When Star Wars came out in 1977, it was an homage to the gee-whiz serial adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon from about 40 years prior. It's interesting that we're now just short of 50 years past that original film. But Star Wars eclipsed its influences to become one of the most influential movies of all time, creating an aesthetic and language.
The idea of a "Death Star" is, if you hadn't grown up with the idea, kind of ludicrously over the top. It's such an arch name for a superweapon, and the fact that it requires a massive moon-sized space station to support the planet-destroying superlaser lifts the concept into the absurd heights of not-very-hard science fiction.
The denouement of Andor, in its final episode, after all the high-stakes blaster fights and explosions have run their course, is simply convincing the rational people in charge of the Rebellion that this is, in fact, a real thing that the Empire is building. That this cartoonishly evil plan is taking place in a world that Andor has redefined as existing within the rational and realistic.
Andor lovingly makes use of Star Wars' retrofuturistic aesthetic, its extremely analogue technology that is nonetheless so much more powerful than what we have (I find this particularly interesting as an evolution of the series given that the high-tech stuff in the movies looked pretty convincing to a 1970s audience, before digital technologies became commonplace and now ubiquitous). Luthen and Kleya's radio is operated by putting a bunch of giant plugs on cables into various sockets depending on the intended recipient. But at the same time, we have hovercars and seemingly sentient (at the very least sapient) droids.
After the horrors of Ghorman, we find ourselves in the final year of the story, BBY 1 (a dating system that does feel a bit contrived - sure it makes sense that dating things in comparison to the first movie makes sense, but surely in-universe they'd date it instead to something like the rise or fall of the Empire? The Battle of Yavin is certainly an important event, but I don't see us using the Battle of Stalingrad or D-Day as the basis for our calendar.)
And there's really just one last thing to cover. It all comes down to Lonni Jung.
Spoilers ahead:
Alas Lonni Jung. Luthen's mole in the ISB, he's been a profoundly useful asset to the Rebellion, and after years and years of expertly avoiding suspicion, his reward is a blaster bolt to the heart delivered by the man who had promised him an extraction when he needed one.
Yes, we must never forget that Luthen Rael is a ruthless man. Safeguarding his mission is the utmost priority. It's not fair or just or good that Jung is left dead on a park bench. But it's cold, brutal pragmatism: Luthen knows he doesn't have the resources or time to get Jung out, and once it becomes clear that it's a matter of hours if not minutes before the ISB swoops in and captures him, extracting all of his secrets before disposing of him in some horrible manner, that the only thing he can do is kill the man and leave him.
It's actually almost exactly how we're introduced to Cassian Andor in Rogue One - meeting with a source but killing that source when it becomes clear that he, through no fault of his own, is going to be a liability. Though Andor has long tried to be a better man than Luthen Rael, he's learned the master's tough lessons.
And to give some credit to Luthen, he turns this same brutal pragmatism on himself.
Dedra Meero fucks up. She has always projected this idea of being an utmost professional with unparalleled competence. But she lets her emotions get in the way of operational protocols: she goes to confront Luthen on her own, and as she gloats, believing herself to have gotten the drop on "Axis," her old nemesis, she realizes to her horror that he did anticipate someone would be coming. Maybe not in that moment, but she arrives as he's pouring a corrosive fluid all over the secret radio in the back of his antique shop. That sizzling of melting metal distracts her long enough for him to plunge an antique dagger into his own chest.
It could have been avoided. She could have gotten her man if she had just had the humility to stay in her lane. Luthen is rushed to a hospital, and the situation might be salvaged for the ISB, but they forgot about Kleya - Luthen's assistant and perhaps daughter. Trained since childhood to be just as deadly a spy as Luthen, she infiltrates the hospital (the security forces are sure it must have been a team of three at least, only to discover that this one very badass woman did it all) and mercy-kills her mentor and father figure, disconnecting his life support so that they have no one to interrogate. It's a final act of devotion that one imagines Luthen would approve wholeheartedly of if he were conscious.
Our final real action-sequence of the series is when Andor, Melshi, and the recently re-programmed K-2SO (seen earlier massacring the Ghor before getting bisected by a truck) go to extract what they think will be Luthen and Kleya.
Despite Kleya's effective infiltration of the hospital, the ISB isn't totally incompetent, and manages to trace the location of the safehouse. What they for sure do not account for is that the Rebels have a KX unit on their side, who kills the absolute shit out of Supervisor Heert (who took over the Axis case after Meero was reassigned) and the Imperial SWAT team tasked with capturing Kleya.
(Weird little sidebar: the armor that the tactical unit wears looks like Stormtrooper gear without the helmets. Are they Stormtroopers?)
We get some backstory on Kleya and Luthen - Luthen was evidently once Sergeant Lear (a pretty easy formula for a pseudonym, simply reversing Lear to become Rael) in the Imperial army, and had a freak-out when his unit was tasked with massacring some civilian population, unable to handle the horror of what he and his men were being ordered to do. Hiding aboard the ship to which he had retreated was Kleya, as a child. Lear kept her hidden from the other soldiers and at some point later started traveling with her, evidently leaving the army and taking her on as her guardian, trading in artifact to pay for food. Kleya sought her help in fighting back against the regime that killed her family, and the two of them wandered the galaxy fighting back in little and larger ways (including evidently blowing up a bunch of Imperials on a bridge on Naboo - it's such a crazy juxtaposition seeing a young Kleya with what looks like an ice cream sundae in one hand and the detonator for a remote explosive in the other.
Kleya is reluctant to leave, to go to Yavin where all the uncomplicatedly heroic figures now leading the Rebellion like to dismiss the value of Luthen Rael, but it's clear that it's just not safe for her to be on Coruscant anymore. I think we're left to wonder what might come of the rest of her life - maybe she just gets to retire, but I think it's more likely that she becomes the Rebellion's spymaster, taking over Luthen's role even as the Rebel Alliance grows to the point where they don't need to do all their work in the shadows anymore.
Meero's errors ruin her. Not only do they allow news of the Death Star to get to the Rebellion (not quick enough to save Alderaan, but we know that story) but whether it's simply a search for a scapegoat or genuine suspicion, Director Krennec suggests that she might be a Rebel spy. The last we, and maybe anyone else, ever sees of her, she's in a prison facility just like Narkina 5 (evidently they had kept a fragment of the prison set, which was convenient).
Her boss, Partagaz, goes out on his own terms. Partagaz, I think, has always represented what people like Syril and Dedra Meero aspired to be. Calm, rational, professional at all times. There's just one moment during the raid on the apartment block where Partagaz loses his cool for what might be the first time. After K-2SO smashes the radio in the shuttle Heert and his team took there, we see Partagaz panicking and flipping some switches kind of uselessly. It's shockingly uncharacteristic of him, but it shows you just how fucked the operation is.
Krennec apologizes to Lio Partagaz, that he won't be able to shield him from this catastrophe. And ultimately, he's responsible for the errors of his subordinates.
In his final scene, Partagaz listens to Nemik's manifesto, which has evidently been shared and spread despite efforts to suppress it. But Partagaz is smart enough to see the truth in Nemik's argument: tyranny requires constant effort, unnaturally suppressing the natural desire for freedom. We might have thought of Nemik as naive when we met him in the first season, but Partagaz understands that he's right in the end: this whole project of control is doomed, and people like him are going to wind up swept away in the tide. He cannot know it, but Krennec will soon be dead, vaporized by the Death Star's first firing on Scarif at the command of Grand Moff Tarkin. And Tarkin, then, will be dead as the seemingly invicible superweapon is destroyed by a scrappy farm boy who just wanted to fight (and, you know, also had magic powers). Even Darth Vader and the Emperor himself will be dead in just a few years (let's ignore the notion that the Emperor somehow comes back later).
Partagaz understands he's a cog in that machine, and that machine is eventually going to rust, crack apart, and burst into flames. So, rather than present himself to be force-choked by Vader or blasted with lightning by the Emperor, he decides to do the dignified thing and blast himself in the brains.
Over on the Rebel side of things, the last real challenge that Andor faces is just getting people to believe the story. It's word-of-mouth, fuzzy and ambiguous. Mostly just a few scattered phrases. Bail Organa is unconvinced that the weapon that will ultimately destroy his planet (and I assume him? He's on Alderaan when it's blown up, right?) exists. That cold and ruthless pragmatism has made the upstanding leaders of the Rebel Alliance shun and resent Luthen. But that kind of holier-than-thou attitude is not something they can afford.
It has been like ten years since I saw Rogue One when it came out (bizarrely, it's the last movie my mom saw in theaters, if I recall, and of course only a few days after we saw it, Carrie Fischer died) but as I recall, there's still some skepticism about the Death Star at the start of the movie. This arc, thus, sort of kicks us into the events of the film.
While this series is itself a prequel to that film, which is itself a prequel to the original Star Wars, I think knowledge of the frankly shockingly gutsy ending to that movie informs the near-final montage of Andor walking to his U-Wing to head to Kaffre. We know that this will ultimately be his last mission.
(Funnily enough, I remember thinking it was bold for Disney to make a movie that they absolutely couldn't spin off anything from, given that every original character in it is dead by the end, but here we are! I'm pretty happy they did, in this case.)
As all the pieces are laid to rest, Kleya adjusting to life on Yavin, Dedra succumbing to despair as a prisoner in a no-exit facility, Krennec overseeing the weapon that will eventually kill him, we finally check in with Bix, who is back on the farming planet, walking through endless fields of grain with a little baby at her hip. Cassian might be doomed to die on Scarif, but life goes on. He might never see the sunrise on a new Republic, but he buys that for others.
As a series, I'll concede that there's a little of a positive response bias I have: getting a mature version of Star Wars that even reaches toward rich and complex themes is so refreshing, and something I hope that Disney does in other projects.
I do think that there are some structural issues with the series, though: its commitment to 3-4 episode arcs can sometimes push it into focusing on plotlines that aren't really as compelling as they could be. The second part of the Ghorman arc, culminating in the Massacre, is amazing , but the earlier part, where the Ghorman Front is kind of just getting started and unwittingly helping the Empire justify their eventual massacre (and getting Cinta killed in a truly senseless way... I don't hate that on a thematic level, though it does unfortunately invoke the Bury Your Gays trope - though hey, another tragedy: Vel specifically requests Cinta come on that job and inadvertently gets her girlfriend killed). While I think it was good to demonstrate with the Maya Pei brigade that some of the factions of the Rebel Alliance are absolute fucking clowns, I don't know if we needed three episodes of it.
Weirdly, Andor sometimes feels a bit sidelined in his own show. It's sort of ok, given that there are so many compelling characters (surely Luthen steals the spotlight whenever he's on screen). If we think of the show as more of an ensemble piece, that helps this fact.
Anyway, very happy to have finally gotten to see the second season. I imagine Tony Gilroy is happy to ride off into the sunset and not do anymore Star Wars projects, but I really hope that the ambition to make smart, thoughtful, mature Star Wars stuff remains.
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