[COLUMN] The Warped Reflections of Andor | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the fourth through sixth episodes of the second season of Andor, now streaming on Disney+. But you should be watching it anyway. It’s great.

To paraphrase George Lucas, there is a certain poetry to Andor. “It rhymes.”

Within the first six episodes of the second season of Andor, all directed by Ariel Kleiman, there is a strong recurring emphasis on mirrors. Early in “One Year Later”, in Bix Caleen’s (Adria Arjona) nightmare, Doctor Gorst (Joshua James) sneaks into her living quarters to torment her again. The scene is shot from Gorst’s perspective, his face only appearing when he stops to check his face in the mirror. Gorst sneaks into Bix’s bedroom and pulls the bedsheet down, at which point she awakes, screaming.

The sequence is very deliberately mirrored in “Harvest”, where Lieutenant Krole (Alex Waldmann) stops to check his reflection and fix his hair in the exact same mirror before attempting to sexually assault Bix. In the same episode, Supervisor Dedra Meera (Denise Gough) returns from plotting a genocide on Ghorman to get dressed up for dinner with Eedy Karn (Kathryn Hunter), the mother of her partner, Syril (Kyle Soller).

Karn himself is a man with a myriad of reflections. He gets dressed in front of a similar arrangement of mirrors to Meera in “Harvest.” In “Ever Been to Ghorman?”, Karn is reintroduced working undercover on Ghorman to help stir up rebellion against the Empire – working, he believes, on a “plan to bait Ghorman as a prize for outside agitators” – checking his reflection in the mirror. There is a sense of irony in this. These characters who do terrible things have no difficulty looking at themselves in the mirror.

There is a clear contrast between how the show frames these characters looking at their reflections and how it approaches the rebels fighting against imperial authority. Under perpetual scrutiny, these characters all have to perform. In the first season, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) has to put on a wig and dress up to return to Coruscant. In “I Have Friends Everywhere”, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) has to dress up as a literal fashion designer to conduct reconnaissance on Ghorman for Rael.

The reflections of these characters are often fragmented or distorted. As Andor leaves Coruscant for Ghorman, his reflection is warped in the glass corridors. When Andor arrives on Ghorman, his conversation with Enza Rylance (Alaís Lawson) in a local café is shot very deliberately using the mirror on the wall behind the pair. Each character is only ever in shot with the other’s out of focus reflection, as if each cannot clearly see the other. When Rael attends a party hosted by Davo Sculdun (Richard Dillane), only his hand is visible reflected on the surface of an antique glass table.

These figures are glimpsed through windows rather than allowed to see themselves in mirrors. When Working as a double-agent on Ghorman, Karn stares through his mirror through a window to spot a local watching him from a neighboring rooftop. His office has three gigantic windows on it. Hiding out on Coruscant, Bix is freaked out by the windows that open out onto the city planet. An entire wall of Andor’s hotel room on Ghorman has floor-to-ceiling windows. A reunion between estranged lovers Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) and Cinta Kaz (Varada Sethu) is framed through café windows.

For all that Andor deftly hands plot and character, the show has a commendably lyrical grasp of theme. The show is surprisingly grounded for a Star Wars television series, but it also has an endearingly poetic sensibility, reflecting Lucas’ mythic storytelling. The show is full of recurring motifs, incidents and details that inform the larger view of what is happening beyond providing a catalogue of incidents for audience consumption.

The second arc of the second season, and in particular “I Have Friends Everywhere”, is preoccupied with the challenge of separating signal from noise. This is obvious from the episode’s opening moments, with the beautiful theme song refracted through a series of strange disconnected radio signals as Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau) scans for a bug that she had planted in Davo Sculden’s home, tucked away inside an antique. It is a detail that sets up later plot points, but it also establishes the episode’s larger themes.

In the second season of Andor, things are moving quickly. The twelve episodes of the first season unfolded across a single year in the life of the characters. In the second season, each three-episode arc is followed by a jump to the subsequent year, counting down to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the original Star Wars. The title cards, reading “One Year Later” and then the time before the Battle of Yavin, create the clear sense of a countdown.

Throughout Andor, characters are struggling to receive and process information. Characters lie to one another, manipulating friends and colleagues to serve their own ends and polluting the pools of information that their enemies might gather from. Rael sends Andor to Ghorman, but neglects to inform him that he also sent Sartha. Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) feeds misinformation to traitor Pluti (Marc Rissman) to distract Imperial attention away from his real target.

The Empire works in similar ways. Karn believes that he is being sent to weed out agitators at the behest of Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser), but the real plan is orchestrated by his partner, Meero, to actively incite insurrection in the hope of justifying an Imperial response. “You walk a very narrow path, Dedra,” Partagaz warns Meera. “Syril must never know what this is all really about.” The air is so thick with disinformation that even a romantic couple cannot trust one another.

There is a sense that everything is speeding up and intensifying. It is hard to keep track. Rael arranges a meeting with Supervisor Lonni Jung (Robert Emms), his man inside the Imperial Security Bureau. “I can’t wait another three months, Lonni,” Rael insists. “There’s too much going on.” Jung replies, “You used to tell me to wait.” Rael sighs, “Those days are gone.” Rael struggles to piece together the information that Jung has given him. “I need the endgame!”

He makes similar complaints to Marki over the jumble of information from her bug inside Sculden’s home. “Bits and pieces!” Rael shouts. “That’s all we ever got!” He voices similar complaints to the ones that he shared with Jung. “I can’t keep track anymore,” he admits. “All the lies we’ve laid, all the information. The radios, the frequencies, the messages flying around. We’re drowning and you keep pretending it’s all under control.” It is too much. It is suffocating.

It seems pertinent that the actual material purpose of Andor’s trip to Ghorman is to pass “a fresh code crystal for the radio” operated by Elector Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel), who is trying to organize Ghorman resistance. Rylanz has never met Rael. “The person who sent you is but a voice to me,” he explains. “We’ve spoken, we’ve exchanged messages, but I have no idea really who it is at the other end of the line.” How is meaningful communication even possible under these circumstances?

Andor is smart enough to realize that the Empire is baiting the Ghorman Front, trying to provoke them into an armed insurrection that will inevitably justify “the Suppression of Ghorman.” As such, the Empire is feeding the Ghorman information and gossip in the hopes it will lead them – in Meero’s words –  “to do the wrong thing.” Andor warns Rylanz, “Feeding false information is what they do.” He cautions the would-be rebels, “They’re pretty good at it.”

This aspect of Andor feels decidedly timely. “Words have meaning!” Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) insists during an argument with Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), an ironic statement coming from a man using “the Ministry of Enlightenment” to help pave the way for ethnic cleansing. However, the challenge in deciphering signals from noise resonates in this post-truth era where bad faith actors just seek to “flood the zone” and overwhelm their opponents.

To return to that theme of mirroring, there is a nice symmetry to the structure of the first and second seasons of Andor. The seasons are clearly structured in such a way as to echo one another. The first arc of the first season finds a Preox-Morlana security team arriving on Ferrix in search of a criminal and causing disruption to the local population; the first arc of the second season finds many of the survivors of Ferrix hiding out on Mina-Rau, only for the Empire to show up searching for “illegals.”

In both the first and second season, the second arc builds to a heist orchestrated by a faction of rebels led by Sartha designed to escalate tensions between the Empire and its subjects. In the first season, it was the robbery of the payroll at an Imperial garrison on Aldhani. In the second season, it is a raid on a convoy carrying materials to the new “annex” that the Empire is constructing in Palmo on Ghorman, proving that the new construction is an armory.

As in the first season, Rael argues that the long-term plan is to generate enough outrage to convince other systems to rise up against the Empire. Andor realizes that Rael doesn’t care how many locals die to prove that point. “It doesn’t matter to you, does it?” Andor protests. “Doesn’t matter?” Rael counters. “Ghorman in play? A new frontline against the Empire? A chance for that, it’s a triumph.” Andor objects, “And… if it goes up in flames?” Rael replies, “Then it will burn… very brightly.”

This is a recurring theme of Andor. “Yeah, it’s called accelerationism,” showrunner Tony Gilroy explained. “I think that’s the dialectical term. It covers all sides of the political spectrum. It could be left, right; it could be anywhere. But it’s the idea of, ‘I can’t get people to do something unless they really feel it.’ And that’s a classic revolutionary leadership move all the way through. I mean, you could go back 2000 years and find people that were doing that.”

Gilroy’s emphasis on “all sides of the political spectrum” is telling. One of the more interesting aspects of the second season of Andor is the way in which it exists in conversation with the first season. In the first season, Rael used accelerationism to create conditions conducive to a united insurrection against the Empire. The second season suggests accelerationism is an amoral and apolitical tool. The Empire is just as adept at using this impulse to its own end.

When Krennic states that he needs a justification for the Empire to seize Ghorman, it is Meero who comes up with the perfect solution. “Propaganda will only get you so far,” she advises Krennic. “You need a radical insurgency you can count on.” She clarifies, “You need Ghorman rebels you can count on to do the wrong thing…” This is exactly the same logic that Rael uses. Indeed, the first season suggested that Meero is unique among Imperial officers because she can think like Rael. She is the person to identify his coordinated network because he organizes the way that she would.

The mirror has two faces. If Andor suggests Meero and Rael as reflections of one another, it also pairs Karn and Andor. In “Ever Been to Ghorman?”, Karn has left his partner Meero on Coruscant to make contact with the Ghorman Front, while Andor has moved to Coruscant to live with his partner Bix. In “I Have Friends Everywhere”, when Karn returns from Ghorman to reunite with his partner, it is Andor who leaves his partner on Coruscant to make contact with the Ghorman Front. Just as Rael lies to Andor, Meero lies to Karn.

Gilroy argues that Andor and Karn are perhaps not as different as each might think. “My take on Syril is a little bit different than some people,” Gilroy acknowledges. “I think he’s completely unformed, and I think he could’ve, would have just as eagerly embraced any kind of family that had taken him in, in a way. I think he was eager for acceptance, but passionately in need of that acceptance.” Had things gone a little differently, could Karn have been honestly working with the Ghorman Front?

For all the chaos around them, Andor and Karn are locked in a surprising intricate dance. Neither is aware of the other’s presence on Ghorman, but they interact with the many of the same characters and miss one another by what seems like a matter of hours. It underscores the sense throughout Andor that neither side really exerts any meaningful control over all of the variables at play. Both the Empire and the nascent rebellion are playing with matches, hoping that they are properly positioned and that the wind blows their way when the explosion hits.

In this sense, the insane rebel Saw Gerrera might just be the most honest player on the board. He is working with young Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhaier), who Rael has sent to teach Gerrera’s faction the mechanics of stealing the precious Imperial fuel rhydonium, also known as “rhydo.” It quickly becomes clear that Gerrera is obsessed with the chemical in a very unhealthy way. “I’ve always loved you,” he admits to the fuel, like a pyromaniac whispering sweet nothings to gasoline.

“Have you ever seen a man die from rhydonium?” Gerrera asks Wilmon. “Maybe you’re like me, maybe you… you love the smell of it. And maybe you breathe just a little too deeply. Burn from the inside. You watch your skin blister as it melts away. Or you die loud. Cut a line, drop a wrench, let it spill. You don’t even need a spark, do you boy? Boom! Burn from the outside.” Andor is being poetic again. Gerrara is talking about rhydonium, but he’s also talking about something more universal.

To Gerrara, rhydonium is the purest distillation of an abstract concept of revolution, “the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air.” He breathes it in. “That itch, that burn, you feel how badly she wants to explode?” he teases Wilmon. Gerrera has never set foot on Ghorman, but he arguably understands the situation as well as Rael or Meero. It doesn’t matter whether the planet burns from the inside or the outside; either way, the planet still burns. It is a maddening, horrifying thought.

Then again, as Gerrera acknowledges, “revolution is not for the sane.” If it’s a choice between those people who can do these things and still look at themselves in the mirror and those who can’t, it’s no choice at all.