(courtesy IMP Awards)
There is a fearful moment when something known only in the abstract, but horrific even so, suddenly becomes real, takes manifest palpable form and you are unable to pretend even for a second that within humanity lies the kernel for great evil if so nurtured. (Thankfully, great good exists there but that is something we will get to later.)
Watching Andor season two’s third tranche of three episodes, essentially a movie in three gripping parts, is to come face-to-face with the true evil of authoritarianism, to appreciate in a way that history and lamentably current events in too many countries around the world for anyone’s comfort do not even fully convey, with the horrors of what absolute power will do to make sure it is maintain and assured.
The Empire was always cast as unspeakably evil, something never in doubt from even the swashbuckling, gung-ho Westerns-vibe of A New Hope, but there is something about these three immersively compelling episodes that leave you reeling, leave you stunned at what far too many people are willing to do in the service of their own egos and of what they think is the greater “good”.
While these episodes demonstrate the real bravery of people like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) who bravely stands up in the Senate and condemns the bloodthirsty Ghorman Massacre of the day before as the act of one man and one many only, Emperor Palpatine (see the speech in full below), and of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) who spirits Mothma out of initial harm’s way – Imperial Forces aim to capture and silence her for the outrageous act of speaking the truth, something in graphically short supply in the Empire – it also underscores what people will do to advance a cause of great evil to which they have aligned themselves for a host of mostly self-serving reasons.
MON MOTHMA’S SPEECH
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said, and what is known to be true, has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
This chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday — what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber.
And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we’ve helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine! (courtesy TV Guide)
Take Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) who gives up everything in the end ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- including the love of Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) who is horrified to discover the Empire’s true plans on Ghorman and who dies in the main plaza in an orgy of violence that serves no one’s end but that of entrenched fascism (surely he have spoken up earlier? Absolutely he should), and who even facing some pretty intense personal pressures, gives the order to enact the Empire’s end plan on a planet that is sacrificed simply to keep the Imperial power and war machine running.
Watching her grapple with what she knows she has to do – sure she has a choice and Karn almost gives her one but in the end, she’s so far gone into the Imperial apparatus that self determination has long been foregone except when it advances her place in the hierarchy of an oppressive regime – and seeing her make a final decision even though it will end everything but her career is breathtaking.
Andor has done a superlative job of humanising the characters on the Empire’s side; not so we can sympathise with them because their actions, to a person, are monstrous and unconscionable, but so we can understand and appreciate that within every evil authoritarian regime are people without number, human beings just like you and me, who have chosen to actively participate in advancing the regime’s grip on power, or at the very least, turning a blind eye to it.
Whatever they do, it is a choice, and Andor whips away any delusion we may have that these people are being compelled to do what they do; instead what we see is person after person, some with qualms, some palpably with none – we’re looking at you Captain Kaido, played with cold, clinical, bloodthirsty precision by Jonjo O’Neill – who enact a plan that will many hundreds of innocents killed as part of a false flag operation by the Empire.
They know what is going to happen, they know the deaths that will result and they know a planet will be literally ripped asunder and a culture obliterated but they proceed anyway, and Andor makes it graphically and diabolically clear that every single person in the Empire’s hierarchy, bar a couple of halfhearted dissenters, will choose to perpetrate great evil when they could, if they so choose, resist.
But they do not, and while Mothma and Andor and a number of others ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- escape and live to fight another way, especially Mothma who, in an impressive feat of retconning is rescued by Andor rather than Alderaan Senator Bail Organa’s (Benjamin Bratt) people, evades the dead hands of the Empire to lead the Rebellion as we see in the middle (original) three movies of the Skywalker Saga, many others do, people committed to self determination and freedom and who pay the ultimate price defending it.
In the end, episodes 7, 8 and 9 (“Messenegr”, “Who Are You?” and “Welcome to the Rebellion”), taking place at BBY 2 or two years from A New Hope‘s Battle of Yavin, are some of the most gripping TV you will see all year, if not ever.
At no point during episodes that are taut and tight and give no inch to any kind of flabby, unnecessary storytelling does Andor lose sight of the humanity that sits at the beating heart of the Star Wars story, and indeed any tales of people who fight for or against great authoritarian evil.
While what happens in episode eight on Ghorman is terrible and epic and will chill your soul to its farthest extent, and how people react to it in episode nine shows that we cannot for a second stop resisting any kind of drift, fast or slow, towards authoritarianism, ultimately what Andor leaves us with is an emboldening sense that however we react to fascism, it is a choice we make.
Every single moment of every single scene of every single episode in these three superlatively wrought episodes drives home the point with screaming ferocity and grief-stricken nuance that we must all make choices, whether it’s Moro deciding to proceed with the plan even as she struggles somewhat with the scope of it (obviously not too much in the end) or Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- quietly stealing away and leave Andor alone on Yavin so he can devote himself to the fight, one we know from Rogue One he does not survive, and those choices have consequences.
In the case of Andor, a descent to all-out war between the Empire and the Rebellion from which there is no coming back and which will determine, with choices made by all kinds of people in all kinds of places, the fate of a galaxy, of civilisations and planets and the people who make up, quite possibly, one of the best, most important stories the Star Wars franchise has told in a good long while.
Andor streams on Disney+