(courtesy YouTube (c) Star Wars/Disney+)
One of the enduring strengths of the flawless perfection that has been Andor right throughout its two superlatively good seasons has been its attention to detail when it comes to joining up the dots with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars: A New Hope.
If you watched these two movies, and if not, why not, you will be well aware that the major narrative thread through the two are efforts, and they are considerable for obvious reasons, by the Rebel Alliance to destroy the Death Star, a planet killer weapon that the Empire plans to use to cower the entire galaxy into submission.
A New Hope made reference to how much it cost the Rebels to source the plans which informed the attack, led by newly-minted pilot Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), but it wasn’t until Rogue One, and now, of course, Andor, that we fully appreciate what it takes to defeat evil, one so great it twistedly conflates authoritarian oppression as some peace and prosperity garden of calm and ordered delights.
In the swashbuckling, neo sci-fi Western delights of the first Star Wars trilogy, we came to understand how ruthless the Empire was, happy to obliterate a planet full of tens of millions of people just to make a point, but it’s only when watching Andor that you truly understand how committed the Emperor and his eager minions are to murder, oppress and destroy on a grand scale to preserve what they see as the idealised state of the galaxy.
In the final three episodes of the second season, and the series overall, we reach the pointy end of proceedings where Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), a ruthlessly ambitious Imperial Security Bureau supervisor, has figured out who her long-sough Rebel quarry is and who chooses to confront Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) in his antiques store in a way that is menacingly calm and full of portentous meaning.
Unfortunately for both parties, this slowly simmering confrontation, which goes south very quickly, will be the literal death of ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- of Rael and the metaphorical death of Meero who extends her ambition too far and is imprisoned by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the director of weapons research for the Imperial miliary and overseer of the Death Star’s construction, where she finds out too late that throwing your lot in with a regime that does whatever it needs to stay in power, has no qualms about sacrificing those who serve it if it serves their ends.
The end of Rael consumes all of episode eight, “Make It Stop”, which not only explores what happens to the man you could easily hail as the father of the rebellion, even if people like Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt) and a great many others on Yavin, the Rebels’ base, are loathe to admit it – they see their cause as lofty and shinily idealistic and can’t countenance the dark deeds needed to bring it into being and sustain it – but takes us back to when he essentially deserts his post as an Imperial officer in some unnamed battle which decimates the home of Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau; April V. Woods as a young girl) who becomes his surrogate daughter and later assistant at his store.
It’s a searing and emotionally impactful effort which intersperses the effective ends of Rael and Meero with the path that brought Rael to a point where he had no choice, so he felt but to oppose the very organisation of which he had once been an integral part.
Perhaps the most moving moment in an episode absolutely stacked with moments that ripped your heart out and drove home the true cost of standing against authoritarianism, was when Kleya risks everything to sneak into the hospital where Rael lies on life support and switches off the machines keeping him alive.
You can tell how much it emotionally kills her to do this, but she has been trained to do what is needed, and what must happen is that everything Rael knows cannot be allowed to fall into the Empire’s hands.
What follows is a daring rescue, against the Rebels’ high command’s orders, by Andor (Diego Luna), Ruescott Melshi (Duncan Pow) and reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid K-2SO (voiced and motion-captured by Alan Tudyk), of Kleya from the very heart of Coruscant, a spectacular sequence which comes with a ton of intensive action but some deeply affecting moments as a shock-soaked Kleya is taken to Yavin where, injured psychically and physically, she struggles to cope with what has just happened to her.
It’s at this point where Andor demonstrates why it’s such a perfectly constructed show.
Other shows would have been content to go all guns blazing and dazzle us with action and acts of extreme prejudice, but while episodes nine and ten, “Who Else Knows?” and “Jedha, Kyber, Erso” respectively, has that in spades, it also takes the time to show the toll the events of these episodes take on Kleya who has lost everything she cares about in support of the Rebels’ cause and yet who is shunned by many of the people on Yavin because of her connections to Rael.
But she has the key pieces of intel about the Death Star and she must be listened to, even if Andor and Mon Mothma aside (Genevieve O’Reilly) are the only ones who believe her; it’s stunning how close the Rebels come to ignoring the existence of the Death Star and taking urgent steps to stop it.
Of course, we all know they will listen and they will act, but rather knowing it all ends sucking any and all tension and emotional import out of the final episode, it actually amps it up because we know what is coming and what it will cost so many people to make the destruction of the Death Star, and eventually end of the Empire itself, a reality.
A lot goes down on the way to events with which we are intimately familiar, but Andor makes it feel pressing and vital, and highly emotional, but the series ends up on a poignant note with Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) back on Mina-Rau, the agricultural planet, where she stands amidst verdant golden wheat fields holding a baby (is it Cassian’s? If so, dial up the poignancy to heartbreaking levels) looking up the stars.
We know that she will never Cassian again and so the scene sums up, in ways that are crushingly moving, what the events in Andor have and will cost everyone, and how beautifully this treats has told such big and epic narrative moments in such nuanced and emotionally intimate ways, leaving us in no doubt that while opposing evil such as the Empire’s is a no-brainer if you have a beating heart and human soul, that it is no easy task and will involve sacrifice on an unimaginable scale until, hopefully, victory comes.
Andor streams on Disney+
After all that brilliantly executed drama, here’s some Andor promo fun …
(courtesy Laughing Squid)