[COLUMN] On Andor, There Is No Way Out | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece will include a full and frank discussion of the latest block of Andor episodes, which count among the best things Star Wars have ever produced. So, check them out, if you haven’t.

The two seasons of Andor are neatly mirrored. Both run twelve episodes and can be neatly delineated into four arcs each. Those arcs mirror one another across seasons. Both seasons open with a story about a backwater world that becomes the focus of attention of a militarized outside force, which leads into the second arc in which Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) oversees a rebel raid on Imperial forces, culminating in a heart-stopping heist sequence.

The third arc of the first season of Andor was set on the prison colony of Narkina 5. It was a story about the prison industrial complex, culminating in a mass escape built on the realization that there was only “one way out” for the inmates: together. On the surface, the third arc of the second season of Andor is quite different. There is no prison in these episodes, which are set mainly on the streets of the Ghorman capital Palmo and in the halls of the Senate on Coruscant.

Still, these two arcs rhyme. The big revelation about Narkina 5 wasn’t that it was a prison, it was that it was a trap. The Empire would routinely double the inmates’ sentences and, instead of releasing them at the end of their sentences, would just ship them off to another labour camp. By this point in the second season, the Empire has turned the entire galaxy into a prison of sorts. Thematically, this third set of episodes suggests that, for most of the characters on Andor, there is no way out.

The second season of Andor has spent six episodes building to the inevitability of the Ghorman Massacre. This event in Star Wars continuity was first mentioned in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, published in 1990. Interestingly, Andor uses the details of that version of the tragedy – Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing, Wayne Pygram) landing his shuttle on peaceful protestors – as a jumping-off point for its take on events.

Showrunner Tony Gilroy has talked about the paradox of building Ghroman into the structure of Andor. “Ghorman, interestingly, is canonical but completely undescribed,” the writer explained. “It's a total blank slate.” Andor plays with this Schrödinger’s continuity; it is revealed early in the season that the version of events described in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook actually happened years ago on Ghorman, with a monument built to the victims in the capital, Palmo.

Andor reimagines the actual Ghorman Massacre as something more orchestrated and insidious. The Empire has been planning it for years. “One Year Later” finds Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) hosting some of the Empire’s keenest strategic minds at the Maltheen Divide to plan for the ethnic cleansing of Ghorman under the auspices of “the Emperor’s Dream of Energy Independence.” He also reveals that “this is not [his] first meeting on the subject” of “the Suppression of Ghorman.”

The second season of Andor covers the four years leading up to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the original Star Wars, jumping a year between each of the arcs. This allows the audience to get a sense of how effectively the Empire has moved towards this goal. This tragedy did not just happen. It was not spontaneous. It was not accidental. It was not the product of bad luck or happenstance. It was something that was organized.

In this sense, Ghorman itself becomes just as much a prison as Narkina 5, its citizens treated just as much as raw material for the Empire’s ambitions as the slave labour in its penal colony. Indeed, both Ghorman and Narkina 5 are essential to the construction of the Death Star. The inmates on Narkina 5 manufacture the pieces, while the Empire needs to purge Ghorman of its inhabitants to allow them to conduct “gouge mining” to extract the precious mineral Kalkite from the planet.

By the time the massacre actually occurs in “Who Are You?”, it has become inevitable and unavoidable. The Empire has stoked local political movements to create an insurgency that it can use to justify a brutal clampdown. The morning of the atrocity, Elector Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel) realizes that his own efforts to oppose the Empire have simply enabled it. “It’s a trap,” he warns his daughter Enza (Alaís Lawson). “They want us out there.” He argues, “They’ve been begging us to fight!”

Early in “Messenger”, Senator Dasi Oran (Raphael Roger Levy) sits down with Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) in the halls of the Imperial Senate. Oran is the Ghorman representative. “I’m afraid we are near the point of no return,” he admits in a moment of candor. “How can I help?” Mothma asks. Oran replies, simply, “Turn back the clock.” There might have been a time when this could have been avoided, but it’s long gone.

Andor has always been a tragedy. It is a prequel to a prequel to Star Wars. The audience already knows how this story ends, and how the story that it leads to ends. The audience knows how Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) will die. The audience also knows that the Empire will build its Death Star. The second season in particular is racing towards those inescapable inevitabilities. The characters are all trapped, just as Ghorman itself is trapped.

In the lead-up to the massacre, various characters desperately plead with others, hoping against hope that there is some narrow path to avoid atrocity. “I… think there’s a way out of this before things go too far,” Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) promises Enza in an alleyway the night before the slaughter. She leaves him standing alone. The next morning, her father Carro begs Enza, “You could stop this. It’s not too late.” Ultimately, both Rylanz and Karn are hopelessly naïve.

The inevitability of what happens on Ghorman is also a moral salve. Andor has always understood the banal bureaucratic mentality that drives people to participate in these atrocities. In “Messenger”, Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser), the head of the Imperial Security Bureau, passes on the order to begin ethnic cleansing. The Empire has failed to produce a Kalkite alternative. “I don’t know the science, but… it’s bad luck, Ghorman,” he instructs Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough).  “We need what’s in the ground, and when we’re done, they won’t have much left to call home.”

The way Partagaz frames it, the destruction of Ghorman is not a choice. It’s just “luck.” This sense of inevitability also allows Meero to live with herself despite her role in planning the atrocity. When Karn confronts her with what she has done, Meero shrugs off responsibility. “This began long before we got here,” she insists. “They’ve been planning it for years. They’re doing this, no matter what.” Meero was just “following orders.” If she didn’t do it, she contends, someone else would have.

Even before the shooting starts, Ghorman has been transformed into a prison. There are blockades in public squares. When Cassian stays in the hotel overlooking the square, the window panels look like prison bars. He notices Stormtroopers perched on the roof, like wardens surveying a prison population. The Empire herds protestors into the large public square at the center of Palmo. “Close all the exits,” orders Captain Kaido (Jonjo O’Neill), turning the wide open space into a cage.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the Ghormans do. The Empire has been flooding the airwaves with racialized propaganda to alienate Ghorman from other planets. It has been staging false flag attacks to justify a predetermined response. The first shot fired on the Ghorman plaza is an Imperial sniper shooting an Imperial trooper, to provoke the Imperial troopers to fire on the crowd. The Ghormans are trapped inside a narrative that the Empire has constructed.

“Propaganda is where it’s at,” Gilroy explains. “I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident got America into Vietnam. Burn the Reichstag, then you can round up all the Communists and the Jews you want. All these false flags. You’re not telling the full story of revolution without it.” The second season of Andor is particularly attuned to the “post-truth” moment. Mothma’s stirring speech in “Welcome to the Rebellion” laments “the loss of an objective reality” and “the death of truth” on “the Ghorman Plaza.”

Andor understands that prisons need not be literal. It is entirely possible for a person to be trapped without being sentenced to a penal labour camp. The third arc of the second season of Andor is, in that way, an extrapolation from the third arc of the show’s first season. It is about the more invisible cages constructed around these characters and these worlds. Indeed part of the beauty of these three episodes is the way in which this idea resonates and reverberates.

“Who Are You?” is about the trap that the Empire has built around Ghorman. “Welcome to the Rebellion” narrows the focus from an entire planet to the show’s primary cast, focusing on the cages that characters like Cassian Andor, Mon Mothma and the revolutionary Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) find themselves, as Mothma sets out to make a speech calling out the Ghorman Massacre and Andor finds himself tasked with evacuating Mothma from Coruscant to the rebel base on Yavin.

These characters are arguably just as trapped as the citizens of Ghorman. After all, the audience already knows the fate of these characters. Andor will die at the end of Rogue One. Mothma will make it to Yavin for Rogue One and survive until the end of Return of the Jedi. This is already written. There is no way to change this. There is no choice that these characters can make that will change that. There is a crushing weight of inevitability behind this.

Gilroy acknowledges this, emphasizing how much of this season of Andor is dictated by choices that had already been made. “It wants to feel inevitable,” Gilroy explained. “One of the responsibilities is to deliver, canonically.” He admits, “I have a couple events I have to deal with … I have Mon Mothma leaving the Senate, her big moment to leave, that’s on my calendar. K-2SO has to arrive, and we have to deliver enough espionage, and enough intrigue, and enough information about this mysterious energy project that leads to the exploration that’s going to happen in Rogue One.”

It feels notable that this third arc of the second season is saturated with so much of this continuity. “Messenger” opens with the rebel base already active on Yavin, a crucial piece of continuity leading to the original Star Wars. “Who Are You?” explains how Cassian comes to capture and reprogramme K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). “Welcome to the Rebellion” documents how Mon Mothma goes from the galactic senator (kinda) seen in Revenge of the Sith to the leader who addresses the rebels in Return of the Jedi.

This is the kind of stuff that could easily seem like indulgent fan service, inviting the viewer to point at the screen in recognition of things they already know. However, Gilroy has talked about how hard Andor works to avoid those crass impulses, “We would never add anybody for fun. We’re not going to add anybody for a smile or a wink or anything like that.” All these choices are earned dramatically and thematically, but they are cleverly used as reminders of the inevitability of what lies ahead.

This is an exceptional use of the prequel format, and it honestly mirrors the approach taken by something like Better Call Saul, which uses the audience’s familiarity with these characters and their history to construct a tragedy that feels truly mythic in scope. It is an excellent example of how franchise continuity can be used for more than just satisfying the base impulses of a fandom, but in a manner that has real dramatic weight and genuine stakes for the characters.

This means that even what might otherwise seem like an escape feels like it is itself a trap. “Welcome to the Rebellion” covers Mothma’s escape from Coruscant, but Mothma herself repeatedly emphasizes how little agency she exerts in what is happening. She understands that Rael is not evacuating her to protect her, but instead to protect himself. Mothma discovers that her aide Erskin Semaj has been working for Rael for years. Mothma exerts little agency in her own escape.

Even then, the narrative itself is rewritten. Despite everything that Andor and Rael risked to rescue Mothma from Coruscant, Yavin wants the exiled Senator “coming in with a Yavin escort” for optics. “They want to rewrite the story,” Kleya explains. This is a bit of continuity smoothing, referencing events already depicted in the episode “Secret Cargo” of Rebels. Once again, the characters – and even the show itself – are trapped within a narrative outside of their own control.

Indeed, Cassian himself spends much of this third arc trying to escape this life, this world and this story. “I’m not coming back,” he warns Rael’s assistant, Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau). “I’m done after this.” He plans to retire with his lover, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona). There is a sense that Andor can feel the tragedy looming in his future. “I’ve done what I can, and I’ve done a lot,” he tells Bix. “I’m done.” He argues, “The only special thing about me is luck, and I’ve overplayed my hand already.”

When Kleya presses Andor about what he actually wants, it turns out that Cassian wants freedom and self-determination. “I need to start making my own decisions,” Andor explains. Kleya wryly observes, “I thought that’s what we were fighting for.” The Empire has trapped these characters too, just as surely as it marched the citizens of Ghorman to their fate. Under the Empire’s boot, there is no choice and no individual autonomy.

Interestingly, “Messenger” marks the first time Andor has explicitly acknowledged the Force, with Bix taking Cassian to visit a Force Healer (Josie Walker). In keeping with Star Wars continuity, Cassian dismisses the Force as mumbo jumbo. However, the Healer recognizes something in Cassian. “He’s a messenger,” she advises Bix. “There’s some place he needs to be.” There is a sense of purpose to Cassian’s journey, which exists as the alternative to the Empire’s grim march of inevitability.

This conversation is neatly mirrored when Cassian meets with Rael in “Welcome to the Rebellion.” Cassian offers to evacuate Luthen from Coruscant to Yavin, along with Mothma. “We get her out, she goes to Yavin and not you?” Andor asks. “No Yavin for me,” Rael sighs. It’s a beautiful dramatic beat, framing Rael as a sort of a Moses figure in the Star Wars cosmology, a leader who helped guide the rebellion to the promised land but never set foot there himself. It also neatly mirrors the character of Kino Loy (Andy Serkis) on Narkina 5, who guides his prisoners to freedom but cannot go himself.

“They’re going to find you, Luthen,” Cassian pleads with his mentor, in much the same way that Carro and Karn had pleaded with Enza. Rael shrugs it off and accepts the inevitability. “You act as if we had a choice,” Rael replies. “Eventually they’ll hang us both, won’t they? We set that course the first time we met.” He challenges Andor, “You see no truth in that?” Andor replies, “I make my own decisions.” It is unclear whether Cassian actually believes that or if he just needs to say it out loud.

Cassian successfully evacuates Mothma. He tells Bix that the two of them are going to leave and start a life elsewhere together. That is his choice, his decision. However, he wakes up to discover that Bix is gone. She disappeared in the night, leaving a recording. “We have to win, we have to beat them, and I believe you have purpose in making that happen; I need to believe that,” she tells Cassian. “So I’m choosing for the both of us. I’m choosing the Rebellion.” Cassian doesn’t have a choice.

The final scene of the episode finds Cassian racing through the jungles of Yavin, trying and failing to catch the freighter that leaves with Bix on it. As he waits on the landing pad, he is informed that the techs have finished rebooting K-2SO, the droid that he recovered from Ghorman. It is in some ways a strange choice to end these three episodes with a scene that could easily feel like fan service, bringing two of these characters together. However, it serves a clear thematic purpose.

“You’ll hear a lot of bather about ‘reprogramming’, which makes it sound as though it’s a problem solved behind a console, but that’s nonsense frankly,” Fay Drolla (Tim Plester) warns Andor as they prepare to power up the droid. “It’s really all about impulse suppression, which is an entirely engineering and wiring issue.” In other words, the droid is hardwired the way that it is. What makes K-2SO itself is not software or code, but some intrinsic facet of its design and build.

Perhaps the same is true of Cassian. He may not have chosen this path and it might not be what he wants, but he was built for it. He was shaped for it. There is something intrinsic to the way that he is that makes him perfectly suited for it. He is a man for this moment not by choice or desire or intent, but because he has been put in the position to do the right things at the right times for the right purpose and his nature is to do those things. There is no way out of that.