(courtesy IMP Awards)
***** SPOILERS AHEAD *****
When the history of some great struggle is recounted, most relevantly in this case, that of the liberal western democratic allies who took on the might of fascist Germany and won in World War Two, there is an inadvertent tilt towards stripping all of the humanity out of the story and simply tell it as an inspiring tale of brave, principled people against those a great evil they simply couldn’t countenance.
That makes sense since historians by and large need to be factually focused and looking at what happened in reasonably unemotional terms; to do otherwise, can prioritise emotiveness over factuality to a degree that does a disservice to this historical record.
But one of the things that proves to be most inspiring about the recounting of these David and Goliath tales is what motivated those took up a seemingly impossible fight to do what they did – what made them cross the threshold from agonised bystander to active participant and what did it cost them to stay in the struggle?
It’s an intriguing question and that one of the second season of Star Wars: Andor takes up with moving alacrity in its first three episodes, which focus principally on two key players against the Empire – Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) who is bankrolling the Rebellion and running political interference where she can, and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) who has considerable skin in the game after the harrowing events of season 1.
In these first three episodes, which vary in their impact with the second of the instalments dragging a little, we bear witness to the great cost involved in committing yourself to a just cause which, while it may appear gloriously inspirational in its historical context, exacts a great deal of very dark and terrible things from those who see the struggle through to its conclusion.
Mon Mothma is likely the most instructive in this regard in these episodes.
While her attention should be drawn almost exclusively to the wedding ceremony of her daughter, Leida Mothma (Bronte Carmichael), which takes place over days on the Senator’s home planet of Chandrila and involves carefully calibrated ceremony and deftly executed ritual to an almost agonising degree, Mothma finds herself torn between her motherly duties and the fact that the wedding is a power play to get access to the funds and leverage she needs for the Rebellion.
She is a clearly guilt-ridden about effectively sacrificing her daughter to the cause, but when she tries to tell her daughter she can walk away from the ceremony to someone she doesn’t even know, let alone loves, her daughter coldly rebuffs her, knowing all too well why this wedding is happening even if she’s not aware of what it will accomplish in other ways.
Mothma must also contend with the fracturing of her childhood friend, Tay Kolma (Ben Miles) who is not handling the breaking apart of his marriage nor the decline of his business interests, a degradation on a number of fronts that is leading him to become a bit of a loose cannon in a campaign that cannot afford a single leak or moment of weakness.
The Senator knows what will happen if he continues down this course, but tries to pretend otherwise when her close ally, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), who is on the surface a quirky antiques dealer from Coruscant but beneath that cover, a major operative in the Rebellion, intimates what must happen in circumstances when anyone or anything spinning out of control will bring the house down upon them all.
‘We’d be vulnerable forever. You need to be protected,’ says Luthen while final preparations for the wedding swirl around them.
‘I’m not sure what you’re saying,’ says Mothma who knows precisely what he means, her furious response evidence of how turn she is.
‘How nice of you.’
In the tense moments after this exchange, it is evident that Mothma knows she has said goodbye to her longtime friend, and that thought she hoped she could keep him alive by other means, that that is simply not an option.
She has, in one weekend, given up her daughter to a possibly loveless if financially and politically expedient marriage and sacrificed a close friend-nearly-lover to certain death, and her sadness in this moment, and the obliterative drunkenness that follows is testament to how it is hurting her to stay true to the cause she believes in and which is exacting everything from her.
She is not alone in the isolation wrought by doing the right thing when standing by as great evil prospers would be so much easier.
Cassian has already paid a hefty price for his slow motion embrace of the Rebellion which as season two opens has ramped up considerably, picking up a momentum which will end with the Battle of Yavin in four years time, a titanic battle which forms the core of the final act of Star Wars: A New Hope.
In the first episode, Cassian steals an experimental TIE fighter from an Imperials base, but not before he has a striking conversation with a newly-minted operative who is nervous about her tentative but instrumental first steps into the embrace of the Rebellion but knows that to stay on her current course is something she simply can’t live with.
When she admits to Cassian, just before he fights the mother of all battles to escape the hanger, he assures her that he gets it and that joining the Rebellion is like “coming home to yourself”.
It’s an inspiring moment, true, but it also speaks to the inevitability of the committing yourself wholly to a cause when the new recruit sagely admits that she’s going to miss her workplace and colleagues; she know she will pay a great price, as does Cassian but that’s something everything agrees to, implicitly or not, when they become a member of the Rebellion.
The greater part of the first two episodes for Cassian anyway, finds him trapped in the jungle with the Maya Pei Brigade who break into two fractious groups even as they hold Cassian hostage, their attention not on the greater struggle of which they’re apart but on the civil war within their group that ends up gaining them nothing.
When Cassian finally escapes, he races back to Mina Rau, an agricultural planet where he, and his friends and fellow Ferrix refugees, Bix (Adria Arjona), Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) and Wil (Muhannad Ben Amor) are in grave danger from the arrival of Imperial forces on the planet, there to conduct an audit which will likely see them exposed as illegal residents on the planet and send them into the Empire’s destructive clutches.
He naturally should not be so obvious about having an Imperial prototype fighter in his care, but once he realises the people he loves are in danger, there’s no choice but to race back and do what he can.
But it doesn’t end well, with Brasso dying and the three remaining friends on the run again, and while, yes, his mission was largely a success, it has cost him and his friends dearly once again.
The opening three episodes of Andor season two also focuses on Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), two high ranking Empire operatives who are, uncharacteristically for Star Wars, humanised somewhat – not as a way of making you sympathise with them but more as a way of underlining how they, like those that oppose them, make choices about the path they will take on very human grounds – but it is the stories of Mothma and Cassian that really capture your attention, and drive how how fighting for what is right and good, laudable though it is, comes with a price so heavy it weighs the soul down to a monumentally sacrificial degree.
Star Wars: Andor streams on Disney+