Star Wars spinoff ‘Andor’ returns with a vengeance (Chapter 1: Ep. 1-3)

Andor returns with three new entries—titled “One Year Later,” “Sagrona Teema,” and “Harvest”—which arrive nearly three years after the series’ initial bow on Disney+. It remains, for the most part, excellent, save for an extended subplot that follows title character Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on a Rebel mission that proves repetitive and inconsequential. It’s the first time the series has dropped the ball, presenting a tonal detour more closely aligned to Disney’s other Star Wars output: it’s quippy and action-packed, but lacks all momentum. The biggest strength of season one was that it felt like the Mouse House wasn’t really involved (this turned out to be true; showrunner Tony Gilroy noted minimal studio oversight). Thankfully, this problem is temporary—it’s resolved by the end of the second episode—and it does little to dull the other three major subplots, which barely skip a beat and maintain the series’ signature potency.

The show picks up a year after season one, which concluded with Cassian offering to join the Rebellion—despite its two-faced ringleader, the accelerationist Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), trying to kill him out of self-preservation. Once a rogue on his own path, Cassian is now a revered spy deeply embedded within the evil Empire, and posing as a test pilot for a brand-new TIE Fighter. With the Rebellion still in its infancy, they need all the equipment and information they can gather, so getting their hands on new technology remains paramount. There’s just one problem: Cassian has no idea how to fly this advanced new attack ship, leading to him slipping and sliding his way out of a hangar while under fire from Stormtroopers.

The show’s new action-comedy tone is welcome, especially since it follows a quieter beat during which Cassian doles out much-needed advice to a novice turncoat, who has trouble seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. “You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them,” he assures her. “You’re coming home to yourself.” He seems to have taken the poetic musings of “The Trail of Political Consciousness,” the political manifesto penned by his late comrade Nemik in season one, to heart. However, what follows is the first real instance of Andor spinning its wheels.

While handing off the TIE Fighter to another pilot, Cassian is captured by a splinter Rebel faction who don’t believe he’s part of the Rebellion. But rather than having to use his wit or skill to get out of this situation, Cassian ends up a passive prisoner for nearly two whole episodes, as we watch this unknown crop of plain new characters bicker amongst themselves—a seeming gesture towards the idea of leftist infighting, but without any sense of their political ideologies or allegiances. It becomes quite irritating after a while. However, this initial chapter remains effective regardless, proving we’re in safe hands.

Written by Gilroy and directed by Ariel Kleiman, the first three episodes maintain a thundering intensity that’s only occasionally interrupted by Cassian’s subplot. Despite the time-jump, most other characters’ stories feel as if they pick up right where they left off—or at least, with their dangling threads taking center stage.

We rejoin the four supporting players who absconded with Cassian—from their occupied home world Ferrix—in hiding on the farming outpost Mina-Rau, where they work under secret identities. Cassian’s best friend Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) has found himself a local woman to love. His comrade, the young mechanic Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier)—whose father was tortured to death by the Empire—is in the throes of young romance too, but he knows his happiness is temporary. Meanwhile, Cassian’s former flame, the tech smuggler Bix (Adria Arjona), has a much tougher time adjusting to this wide-open landscape, with its floating grain silos and endless fields of wheat. She was similarly tortured near the end of last season, and still has vivid nightmares, though by the end of this season’s first chapter, her skirmish with a particularly slimy villain allows her to assert more control over her trauma. And of course, Cassian’s loyal short-stack droid B2EMO (Dave Chapman) waits innocently and eagerly for his return.

However, as idyllic as the quartet’s hiding spot might seem, their refuge turns on its head when Mina-Rau becomes the target of a sudden audit by imperial inspectors, laying bare the show’s updated (and surprisingly explicit) political allegories. Without disguising itself through metaphor or obfuscating language, this subplot becomes about the Ferrix characters’ “illegal” status in lieu of proper work visas, leaving them vulnerable and exposed to fascist jackboots, even though undocumented workers form the backbone of the local economy. It’s a very direct echo of contemporary U.S. immigration issues, but it only announces itself insomuch as it’s the most immediately relevant dramatic hurdle for characters on the run from the encroaching Empire. It’s a wonder that Star Wars hasn’t used such a plot device sooner, but maybe that’s for the best. Gilroy and Kleiman don’t simply present this and other political parallels as is. Rather, they make them feel intrinsically entwined with the character drama, imbuing each unfolding scenario with electric urgency in the process.

The show’s politics are perhaps no more overt than in its Empire segments. In a secret boardroom in the mountains, we’re re-introduced to not only rising, stone-faced security officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and her supervisor Major Partagaaz (Anton Lesser), but to the raspy-voiced Rogue One villain Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), who lays out the Emperor’s scheme for an upcoming occupation, and its economic outcomes, with brutal frankness. The Empire has never played coy about its intentions, but Andor season two presents its desires and modus operandi in starkly realistic hues. In order to draft plans to invade the resource-rich planet Ghorman, Krennic employs a pair of propaganda ministers to demonize and dehumanize the entire population—a jaw-dropping look at banal, Nazi-esque bureaucracy, which the franchise has never really seen thus far. Star Wars may be fantastical space opera, but Andor season two makes the shadow of the real world unavoidable. These don’t just extend to historical allusions, but to contemporary geopolitics too; to assist Krennic’s plan, Dedra floats the idea of supporting a destabilizing insurgency—a method oft-employed by the CIA.

Even the show’s marginally more escapist subplot—the lavish wedding hosted by imperial senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly)—is immersed in political intrigue. Last season, in order to keep funding the Rebels under the table, Mothma’s only option to push back against the Empire’s suffocating financial constraints was to make a deal with a devilish galactic thug, Davo Sculdun (Richard Dillane). Mothma would have her cash flow, but she would have to betroth her teenage daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) to Sculdun’s son, in the child marriage traditions of their home planet Chandrila. It’s the ultimate moral compromise, and one we still see Mothma wrestling with when the season begins, during day one of a three-day ceremony.

As Mothma welcomes guests to the lush mountain mansion she shares with Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie), her distant husband, the potential for things to go awry builds slowly but surely, as characters are introduced and re-introduced in lengthy, unbroken takes. Mothma’s Rebel cousin Vel (Faye Marsay) is present, albeit without her partner Cinta (Varada Sethu), who seems to have chosen the Rebellion over their romance. However, the coded way in which the cousins discuss Cinta makes it seem as though a queer couple might not have been welcomed by the planet’s elders to begin with. Chandrilan culture may have a robust history—it feels detailed, and richly formed—but its stiff-upper-lip façade conceals a certain rigidity.

Also in attendance are Luthen and his assistant Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau), Mothma’s Rebel contacts, who moonlight as antique dealers and arrive as Sculdun’s guests. While they pretend to work and frolic, putting on their signature fake smiles, their real worry is Cassian’s lack of mission updates. This is the only subplot that remotely benefits from Cassian’s haphazard story, because it forces Luthen, Kleya and Mothma to speak in subdued whispers amidst the opulent bombast. Watching them waltz between their Rebel and socialite modes in crowded banquet halls is a wonder. Complicating matters further is the fact that Mothma’s childhood friend Tay Kolma (Ben Miles), the Chandrilan banker who facilitated her deal with Sculdun, has fallen on hard times, and beings delivering veiled threats of extortion, putting Mothma and Luthen’s secret dealings at risk.

The upper-class snobbery of these party scenes takes on a Victorian tone. It’s repressive, not only of honest emotions—Mothma is practically bursting at the seams to confess to her daughter, and to protect her from the kind of sham marriage she now has—but of cloak-and-dagger conspiracy against the Empire, which comes ever so close to being exposed. Each time the show cuts back to Chandrila, it builds in tension, thanks in no small part to a propulsive, diegetic techno track at the wedding reception, which yields devastating contrast (with its tongue-in-cheek chants of “Niamos!”—the space Miami where Cassian was arrested). All the while, O'Reilly and Skarsgård deliver a masterclass in communicating through subtext. They have entire conversations where the words they use are distinctly ordinary, but the subject they discuss is the deadly lengths they might be forced to go to, in order to protect the Rebellion.

No one ever mentions the moral depths to which they’ll have to sink, but the show makes it crystal clear, in ways you can’t help but feel within your gut. The actors’ glimpses and glances do all the talking: will Mothma sanction killing her lifelong friend? This subplot’s closing images, with Kolma being chauffeured away from the wedding by a driver he doesn’t recognize—none other than Cinta in disguise—are wordless, but speak volumes. Vel, who hasn’t seen her for some time, briefly catches Cinta’s gaze as she heads off for what seems like another deadly mission, where she might further lose her soul. Meanwhile, Mothma heads back to the party to lose herself in dance. Her body language seems liberated, but to anyone who knows the details of what’s unfolding around her, it can’t help but feel like desperate flailing, as the camera circles around her, trapping her in a seedy world of moral compromise—one partially of her own making.

And that’s that! Surely I’m not missing anything, so tune in next week for…

Okay. We have to talk about Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), the world’s most pathetic imperial underling, who you can’t help but root for. He still tailors his uniform collars to be a tad  too high, and his once haughty reverence for his position in the Empire now applies to his lowly managerial job at the Bureau of Standards. He also appears to have “gotten the girl,” in that his obsession with (and subsequent rescue of) Dedra last season has led to them living together. They’re clearly in a relationship of some sort, and he even introduces her to his comically overbearing mother (Kathryn Hunter), in the messiest and most awkward dinner scene since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Like Cassian’s conundrum, this Syril subplot doesn’t have much to do with the goings-on elsewhere—other than it featuring Dedra, who mulls over whether she wants to head up the Ghorman occupation. Where Cassian’s detour serves to remove him from the spotlight—returning him to it heroically, but just in time to witness a personal tragedy—Syril’s story keeps him front and center. Like Cassian, he’s a passive observer, only it isn’t a problem since he’s rendered inert by a shockingly funny domestic scenario, involving the two strong-willed women in his life inevitably butting heads.

How Syril will factor into season two remains to be seen, but knowing where he stands emotionally—alongside a woman who sees his worth, even if she barely smiles or shows her appreciation—is a much-needed update. After all, there’s no examining the Empire without inspecting the bottom rungs of its ladder, and taking a closer look at the kind of insecure, belligerent losers who grease the wheels of fascism to keep them turning.