Season 2 of Andor’s first of four chapters, episodes 1 through 3, picks up a year after the events of season 1 and starts sprinting. It’s a funnier-than-I-expected opening to season 2 as well. Like the first season did so well, Andor is still focusing on the small things. While the big picture of the rebellion is never far out of mind, this first chapter takes great pains to highlight the personal costs of taking on the Empire with great characters, some truly impressive filmmaking, and one of the best dance parties Star Wars has ever seen.
There’s a scene almost right off the bat between Andor and an Imperial technician who’s helping him steal an experimental new TIE fighter. She’s nervous, scared, wondering if the risk she’s taking is even worth it, but Cassian is there to help talk her through it. He says all the right things, clearly drawing on experience he’s had in the year since we last saw him. It’s a perfect way to immediately show his growth.
But the most important part of this conversation is when the tech talks about how she’d had an okay life at this facility. She had fun. It’s like she feels guilty about ever being happy as a part of the Empire and she’s not sure how to deal with it. This is a small conversation about a very small thing, but it says so much about this first chapter of Andor season 2, and it’s really quite something that they were able to do so much so efficiently in these opening moments.
There’s a feeling throughout these first 3 episodes that any sense of normalcy or comfort is going away. The way the team behind Andor sets out to accomplish that is really savvy. This season is written and edited so well, and particularly in these first 3 episodes, Andor is built in such a way that very directly contrasts the realities of managing a rebellion with continuing to live in the Empire while you do it. It’s a fascinating little tight rope act, and one that the writers and directors almost flawlessly pull off. Even in the opening sequence, we see him very capably tending to this would-be rebel helping him, but immediately he’s back in over his head when he narrowly escapes in a ship he can barely fly.
Another great example of this arrives in episode 1. While Cassian is stuck on a forest planet with a group of rebels that don’t trust him and can’t even get on the same page with each other, we’re taken to a secret meeting of top Empire brass in a snowy, mountain top fortress. The way the episode jumps back and forth between these two scenes connects them in a really sneaky way. It’s edited quickly, almost like a montage, but these are two seemingly unrelated scenes being drawn together.
On the one hand, you see the uphill battle that the rebellion is facing, with factions fighting for the same cause but killing each other because of distrust. This crew holding Andor hostage is just a bunch of selfish idiots – but, meanwhile, the Empire is quite casually plotting the destruction of an entire planet over coffee and canapes at a corporate retreat. These moments get lumped together as effectively one scene, and that one scene isn’t about what the rebellion or the Empire are up to separately. It’s a scene about how far apart the two sides are in their plans and how they get executed. While the Empire can get the ISB and the smear-campaign-pitching Ministry of Enlightenment douchebags marching in lockstep, the rebellion is literally starving in the mud, fighting each other while stranded on a planet full of beasts. They are not playing on the same level.
It’s also a scene that proves just how well Andor is put together. Smart and efficient filmmaking like this pops up throughout this series to subtly drive home the themes while you’re not even looking.
I will say though, episode 2 gets a little long where Cassian’s part of the plot is concerned. This band of misfits in the jungle are just too meatheaded to be interesting for as much time as we spend with them. They did their job very well in episode 1, but I don’t know that I needed the Star Wars version of rock, paper, scissors to play such a big role in Andor’s escape. It’s another vote in favor of the release schedule for season 2, though. I would’ve been a little more critical of episode 2 if I had to wait a whole week to see episode 3.
Thankfully this first batch of episodes also features the galaxy’s most intriguing character, Mon Mothma. The fact that a major plot point of season 1 involved the senator agreeing to arrange the marriage of her daughter to a mobster’s son in order to finance the rebellion was one of the reasons I fell so hard for this show.
Season 2 uses that wedding on Chandrila to do a couple of very cool things. It’s already incredible that Mon sending her daughter to marry into a shady financier’s family plays such an enormous role in the organization of this rebellion. But now her childhood friend and banking guru Tay has lost some money and gotten divorced, which in turn is causing him to make uncomfortable waves for Mon and Luthen Rael’s plans.
Just to say that again, because it’s wild: A dude’s wife leaving him has enormous implications for the future of the rebellion. Forget teaching a kid in the desert how to use a light saber, this is the kind of fascinating butterfly-effect stuff that the second season of Andor is doubling down on in all the right ways. That something as tiny and personal as a marriage falling apart is a real threat to these early days of the rebellion is such a fun thread to pull on.
More than Chandrillan divorce – and there’s always one guy who just got divorced at a wedding – the four-day extravaganza at the Mothma estate highlights that contrast that’s painted so well early in this season. Mon Mothma has always been obliged to play nice in the Senate and at home, while secretly funding the rebellion. Placing all of her anxiety around the rebellion, including the unexpected arrival of Stellan Skarsgaard’s Luthen Rael, against the backdrop of such a traditional event shows how determined the rest of her world is to carry on as though nothing is amiss and the Empire isn’t capable of blowing up a whole planet for a mineral.
By the time the wedding is over, Tay’s been dealt with in the only way Luthen knows how to deal with loose ends, and Mon is doing shots – shots that she has very much earned, and dance-partying her way through some pretty boss EDM. Her tragedy is juxtaposed with a fresh and terrible loss for Cassian. Not only does Mon have to grin and bear it through an upper-class tradition, that contrast is used to invade Cassian’s life as well. It’s another sequence like cross-cutting the jungle meatheads and the Empire planning to strip-mine Ghorman. It creates a single story out of two otherwise unconnected threads.
The real craft of Andor season 2 is in these moments, because they corral disparate parts of the rebellion into the whole. Mon Mothma and Cassian Andor have not met. Their only connection is that they both know Luthen Rael, but quite independently of each other. Here at the end of episode 3 though, they’re in the same place thanks to the absurdly clever editing of that house music.
Meanwhile, on the antagonist’s side of the spectrum, the two main villains from season 1 are embroiled in a domestic chamber piece. Dedra Meero and Syril Karn squaring off against Syril’s mother, who, by the way, I believe to be the second or third best character in this entire show, is an incredible scene. It’s written with some of the most passive-aggressive dialogue humankind has ever seen. The three performances have at least a few layers of awkward subtext at play and, beyond any of that, we get more of what makes this first chapter great – the attempt at normalcy in the midst of rebellion.
Taking a relationship to the “meet the parent” phase is a big and stupidly normal step for two ambitious, true-believer imperial agents like Dedra and Syril. There’s an incongruity to it that’s both really funny and really creepy. Seeing Syril more or less trade one mom for another is a wild place for this series to go, but at the same time, it’s exactly the kind of thing that made the first season so intriguing – and that season 2 is highlighting even more effectively.
And while I was happy to see Bix again, her peaceful bit of respite harvesting grain with Brasso and Wilmon interrupted by an imperial audit is the most on-the-nose part of chapter 1. The officers are so blatantly slimy and their tactics so familiar, the storyline just didn’t have nearly as much to offer as the others. I certainly preferred the farmers on that planet to the meatheads in the jungle, but to be fair that’s a pretty low bar to clear.
