THE STORY – In an era filled with danger, deception, and intrigue, Cassian Andor embarks on a path that is destined to turn him into a Rebel hero.
THE CAST – Diego Luna, Kyle Soller, Adria Arjona, Stellan Skarsgård, Fiona Shaw, Genevieve O’Reilly, Denise Gough, Faye Marsay, Varada Sethu & Elizabeth Dulaua
THE TEAM – Tony Gilroy (Creator/Writer), Ariel Kleiman, Janus Metz, Alonso Ruizpalacios (Directors), Beau Willimon, Dan Gilroy & Tom Bissell (Writers)
Jyn Erso might have preached, “Rebellions are built on hope” in “Rogue One,” but in the marvelous second season of “Andor,” there’s a darker, more urgent message. To fight fascism, you must be willing to do anything it takes to win, from surrendering your friends or family to renegotiating your values in a heartbeat; you are not important; the cause is. “Andor” powerfully asks what will you give up for the fight. For most of our characters, it’s everything. We see daughters sold to gilded thugs for emergency rebel funding; companions killed to conceal vital intelligence, and innocent deaths bartered for political gain. We all have different moral lines in the Tatooine sand, and across this season’s exhilarating twelve episodes of spy games, heists, and warfare, these ethical mores are tested and destroyed. They are rarely rewarded.
This is “Star Wars” at its most bleak, but it’s only in showrunner Tony Gilroy’s commitment to honest, ironically real-world storytelling that Erso’s sparks of hope can be found. Three years after the surprising brilliance of “Andor’s” first season, we re-enter the galactic fight in season two with the Empire’s chokehold on the galaxy beginning to tighten. Imperial arrests have flooded prisons to the point the officers can’t process them all. Meanwhile, splintered rebel groups in need of leadership (a theme that runs through the whole season) are growing increasingly desperate. It’s a moodier, darker season than the already intense season one, with the stakes growing more intense as the series moves closer to “Rogue One” and “A New Hope.”
This is apparent as early as the season’s opening scene. When we meet Cassian (Diego Luna), he’s giving a grim pep talk to an Imperial Navy informer helping him steal an experimental Tie Fighter, reassuring her that her betrayal of the Empire, possibly resulting in her death, will be worth it. But as Cassian tries to fly the Tie out of the hangar bay like it’s a startled womprat, it’s withheld from her and us what the ship’s purpose will ultimately be. Could it be to destroy an Imperial arms depot? To liberate prisoners? To kill unarmed Imperial officers? Or worse, given the ship’s uneasy controls, if it’s worth stealing at all. So, the Imperial informer’s only choice, like the audience’s, is to ask what kind of risk is worthy of revolt in the face of unacceptable oppression, regardless of certain outcomes. This is a dilemma the season repeats again and again, uniting the ensemble of storylines across the season’s nearly half-decade timespan.
Gilroy wasn’t shy about using revolutionary history as one of the primary influences on the first season, but season two uses World War II as an even more explicit reference point. When we meet Adria Arjona’s Bix, she’s in hiding on a wheat-farming planet amidst an Imperial census; it recalls the Nazi’s hunt for hidden Jews in occupied France. On the other side of the galaxy, Dedra (Denise Gough) attends a top-secret conference in an Empire mountain stronghold, a clear nod to Hitler’s Eagles Nest, staging an equivalent to the Wannsee Conference that planned the Holocaust. It’s there we see the return of Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, a delight), introducing the central plot of the season. The planet Ghorman, known for exporting fine fabrics and fashions, has a precious hidden resource the Empire wants (clearly for the Death Star), and the population must be dealt with. The Ghormans speak in a space opera reimagining of French; the streets resemble a blue-hued Paris, and they consider a violent insurgency reminiscent of the French Resistance. It’s Melville’s “Army of Shadows” in space, and the Ghormans want to fight back.
None of “Andor’s” historical gesturing is subtle, but much like how the Prequel Trilogy were Bush-era parables about illegal wars and the decay of democracy, it isn’t meant to be. “Star Wars” has always been an abundantly political series, and while “Andor” lacks Jedi and prophecies, it nails Lucas’ political vision for “Star Wars” by focusing on top-down governmental bureaucracy and corruption, expanding that scope to a David Simon-like survey of galactic political systems. Through the Ghorman storyline, Gilroy patiently guides us from how the orders at the highest levels of Imperial command slowly trickle down, from the rungs of the Empire’s middle-men to senators like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), to the Ghorman people (manipulated by the tightly wound Syril, played by Kyle Soller), and finally to rebels like Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Cassian. It’s a brilliantly orchestrated chain of cause and effect, one that rewards the slow-fuse pacing that eventually ignites in the season’s stunning back half.
That singularity of focus also refreshes the structure of the series, too. Unlike season one, which used its four arcs of three episodes each to jump between locations and genres, this season jumps one year every three episodes while staying tightly focused on Ghorman and its consequences. Gilroy uses those one-year gaps to both build momentum and surround the various storylines in negative space. The most effective is in the second arc when Bix is haunted. Cassian killed someone because he could have identified her –– an event left offscreen, leaving us to parse out the ethical cost as Bix’s guilt unravels. This kind of moral questioning extends to most of the cast, from Mon Mothma to her rebel-warrior cousin Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay). There’s some collateral damage to this hopscotch narrative approach, with warning signs the initial five-season plan has been truncated to two. Some of the storytelling can seem scattered or have a stop-start momentum and things you might love to have seen –– like how the rebels eventually collected on Yavin or Cassian’s ascendency to a Rebel officer –– are left sadly unexplored.
Like the rest of the cast, Diego Luna spends even more time this season looking stricken with despair. He plays this older Cassian as more confident and more weary, putting on a sharp front in public as one of the rebellion’s greatest spies but crumbling to pieces in the arms of Bix at home. Their relationship is the surprising emotional backbone of season two, and watching the two struggle with the sins of all they’ve done for the rebellion is heartbreaking. They’re strong performances in a cast that understands what’s needed of them, with Skarsgård once again dazzling with his gregarious but lethal performance. The biggest surprise is Elizabeth Dulau, who gets an upgrade in screen time as she stages an elaborate break-in during one of the seasons’ most intense episodes.
As bleak as “Andor” can sometimes be, it’s still “Star Wars.” The set-pieces all sizzle like a lightsaber cutting thick metal, with one of the best letting Gilroy dig into his screen credits to gleefully turn Cassian into intergalactic Jason Bourne. Cassian is tasked with extracting a political asset in enemy territory, and what follows is a blockbuster of speed walking, vigilante heads turned over shoulders, and quick-draw takedowns. It rips. It’s an old cliche, but what propels these sequences beyond the excellent filmmaking and new score (Brandon Roberts partially replaced Nicholas Britell this season) is how the biggest and most expensive moments are always grounded in character—specifically, choices. When Cassian finds himself caught in a battle exploding around him, it’s the result of the actions of half a dozen key characters coming into harmonious collision, delivering the season’s most emotional climax.
It’s through that character-driven action that “Andor” can start to ask its most challenging questions. On Ghorman, the Empire hopes the citizens show violent resistance so they have an excuse to “overreact” and plunder the planet’s resources. Luthen, the rebel’s machiavellian ends-justify-the-means puppetmaster, also hopes the planet falls into a failed revolt so more systems of planets will be outraged by the Empire and join the fight. Through an unholy kind of serendipity, Luthen’s interests and the Empire’s are intertwined. Cassian, stuck in the middle, abhors that kind of calculated bloodshed but can’t deny Luthen’s methods have a cruel logic. One of the series’ greatest achievements is how neither Empire nor Rebels are depicted as a monolith; no two characters have a moral compass that points in the same direction.
Tony Gilroy shrewdly uses “Andor” to interrogate the tenants of violent resistance, proportionality under oppression, and accelerationism and refuses to offer platitudes in response. How do we resist the ascent of fascism? The showrunner might handwave one-to-one comparisons between “Andor” and the political climate of today in interviews, but season two so persuasively prompts the audience to ruminate on these issues; it’s as though he beckons us to look at ourselves for answers. The best art demands we look inward and then back out into the world to confront our place in the systems around us and imagine what kind of change is possible and what we’re willing to do to get it. This second season of “Andor” achieves that and more, making it not only some of the best “Star Wars” to come out since Disney took over Lucasfilm but some of the very best “Star Wars” period. If there’s hope for the future, it has to start with us. We just have to ask what we’re willing to give something up to take it.
THE GOOD – An exhilarating and ethically probing revolutionary spy thriller. It’s one of the best things “Star Wars” has ever produced.
THE BAD – The time-jumping structure results in missed opportunities, and some arcs are weaker than others.
THE EMMY PROSPECTS – Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series & Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
THE FINAL SCORE – 9/10
