This post contains spoilers for Episodes Four through Six of Andor Season Two, now streaming on Disney+.
Forest Whitaker makes his first appearance of the season as our old friend Saw Gerrera in this week’s trio of episodes. He is as paranoid as usual, but, like the saying goes, is it paranoia if they — in this case, a member of his own resistance cell — are out to get you? Yet in the midst of his usual erratic, intimidating behavior(*), there’s also a bit of the romantic. As he’s reminiscing about his late sister (who appeared with him in animated form in the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons) with Wilmon, he realizes he sounds insane. But he insists, “Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us. Unloved, hunted, cannon fodder. We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back. And yet, here we are.”
(*) Last week, we saw Cassian stuck on Yavin, which will eventually be the home of the Rebel Alliance circa the original Star Wars. This time, Saw is hanging out on D’Qar, which is where the Resistance will be headquartered in The Force Awakens.
Saw is right about himself, at least, as well as Cassian, since we know how things go for each of them in Rogue One. For Saw, for Luthen, for Cassian, and for the rebellion’s other true believers, dying will be worth the sacrifice. Though a notable character, Cinta, dies this week in service of the cause, this season’s second arc is largely about other sacrifices that people have to make on behalf of the causes they believe in.
While there’s some material on Coruscant(*) and at Sculdun’s fancy estate, most of the action is centered on Ghorman, which became the target of Director Krennic at last week’s Wannsee Conference-style gathering of Imperial stooges. Different spies wind up embedded on the planet at different points, including Cassian, Vel, Cinta, and… Syril Karn?
(*) In one of those scenes, Mon Mothma and Perrin run into Senator Bail Organa, who looks a lot different than he did in the prequels, Rogue One, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, because Benjamin Bratt has stepped in for Jimmy Smits in the role. Given that Smits has talked often about how much he loves playing Bail, perhaps this was a scheduling conflict? But if you remember the period in the Nineties and Aughts where Smits and Bratt seemed to be competing for the same roles because Hollywood didn’t have the imagination to make use of both of them, it’s a bit funny that they would eventually wind up sharing the same role in an iconic franchise.
Yes, in the year that’s passed since the season’s opening arc, Syril has settled into a job on Ghorman, much to his mother’s dismay. At first, when he tries to dismiss her prejudiced comments about the local population — much of it just parroting the bigoted rhetoric we see throughout the arc on various Imperial news channels (including the jauntily racist Good Morning, Coruscant) — it seems as if his consciousness has been raised while living among these people. Instead, it turns out that he’s working as a double agent on behalf of Dedra, befriending the local resistance to try to encourage them to take bolder actions. Syril, who naively believes in the Empire as a force for good, thinks he is helping his girlfriend hunt for outside agitators within the Ghorman resistance. He has no idea that she’s using him to implement Krennic’s plan to nudge the resistance into giving the Empire an excuse to do whatever it wants to the planet and its population. (As Mon Mothma puts it after hearing more anti-Ghorman rhetoric: “Are we finding criminals, or making them?”)
At one point, Syril asks Dedra, “If I say this is the greatest day of my life, does it spoil everything?”(*) It would be almost endearing if we didn’t know what Dedra and Krennic’s endgame is here. Instead, Syril has spent more than a year of his life running what he doesn’t realize is a false flag operation, and has been lied to repeatedly by the woman he loves. He has become an excellent spy — if not at the level of his nemesis Cassian, then at least good enough to fool the Ghorman leadership — but the fact that Dedra has to lie to him about what he’s really doing tells you all you need to know about how he would react to the truth.
(*) Dedra’s boss, Major Partagaz, would not approve of Syril’s giddiness. When an underling at the ISB acts too excited about a task, he witheringly says, “It’s an assignment. Calibrate your enthusiasm.” He’s old enough to have worked a long time in the old Republic; to him, this is work, not a sacred cause.
Cassian pays a visit to the planet himself to check out the Ghorman leadership, including Enza and her father Rylanz(*), and even takes a page out of Luthen’s playbook by disguising himself as a well-to-do dandy named Varian Skye. As he will later tell Bix, “I was very, very pretty!” But the trip means more time away from Bix, whose psyche remains incredibly fragile after the back-to-back traumas of being tortured by Dr. Gorst and sexually assaulted by Lt. Krole. They are hiding out on Coruscant at the moment, and Bix has become erratic enough that Luthen is beginning to worry that she, like Mon Mothma’s friend Tay, will need to be eliminated before she exposes the whole operation. From Luthen’s perspective, it’s a not-unreasonable fear. From Cassian’s, it’s a reminder of why he was so reluctant to team up with the guy in the first place, and a reason to question his desire to stay in the rebellion. Eventually, he comes up with a better, if brutal in its own way, solution to the problem, by helping Dedra break into Gorst’s office to torture him with his own machines, then cover their tracks by blowing up the building with him inside.
Cassian (Luna) and Bix (Arjona) on the move.
Lucasfilm Ltd™
(*) The only way the Ghormans could seem more transparently French would be if all of them were wearing red-and-black-striped shirts and black berets, and carrying stale baguettes. Star Wars hasn’t always been subtle about the parallels between the Empire and the Nazis, but the clothes and accents of the Ghormans make it impossible to see them as anything but the French resistance during the occupation.
In addition to being at odds over Bix, Cassian and Luthen also strongly disagree over what to do about Ghorman. Cassian sees Enza and the others as in wildly over their heads, and can tell that anything they do will blow up in their faces. Luthen not only doesn’t care, but almost seems to be eager for that possibility. When Cassian asks what happens if this all goes down in flames, Luthen replies, “It will burn… very brightly.” He is prepared to kill Bix if it will help the cause. Being willing to sacrifice an entire planet for the same reason is only a difference in scale, not kind. As he told Lonni(*) last season (in a speech written by Beau Willimon, who’s back on scripting duties for these episodes), he had to give up all the good and noble parts of himself to get this job done.
(*) Are Lonni and Dedra’s former assistant Heert a couple? It’s left ambiguous, but there are at least hints of something between them beyond work.
Despite Cassian’s negative assessment, Luthen sets up an operation on Ghorman, sending Vel in, and adding Cinta to the mission on Vel’s insistence. The two of them have had to be separated for the better part of years because of Luthen’s orders, because they believe in the cause and reluctantly believe in him as the one who can make it happen. But it turns out to be a reunion Vel will regret, since Cinta dies when the operation goes awry, killed by a stray blaster shot meant for someone else. It’s the most frustrating part of any of these episodes, because it feels like the whole season has wasted Cinta, and because she dies in perhaps the most clichéd item in the Kill Your Gays handbook. (Among many other places, this was used to murder queer female characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Person of Interest, and The 100.)
The Ghorman mission plays out in parallel with a smaller operation being run by Luthen and his assistant Kleya, who have to retrieve the bug they left on one of the art pieces Luthen sold Sculdun. Kleya has risen in prominence this season, and at times seems even colder and more ruthless than her mentor. Here, she’s able to bully Lonni into providing cover for her while Sculdun gives Krennic and several other Imperial muckety-mucks a tour of his collection. It’s an effective suspense set piece, and also a relief to see something go right, since even the success of the Ghorman mission comes at the cost of playing right into Dedra’s hands.
By the end of the arc, Vel has lost her lover, Syril has set in motion events he can’t understand or control, and Bix has committed murder — like Luthen, she has adopted the monstrous tactics of her enemy as the only way to fight them. At Saw’s base, we see the early stages of the Rebel Alliance’s fleet, with several X-wing fighters at hand. But the idealistic and seemingly noble Alliance that Luke and Han join in Star Wars was built on a lot of blood, and on a lot of tarnished souls. Even the characters who survive this series won’t be coming out of it clean, will they?
