the rebels, is hammered home over and over again. You can’t miss it, from Luthen’s fantastic speech last season to the horrific wringer Bix has been put through in this one. No one in the main cast has been through worse. Well. Other than the characters who are gunned down by the Empire. 

The Rebel characters must hide their true selves in a society that is literally out to get them, hiding in dive safe houses, or in plain site like Mon Mothma, who’s situation is arguably worse, because she has to hide within herself. Same goes for Lonni. Their lives are filled with stress and the constant fear of being discovered. They become ruthless and paranoid in response, their humanity getting worn away by circumstance. 

Oh Syril, you over eager puppy dog, you.

On the other hand, Syril is flying high as a kite, living out his life-long fantasy of being an Imperial agent of law & order, playing spy on Ghorman, tricking the locals and helping to suss out disloyal agents of chaos. 

There’s some sly writing here: when Syril’s in ISB headquarters making his report, he notes that the Ghormans are inexperienced but eager, to which ISB head Pendergast (X, who played a Machiavellian priest in Game of Thrones) remarks, “How often those characteristics align” and gives Dedra a knowing look.

They’re treating Syril like some kind of pet puppy, an over-eager novice, a mall cop who dreams of being an FBI agent. 

The two trajectories here are polar opposites: rebels going down into the depths of despair while Syril soars higher and higher into the clouds of ambitious fantasy.

Of course, Syril is being set up for a fall, and when it happens, it’s going to hurt. Pendergast even lays track for this when he tells Dedra that Syril must not know what’s really going on on Ghorman. 

Oddly enough, it’s Syril (Kyle Soller) who has the clearest arc happening in the show. Cassian is a bit of a cipher; he doesn’t show a lot of his inner emotions, other than concern over Bix. He doesn’t have any real character quirks. He’s no nonsense, like Luthen, except Luthen has much, much more going on his head. 

Luthen (Stellan Skarsgard) is agency writ large, or at least he was last season: a master galactic scale chess player. It’s sad to see him relegated to being reactive, but I’ll take what I can get. Beyond his calculation, though, there’s not a lot there. He’s been ground down by necessity to be what he has to be for the sake of the Rebellion, there’s nothing else left.

Syril, on the other hand, is a collection of quirks. He’s a weirdo, emotionally stunted by his overbearing mom and absent father, addicted to cereal, sullen and whiny yet wildly ambitious, he dreams of being a saviour, of being relevant, of righting wrongs and seeing justice done throughout the galaxy… between bouts of pouting on his bed. The gap between his ambition and reality is galaxy spanning. 

Yet this makes him arguably one of the most interesting characters in the show, and so far, he’s the one who has travelled the farthest, character wise. 

Mon Mothma started out hiding inside herself, as did Luthen, and now Cassian. 

Bix (Adria Arjona) is, to me, the only other character who’s had a comparable arc, but her’s hasn’t gotten as much focus as Syril (and it doesn’t have the same range, either). She’s had nightmares and moped in the safe house for much of the season. No dinner with the relatives for her. Fortunately, at the end of 2 BBY, she leaps into action against her inner demons. That was great, and it sets her up to be more active in the concluding half of the season. 

That being said, we all know which side she is on, and that’s not going to change.

With Syril, there’s a kernel of doubt: he may, in fact, eventually turn on the Empire. Personally, I thought that door closed last season when he went all stalker on Dedra; now that they’re a duo, it seemed even more unlikely. 

Yet he’s being used, and more importantly, Syril is an earnest true believer: he does believe in justice, even if it’s a rather twisted, naive version. 

In a fascist society, however, law is a chimera. It’s of convenience, imposed upon the populace, and changed and violated on the whim of the powerful, whenever it suits them, sans accountability or criticism: mistakes by underlings are covered up, the dictator does what they will, and the masses suffer what they must. Abuse is endemic. Even in (ostensibly) law and order governed Western democracies we see abuse by those in powerful institutions. In a dictatorship, corruption is a feature, not a bug. 

Rather like this: 

Oh wait, that's America. My bad.

As such, the only real character question I have concerns… well, Syril: will he eventually see the true nature of the Empire, and turn on it? It’s possibly the big statement brewing under the narrative’s surface.

Everyone else’s course is set. Having Syril eventually realize the monstrous nature of the regime he’s embraced so thoroughly would be an effective conclusion for his character.

On the other hand, he could veer into total fascist fanboy. 

"Did you say fascist fan boy? Hold my beer."

Either way, it makes a statement.

Another standout: Forest Whitaker’s tour de force performance as Saw Gerrera, a mix of savvy ruthlessness and batshit insanity. When he comes on screen, he’s as liable to hug you as shoot you. It’s a mesmerizing performance, although I suspect it’s best in small doses. 

As they say, it’s the villains and crazy characters who are the most fun to play, and I think that pans out here, except for Luthen. Everyone is on point, I have no criticisms to level at the cast, they’re all doing fabulous work with what they’ve been given. 

I expect Syril’s upward trajectory, in such total contrast to the hell the rebel characters are going through, to take a very sharp and nasty turn.

A couple of bits of grit in the Andor eye: I found the Coruscant TV shows jarring (they look like bad local cable TV, the kind government regulations force them to make), and the very overt connection of Ghorman to the French WWII resistance is so on le nez you’d expect it to serve baguettes. The cafes, waiters, bellhops, and vaguely French accents shout, or at least hum, La Marseillaise. I half-expected someone to exclaim, “Mon Dieu, c’est l’Empire!”

It’s fun, yet heavy handed. 

On the plus side, the story is gaining steam and taking shape. I look forward to BBY 2. 

(Incidentally, dating things from the Battle of Yavin seems really bonkers. What the heck was the year before Yavin happened? It’s a silly system that only makes sense from a meta perspective…)

Andor season 2: 4 BBY (episodes 1-3)

Stellan and the rest of the stellar cast of Andor

Andor’s got a novel approach for season 2: each tranche of three episodes is set a year after the last, and covers only a few days. Then BAM: it’s a year later. The next set of episodes will be 3 years later, then 4, the five, which leads directly into Rogue One.

I admit I’ve been really looking forward to Andor season two. I didn’t have much, or anything really, to criticize about season one, so my expectations were extremely high. 

Season two begins with Cassian (Diego Luna) stealing an experimental Imperial fighter craft. Everything, naturally, goes wrong. 

Meanwhile, Dedra (Denise Gough) is attending a Wansee Conference style pow wow led by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the lisping villain of Rogue One, and Mon Mothma (Geneva O’Reilly) is throwing a wedding party for her daughter, with (surprise!) Luthien (Stellan Skarsgard) in attendance. Banality ensues.

The Space Wedding? Oh dear God no, not The Space Wedding!

The sets are absolutely astonishing. The production design is top notch. The costumes are sumptuous. The direction is solid. The acting is fantastic.

You know where this is going.

The writing did not strike me as being as incisive as in season one.

The biggest issue I had with the first episode one came out of left field, and is admittedly an issue of petty minded personal taste: Krennic opens his nefarious conference by flipping on a big screen TV and showing… a cheesy promo video, complete with anachronistic Fifties-style voice over. It took me completely out of the Galaxy Far Far Away and back to ours so fast I got universe-bubble whiplash. 

I also hated the Fifties-style diner in the Prequels, and I say that as someone who absolutely loves diners.

Yes, yes, obviously, there must be some kind of mass media in the Star Wars universe, and I am admittedly being unfair. Perhaps they are evoking a 1930’s style propaganda film (Star Wars is set in arguably set in a clunky high-tech analogue to earth in the 1930s/1940s). Yet everything else in Andor is SO pitch perfect! Great care is taken to present a universe that feels like a real place, one with fantastic world building integrity. They’ve made up language, machinery, architecture, technology, music, fashion, cultural practices, the works… and then they present a video that feels ripped from Fallout.

Ah well.

The wedding went on longer than I’d have liked, but that’s a wedding for you. Points for painful verisimilitude. The in-universe music was jarringly Top Forty. Another quibble, but I’d have preferred they used otherworldly, unusual music to play. That’s kind of a franchise thing, going back to the Catina band.

You need a drink? I need a drink! This wedding feels all TOO REAL.

Andor’s misadventure was… interesting. It touched on how factionalism and in-fighting hold back many a revolution.

The highlight of the first arc, to my great surprise, was the Lives of of the Fabulous and Fascist: Dedra and Syril (Kyle Soller). Turns out, Syril and Dedra have been shacking up since their high adrenaline escapades on Ferrix. Now, they’re preparing for something far worse: the dreaded introduction dinner to Syril’s ever-charming mom (a gloriously cringe-inducing Kathryn Hunter). 

Forget the Death Star: tremble before the terror of dinner with Syril's mom!

She's all about layering in subtext… with a trowel. 

Or a concrete placement hose.

Dedra mentions that she grew up in an Imperial orphanage, yet lacked for nothing, to which our gravel-voiced terror-mom trolls: except a mother’s love. Not missing a beat, Dedra deadpans back: ‘We didn’t know what we were missing.’

I laughed and laughed and laughed.

It was, hands down, the funniest line in Star Wars since Han quipped, ‘I know’ (which, incidentally, is a line change dreamed up by Harrison Ford, who didn’t like the original, ‘I love you, too’ We owe a lot to actor innovation when it comes to George’s dialogue). 

Can Syril, Dedra, and his mom get their own spinoff sitcom? Pitch it as All in the Space Gestapo Family. 

Who knew this trio could be so damn funny?

The heroes get the great speeches, but the villains... they get the character quirks!

The hit new sitcom spinoff: Fascist Friends

Genevieve O’Reilly has some juicy material to play with; sadly her character has to push feelings beneath the surface, so her performance is more subtle, and requires a lot of pained expressions. Poor Stellan has little to work with, and little screen time. He’s largely wasted. Diego is reactive, overshadowed by a rag-tag rebel rabble.

Other bright spots: the casual, day to day oppression of Imperial rule was convincingly depicted. Absolute authority leads inevitably to abuses; not everything has to be space battles, lightsaber duels and backflips. That’s not to say you don’t need them from time to time! It is called ‘Star Wars’ not ‘Daily Imperial Indignities’, after all.

So… would I recommend Andor season two, year two? Yes, but with caveats. It’s a slow burn, and there are some… jarring choices. As a peek into the day to day in the Star Wars universe, it’s a must watch. 

But season one was better. 

Let’s see what year three brings...