Star Wars Andor Season 2: A Masterpiece Under Pressure (ESSAY SCRIPT) (Patreon)

I earnestly think this is some of my best essay writing I've ever done and I wanted to share it ASAP because it's going to take me a while to film this video. I'm so excited to hear your thoughts <3
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Star Wars: Andor Season 2—I’ve been waiting for this. Season 1 wasn’t just some of the most gripping Star Wars has ever been; it was a call to arms. It laid bare the machinery of fascism, how it grinds people down, strips away community, and turns rebellion into survival. But more than that, it showed that the spark of revolution isn’t born from ideology alone—it’s born from each other. It was a demand for collective action that burned with clarity and purpose. If Season 1 was about the spark, Season 2 was about the fire—the fight to stay lit as authoritarianism’s grip tightens. This time, the lens turned inward, exposing fractures in revolutionary movements, the moral costs of rebellion, and the slow, grinding erosion of solidarity – and how we need to reach for each other especially when its hardest. It’s one of the best-written, most insightful shows on TV—and maybe one of its most necessary.

Because Andor Season 2 arrives in a different world. As Marva said: the darkness is now here, and it wants to stay. In a world where the U.S. deports its own citizens to El Salvador, where immigrants are being rounded up, where trans people are being pushed to the margins, where speaking out against genocide gets you labeled an enemy of the state, Andor’s reflection felt disturbingly sharp. Art won’t start a revolution - especially art by megacorprations like Disney - but it can teach, it can imagine new futures, and it can transform rage and hope into something real. And I needed that fire—needed it in a world where a better future worth fighting for feels like it's slipping away.

Showrunner Tony Gilroy even called Season 2 “the most important thing he’ll ever get to do.” And maybe it is. But something about this season felt... off. The flame was there, but it flickered. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the world. Or maybe we’ve been dreaming the wrong dream, talking about the wrong things. Andor understands fascism—but does it understand why we keep cycling back to it?

[INTRO]

To understand what works and what doesn’t with Season 2 of Andor, I think we need to reexamine what made Season 1 so fucking amazing. Every episode of Star Wars Andor Season 1 left me wanting to punch a Nazi square in the face. I mean, I always want to punch a Nazi, but Andor made me feel it in my bones. Season 1 exposed the machinery of fascism—how it grinds people down, strips away community, and turns us into cogs. But more importantly—and what set it apart from so many other portrayals of fascism in mainstream fiction—was how it portrayed what the shape of resistance looks like.

Ferrix, the mining planet from the opening episodes, wasn’t just a setting—it was a blueprint for working-class solidarity. We see how a community is willing to protect and trust their own, even black sheeps like Cassian himself. Gloves hung on walls—tools of labor that anyone could use, but no one dared to steal. Ferrix symbolized a shared identity rooted in history and mutual trust, something fascism seeks to destroy. Andor set up this culture of community to show us us that the most insidious evil of fascism isn’t jackboots and overt violence; it’s the slow erosion of culture, the stripping away of identity until nothing's left but obedience.

We saw this even more starkly in the Aldhani arc. The Empire lured the indigenous people away from sacred pilgrimages, even after building a base on stolen ground. Atomization became its weapon—disconnecting people from shared history and community to make resistance less likely, all while extracting their labor, their resources, and even their bodies—hinted at through mentions of "comfort women" and implications of sex trafficking.

Characters like Syril Karn also showcases what happens when it fully cuts people off from culture and identity and replaces it only with the facist state. Syril wasn’t some Imperial officer—we meet him as a petty rent-a-cop clinging to scraps of power. But that’s the point: fascism doesn’t just recruit the powerful; it feeds on the disempowered, desperate for validation. Raised under his mother’s constant emasculation and growing up in a planet like Corusant cut off from any sense of community, Karn latched onto the hollow image of a "hero," believing that enforcing Imperial order would give his life meaning. His obsession with Dedra Meero underscored that entitlement—the belief that, as a man, he was owed something, typically women, for his loyalty to the state. It’s a glimpse into the often patriarchal underpinnings of fascism seen in Italy, Germany, even America today. His sense of masculinity was twisted into a weapon of control, built to serve a machine that saw him as just another cog, ready to be discarded the moment he stopped being useful.

Dedra Meero, on the other hand, represented the banality of evil. In the ISB, she thrived off competition, clawing her way up through bureaucratic backstabbing while also coldly hunting down any resistance to fascism. Fascism doesn’t just crush its enemies; it pits its own agents against each other. Her ruthlessness wasn’t exceptional; it was the system working as designed—fascism breeds isolation, keeping people too busy fighting amongst themselves for power to question the machine of oppression they serve.

But nowhere was this clearer than in one of the most chiling and best arcs ever depicted in science fiction: Narkina 5. The Narkina 5 prison wasn’t just a cage—it was a factory of dehumanization. Prisoners became literal cogs, making even more literal cogs for the Death Star—a machine of genocide. They were forced into labor, cut off from all conext or culture or identity and pitted against each other in little groups in order to keep them fractured and desperately working to avoid pain. Yet, Narkina 5 showed us how solidarity can bloom even here—through the finding of collective identity through shared class struggle. Kino Loy’s realization that they would never be freed from their prison of endless labour—that they were merely resources to be exploited and disposed of—sparked an uprising by those who realized that their enemies weren’t each other, but their captors holding them it place. Andor captured the truth that fascism only appears strong when it’s unchallenged. The moment there’s unity, it panics. Its power is brittle, built on isolation and fear. Andor didn’t just tell us that solidarity is possible, even under the Empire's boot—it showed us.

And it all culminated in the season finale back on Ferrix. Most people believe Marva’s speech was just a call to arms against the Empire. But what made it so powerful was that it was rooted deeply in her sense of community - her desire to be remembered and held by her community and her sense that it was being taken away by the Empire because people had grown complacent. She demanded her community, and for us, to wake up and fight back before everything that makes us human - connection to each other - was taken away to be used by a system that wants nothing but its own self-continuance. And we saw this same arc mirrored in Cassian’s journey the season—from sole self-preservation to solidarity. His story a blueprint for how consciousness-raising and resistance are born.

Most people argue that Andor worked because it was the least Star Wars property ever - way from your glup shittos and jedi knights and force weildings. But I would argue that Andor actually gains a lot of its power SPECIFICALLY because it built on Star Wars’ original concept of using the Empire’s allegorical nature to reflect real-world authoritarianism. Umberto Eco wrote in Ur-Fascism that fascism is a game played in many forms—it mutates, adapts, but remains recognizable. The Empire isn’t a one-to-one metaphor for any single regime; it’s an amalgamation, borrowing from multiple histories, just as Eco described. That nebulousness isn’t a flaw—it’s what makes Star Wars so powerful.

That’s why Lucas evoked both Nazi Germany and the Vietnam War in the Original Trilogy—cue that clip you’ve probably seen a billion times - the Empire wasn’t just Nazis; it was American imperialism too. Even the prequels, for all their flaws, captured this with the Republic’s fall, paralleling real-world moments like the Patriot Act with Palpatine’s attempts to grab more executive power. Hell, Anakin literally turns to the camera and quotes George Bush. Yeah, STar Wars was never political. But by doing so this, it allows us watching to see the threads that connect these different systems, even if on their surface we would like to think they’re drastically different - that America is so far from the Nazis. Instead, by pulling from and amagamating this disparate sources, we can see how these systems all intermingle and fall into each other. 

But DOES makes Andor unique within Star Wars is that George Lucas often employed what historian Chris Kempshall calls a “pop history” understanding of politics - pulling from more broad historical pastiches and well know symbols. Andor, instead, often went much more specific. It didn’t just gesture at broader histories of authoriatriam and imperialism like fascist Italy, Nazi German, Imperal Japan, authoritarian Russia or Roman imperalism; it pulled directly from history - both authoritarian and revolutionary - like the Aldhani heist echoing the Bolsheviks' 1907 bank robbery to fund the Russian Revolution. It also pulled specfiically from art in this realm - such as nodded to German Expressionist silent film Metropolis which Star Wars has pulled from before with things like C-3PO, but more directly reflecting the films imagery of worker control and rebellion to underscore the themes of class struggle. More subtly, also took full advantage of the film medium. Andor echoed the work of Soviet filmmaker and bisexual icon Sergei Eisenstein, who revolutionized film editing as a tool for political expression. Unlike typical Hollywood filmmaking—which often uses invisible cuts to make its world feel seamless and unchallenged, reinforcing its ideologies without question or, like Lucas often does, uses them stylistically for asethetics without direct deeper intent —Eisenstein believed editing should be noticeable, even jarring, to help cause the viewer to engage deeper in the work. He saw editing as a way to create synthesis between conflicting ideas between cuts and in contracting images, often uses this in his work to highlight the power of collective struggle and communal action instead of the lone hero narrative of most Western film. Andor did this in countless ways, but one of the most powerful was how often it lingered—letting the edit hold on the bodies of those killed during the Narkina 5 prison break or the Ferrix riot. It forced us to sit with the cost of both fascism and resistance. Most shows would’ve cut away, turning nameless deaths into background noise for a hero’s arc. Andor didn’t let us look away. Even its art design highlighted this with Coruscant’s architecture evoking fascist utopian art—designed to make individuals feel small against the eternal state. And as opposed to Star Wars more broad archetypes, Andor’s characters were richly layered, their actions contextualized and complex, giving them subtext and interpretability while still allowing us to understand their interiority. Andor gave Star Wars far more specificity to its writing and worldbuilding then most of Star Wars more broad operatic style. 

That’s why Andor felt like a breath of fresh air in Disney’s Star Wars era especially. Where Lucas’s work baked its politics right in—sometimes awkwardly but always intentionally—Disney’s live-action projects have tried to sand off their edges to be an apolitical mass marketable brand that doesn’t have people think deeply about what its symbolism stands for - leaving it feeling hollow and empty. By the way, did you know there’s a whole store at Disneyland just for Empire merch? You too can have your very own fascist apparel—perfect for shouting “Long live the Empire!”…ironically, of course.

And don’t even get me started on when Disney Star Wars actively tries to be political, because it’s often embarrassingly bad—like The Mandalorian Season 3, where Jack Black, a man so metal that he ended his heavy metal band when his bandmate made an offhanded joke about wanting a fascist authoritarian dead -This machine kills fascists...but only after consulting its PR team apparently - plays a former Imperial who is free due to a Project Paperclip-style New Republic amnesty program, just chilling as the leader of a planet like he didn’t commit atrocities. The show has Mando investigate why the planets droid labor force is rebelling—only to reveal it’s not because of oppression, but some aggrieved Doc Brown Separatist sabotage. The show makes it clear the droids are happy to serve as slaves—literal Proletariat-loves-their-chains propaganda. But hey, at least Baby Yoda got to chill with Lizzo. I’m sure that won’t age terribly.

But Disney keeps choking on its apolitical aspirations because in a world where political polarization is only deepening and real-world fascism in America is actively working to atomize and divide us, the popularity and nebulous politics of Star Wars has created a perfect culture war battleground. The franchise’s surface-level tokenism threatens the myth of white Western masculine heroism that characters like Luke Skywalker can represent—sparking backlash from toxic sectors against BIPOC actors, queer people and women, particularly BIPOC women, who appear in protagonist positions in the francise. Disney, in turn, rarely supports these actors during harassment campaigns, isntead often sidelining the characters or stories and relegates their narratives to tie-in media. The Acolyte, at least, dared to explore the Jedi's complicity in institutional rot by challenging their rigid binaries of the Force. It presented how the Jedi viewed flattened both queer collectives of Force-using women and Sith power-focused fascists as "Dark Side" needing to be feared purely for existing outside institutional control.The Jedi’s own horseshoe theory. It was an interesting show despite its storytelling flaws—flaws that deserved critique—but was demonized as "the worst show of all time," repeatedly often through disingenuous reasons or hyperfixation on its imperfections, the same flaws many of these same bad faith folks conveniently overlook when praising George Lucas's "visionary" prequel work.  I’d HIGHLY recommend by the way La’Ron Readus’s amazing video on the show. But that’s why Andor felt different. Andor Season 1 actually tried not just to say something—but to say it clearly. Its message was tight, effective, and sharp, refusing to be easily dismissed. 

But most importantly, Andor was ground-level Star Wars—a stripped-back look at the galaxy far, far away that removed the more fantastical elements like space wizards and destiny-driven "chosen ones." As much as I love my glug shittos, Andor wasn’t about grand prophecies or mystical bloodlines. It was about everyday people—the ones not written into the mythologies, the ones whose names don’t get sung in victory marches but are still remembered through a shared history and culture that we must fight to preserve, symbolized by Marva’s desire to have her ashes turned into a brick to support her community after she dies. It was about showing that resistance to oppression isn’t about waiting for some hero to rise out of the force or our collective unconscious to come save us - but instead takes collective struggle—people coming together, building solidarity through shared pain and identity, carving out space for real change. It was workers on the factory floor, rebels in the streets, communities rising up—not for prophecy or legacy, but because they reached out for each other and stood by each other. Season 1 reignited the franchise’s revolutionary spark, reminding us of what Star Wars can be when it stops chasing Baby Yoda plush sales and nostalgia-fueled cameos. It was about making us uncomfortable, forcing us to look at the machinery of empire and the real ways we fight it in a way that Star Wars never had. And that fire didn’t go out with the end of Season 1.

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When Andor was first conceived, Tony Gilroy planned for five full seasons—one for each in-universe year leading up to Rogue One. But after seeing how much work Season 1 took, he and his team realized five seasons would take up basically the rest of their careers. And hey, I’m all for years of Andor content, but considering it took five years just to make two, I get it. The man probably wants to go outside and touch grass for the first time in half a decade. So instead, they condensed each year into three-episode arcs for season 2, mirroring Season 1’s structure but with massive time skips in between. To make sure this worked, Gilroy and the writing staff mapped out the whole season first, then broke it into blocks, carefully writing the start and end of each arc to basically give the audience a puzzle at the start of each arc that naturally displays where each character is instead of just giving exposition of whats happened in-between. 

There are moments where this subtlety falters, but mostly it demands closer attention—like with Syril Karn, who in Block two suddenly is now living on the planet Gorhman posing as a sympathetic Bureau of Standards officer to infiltrate the local resistance. The show drops quiet cues—his awareness that he’s being watched without letting on, his chats with his mother that don’t quiet make sense with why he choose to leave, his slightly uncharacteristic empathy for the indigenous Gorhman population—before confirming his ISB mission outright, forcing you to look for the subtleties throughout every story arc.

Also, my favorite touch is how they display the time crads. Remember this absolute fucking legend from Ferrix? That’s the Ferrexian Time Grappler which is the most baller fucking job title ever. Every arc opens with the echo of his gong—Ferrix’s heartbeat still pulsing through the show. We never find out exactly what happened to Ferrix after the riot - though its implied that Ferrix was met with heavy reprisal from the Empire- but that sound, that rhythm, carries on through Cassian, Bix, Brasso, and Wilmon. It’s not just a time card. It’s a culture refusing to be erased.

But Season 2 itself opens with a quiet, devastating scene that distills Andor’s core: under fascism, reclaiming your sense of self is a radical act. Cassian, undercover to steal a TIE fighter, meets Imperial engineer Niya—someone terrified, conflicted, and surviving. She jokes with coworkers, flirts with pilots, clings to normalcy—but her fear betrays her. She’s part of something she doesn’t fully believe in, and that contradiction is eating her alive.

Niya won’t meet Cassian’s gaze—not just because she’s told not to, but because it’s easier not to see. She’s afraid of dying, yes—but also of losing the life she’s built within the machine. Cassian doesn’t judge. He just says, gently: “You’re coming home to yourself.” It’s the emotional thesis of the show. Fascism erases identity, reduces people to function. But choosing to look—to remember who you are—is where rebellion begins.

I’ve heard similar contradictions from friends inside the U.S. government: people just doing their jobs while watching policies strip away rights. That same dissonance—the comfort of routine masking complicity—lives in this scene. And all of it is made even sharper byLuke Hall’s amazing productiond design. The blue-orange glow of the TIE cockpit It’s never looked better, showcasing the asethetic beauty and yet emptiness of fascism. Even Michael Wilinson’s amazing costumes telsl a story. You can tell that every department was working to make sure every single detail informed and built the story. 

Then we jump into an action sequence as Cassian tries to escape with the TIE fighter that’s both thrilling and genuinely funny—a rarity in Andor Season 1 but classic Star Wars. Yet it still carries real weight. The TIEs and stormtroopers feel dangerous, not like the disposable cannon fodder of most of the rest of Star Wars like Rise of Skywalker. It’s grounded, visceral, and blends Star Wars humor with real stakes—leading into the season’s most divisive plots.

Cassian is mistaken for an Imperial pilot and captured by a splinter rebel cell—a disorganized, half-starved group that quickly descends into paranoia, bitter infighting, and ultimately, pointless violence. I get why a lot of people found this sequence frustrating—the rebels are infuriating idiots, the story goes on across two episodes, and Cassian mostly watches in silence. We even get them doing a ridiculous, posturing show-offy game of rock-paper-scissors. But that’s exactly what makes it so sharp. It’s a painfully honest depiction of what happens when leftist movements chase the aesthetics of revolution because it makes them feel strong without doing the hard, unglamorous work of building trust, resolving conflict, and staying accountable. Without that groundwork, all that’s left is chaos dressed up as radicalism.

I’ve seen it happen again and again—especially online—where leftist spaces fetishize the spectacle of revolution without doing the work to make it sustainable, humane, or inclusive. There’s a rush to condemnation, purity tests, and scapegoating, while real introspection—especially around marginalized voices—gets ignored. And that’s dangerous. When movements assume they're immune to bigotry—antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Muslim hate, transphobia, misogyny—they often recreate the very systems they claim to fight. I’ve been on the receiving end of it, attacked by fellow leftists just for speaking up about trans issues, made to feel like I was the problem. It isolates you from the very people you’re meant to be in solidarity with. . It’s exactly what this group of rebels embodies: flailing around with no cohesion, no solidarity, just rage and distrust.  Real organizing is messy because people are fucking complicated. Solidarity doesn’t come from posturing—it comes from listening, disagreeing, growing, and holding space for friction.

That’s why Andor nails this critique without falling into the usual Disney trap—portraying revolutionaries as too chaotic or extreme (looking at you, Flag Smashers) to justify working within the system as the only “reasonable” path. Too often, stories—from Marvel films to even recent episodes of Doctor Who allegorizing Palestinians in Gaza—frame resistance as dangerous if it steps beyond nonviolence, subtly implying that change must come through reformation within a system or not at all. Even when non-extremist anti-oppressive violence isn’t outright condemned, it’s often erased—leaving state-sanctioned mercy as the only imagined alternative.

Andor rejects that framing entirely. The Empire is not a flawed system to be reformed—it’s fascism, built to dominate. And the solution isn’t a lone hero or symbolic gesture. It’s real organizing. The Rebel Alliance—and the word alliance matters here—succeeded because it came from grassroots coalitions, built through communication, trust, and hard-earned solidarity across difference. That’s the work of revolution. Not just waving a blaster at stormtroopers, but building something collective, deliberate, and lasting.

The fact that this mess unfolds on Yavin—the future core of the Rebel Alliance—drives home how far real organizing has to go. It’s not a symbol of hope yet; it’s a reminder that revolution takes work. And that’s why Andor stands apart. The Yavin setting isn’t hollow fan service—it’s treated just like it does actual lived history. Andor uses canon not as empty, shallow surface level nostalgia references to get cheap emotions but as narrative weight, grounding familiar places in purpose, not spectacle. Every reference deepens and serves the story, not the brand.

Speaking of references, I love that Cassian’s contact on Yavin is named Porko—a nod to both STudio Gibbli’s Porco Rosso and red leader Porkins.  Gilroy also based the sequences on a drunken family argument between his son and his niece’s husband then cast them as rebel cell leaders. Because who says Andor doesn’t have a bunch of silly Star Wars shit in it? 

On Chandrila, Andor reveals how fascism seeps even into the lives of the elite—those insulated from its most violent harms but still shaped by its demands.  Mon Mothma arranges her daughter Leida’s marriage to fulfill a morally compromised deal last season, while Tay Kolma, Mon’s long-timeclose friend who is part of the money laundering scheme for the Rebellion, begins extorting her. Mon clings to the naive hope that she can simply pay him off and make it all go away. But Luthen bluntly reminds her that Tay is now a liability—a loose end that can’t be ignored. Mon refuses to acknowledge it, and Luthen’s sharp response, “How nice for you,” slices right through her privilege. Mon may be on the right side of history, but her wealth and status have kept her insulated from the brutal work of rebellion—something the extravagant wedding underscores.

That said, Perrin—who I’d written off as just a detached elitist in Season 1—gets a surprisingly humanizing moment. His speech about clinging to rare moments of joy reflects how his dissociation isn’t just privilege; it’s survival.  He’s a victim too, able to choose numbness because of his class but hollowed out by meaninglessness. His assumption that Mon is having an affair with Tay isn’t jealousy or possessiveness; it’s an acceptance of the life they lead - find feeling where you can get it. I’ve felt that myself these past few months—watching the constant whiplash of policies stripping away rights, the endless news cycles designed to keep you exhausted, just wanting to dissocate into the small things that still bring me joy. Fascism wants for us to go numb - to isolate. I frankly understand Perrin in a way I never did before.  

Mon’s struggle with Leida’s arranged marriage is one of the most devastating threads in Andor. Leida’s embrace of Chandrilla’s conservative traditions is a reaction to Mon’s absence, and Mon feels the weight of that deeply. She tries to connect, confessing her fear of becoming like her own mother—distant, numbing herself with wine at a wedding she doesn’t believe in. Mon knows exactly what she’s sending her daughter into: a gilded cage wrapped in patriarchal ritual. The ceremony makes it explicit—Perrin hands Leida’s new husband a knife, saying, “Do with it as you wish.” Mon offers Leida an out, a rare moment of open vulnerability. But Leida rejects her, and it’s gutting—not because Mon doesn’t care, but because the system has already shaped them both. Their relationship has been hollowed out by distance, duty, and the very structures Mon is trying to resist. In the end, she becomes the thing she feared—drunk, dancing, numb. A moment that lays bare the emotional toll of fighting fascism while still being trapped inside it.

And that’s where Luthen’s gift—a Chandi Merle—takes on deeper meaning. The artifact, stolen from Chandrilla thousands of years ago and now finally returned, isn’t just a symbol of cultural pride; it’s a reminder of colonial theft that existed long before the Empire.  It’s not just a token of cultural pride; it’s a reminder that oppression didn’t begin with the Empire. The systems Andor critiques—colonialism, patriarchy, control—are older, more entrenched. The show refuses to treat fascism as an exception; instead, it shows how domination can appear in tradition, culture, and other oppressive sytems.

Speaking of how fascism erases culture, let’s talk about Cereal Corn—our favorite little incel—and Dedra Meero. Cistern Karn has climbed the ranks at the Imperial Bureau of Standards, clinging to the illusion that he matters, spinning a fantasy where he’s a vital part of the machine instead of just another faceless cog.  The time skip suddenly reveals he’s in a relationship with Dedra—a jarring leap, considering the last time we saw them, he saved her during the Ferrix riot and she looked at him with pure, unfiltered contempt. Seriously, if anyone gave me that look, I’d update my will. Syril had repeatedly proven himself an incompetent dweeb with a hero complex, even stalking Dedra in an attempt to insert himself into her story—and she clearly resented that he ended up being the one to save her. Even Dedra’s actress, Denise Gough, begged Tony Gilroy not to pair them: “That’s the one thing I’m asking you,” she said. So yes, it’s a leap— one I can accept but wish we’d seen develop onscreen. As it stands, it risks making it feel like Syril’s creepy fantasy of “getting the girl” was rewarded, instead of being interrogated.

It perfectly captures their relationship: two people mimicking connection not out of affection, but out of purpose. It’s cold, transactional, and painfully hilarious during their awkward fondue dinner with Syril’s mother, Eedy Karn. Eedy isn’t just a bad mom—she feels like the Empire’s backup interrogation unit. Every line she throws at Syril is a dagger to his ego. Fascism demands its men embody dominance, and Syril, constantly belittled by his mother, clings to the Empire’s definition of masculinity. His obsession with proving himself a “real man” is exactly the kind of insecurity fascism exploits—weaponizing the need for validation into unwavering loyalty. I adore the moment when he flops onto the bed, desperate to escape her even for a second. It’s one of the funniest scenes in Star Wars—yes, even funnier than Babu Frik—and it was entirely improvised by Kyle Soller, with director Ariel Kleiman fighting to keep it in despite Tony Gilroy hating it in the dailies.

But beneath the comedy is something much darker. When Syril leaves the room, Dedra calmly lays out the terms of Eedy’s access to her son—how often she can see him, under what conditions—effectively negotiating custody. And Eedy agrees, even seems to respect her for it. That moment makes the relationship click: for both women, Syril isn’t a partner or a son—he’s something to control. Dedra, weakened by her failure on Ferrix and desperate to regain authority, seizes power in the one place she still can. Eedy, stripped of agency by age, class, and her conservative social role, channels her need for relevance into dominating her son’s life. It’s a familiar pattern: upper-middle-class conservative mothers molding their children not for the child’s sake, but to create the version of success they never achieved. None of them really care about each other—not in any real, human sense. They all function as parts in a machine, acting out the motions of affection while simply using each other. And you can see that hollowness etched into the apartment itself. Stark, immaculate, and cold—just four white rooms with no doors, no privacy, no identity. It’s not a home; it’s a vacuum, sealed off from memory. Architecture designed to erase, not to hold memory, place, or culture. To be functional, not to speak. 

Contrast that with the Yavin home Cassian and Bix share later in the season. Every object, every wall is alive with history—from Kenari and Ferrix, from their shared past. It’s not just a space—it’s a living archive, a place where memory resists being scrubbed away. If fascism is the ax that forgets, then places like Yavin are where memory takes root and refuses to die.

Eedy calls the sterile apartment a palace simply because it has big windows and more square footage than she’s used to. It has more amenities then the barefly function, so its a palace to her. And it’s painfully familiar—how so many of us live in tiny, cookie-cutter boxes sold as the new American Dream, while even the fantasy of shallow, endless suburban sprawl is out of reach. Across Coruscant this season - we don’t see the glittering elite or the criminal underworld—we see bodegas, hollow diners, urban decay. Even the joyful chaos of Dex’s Diner is gone. FACISM DESTROYED DEXTERS DINNER! THIS IS THE CRULTY OF FASCISM. There are no third spaces left. No room for community. We’re cut off from each other, and so we retreat inward and only find meaning in our roles for the machine. just like Cassian and Bix, isolated in Luthen’s sterile safe house, caught in limbo between survival and connection.

But we finally get to see him in these episodes—the boy, the man, the best cape-wearing fascist around—Ben Mendelsohn’s Krennic. I loved his sniveling little middle-manager energy in Rogue One, so seeing him here was a treat, and he doesn’t disappoint. Our caped facilitator is after Kalkite, a mineral the people of the planet Gormans unknowingly sit on, claiming it’s for the Emperor’s “energy initiative”—a transparent BIG LIE. He assembles Imperial officers to plan its extraction and, “regrettably,” how to silence resistance. It’s all very polite, very managerial—the way fascism loves to dress up atrocities in the language of buerocracy - sterolized of the its actual violence. But the subtext is clear: they’re planning genocide. 

The sequence—complete with a retro Pathé-style tourism video—directly evokes the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials didn’t debate whether the Holocaust should happen, just how to execute it. That juxtaposition—Imperials sipping drinks and coordinating mass murder while rebel cells starve and turn on each other—is chilling. Especially horrific are the Ministry of Enlightenment officials, smugly pitching propaganda to dehumanize the Gormans: portraying them as elitist, arrogant, and manipulative. Their plan to use spider imagery, tied to the Gormans’ silk industry, directly echoes the anti-Semitic caricatures of Der Stürmer, which depicted Jews as sinister spiders spinning webs of control.

Of course, the Gormans aren’t a one-to-one for European Jews under Nazi Germany. For example their was a centuries-long history of anti-Semitism in Europe that the Nazis built upon that doesn’t seem to be here with the Gorhmas. But The Empire’s approach also mirrors imperialist strategies against indigenous peoples—a composite of how colonizing nations have justified ethnic cleansing in pursuit of land, labor and resources. But given Star Wars' long-standing visual and narrative parallels between the Empire and the Nazis, the Jewish references land heavily. Andor doesn’t just evoke fascism—it dissects how it operates: with politeness, paperwork, and propaganda, quietly stripping away humanity until genocide becomes just another task on the agenda.

That brings us to Mina-Rau, an agricultural world where Bix, Brasso, Wilmon, and B2EMO have been hiding since the Ferrix riot, taken in by farmers Kellen and Talia. The golden fields stretch like Elysian plains, and in the quiet moments—B2EMO playing with kids, shared meals full of laughter—you feel what the rebellion is fighting for: connection, care, collective spirit, and a place where you get to feel the real tangible results of your labor weave through your community - standing in stark contrast to the Empire’s machinery of isolation, alienation and dehumanization.

But even here, the Empire creeps in. Inspectors arrive to audit Mina-Rau’s farm output, reducing everything this community has built to extractable resource and putting our undocumented rebels at risk. And what makes the scene so sharp is that our protagonists aren’t the only undocumented people here. The farm relies on undocumented laborers—a clear reflection of the American agricultural system, where immigrant labor is essential but relentlessly demonized. According to Cornell’s Mobilizing Against Inequality Project, undocumented workers make up 25% of U.S. farm labor, enduring long shifts in harsh conditions. The same holds across industries like construction, janitorial work, and healthcare. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas even found that immigrant laborers were crucial in growing the post-pandemic economy, keeping inflation down, and preventing labor shortages.  Yet these workers are scapegoated to stoke xenophobic fear, all while propping up the very system that exploits them. That tension—between dependence and dehumanization—creates the political volatility that makes people ripe for either revolution or fascism.

The Imperial sergeant on Mina-Rau knows this dynamic well. He admits he looks the other way because the farmers need labor, exposing the hollow pretense of Imperial law. But he still wields that law as a weapon. We see him wield his power against Bix, trying to coercing her into sex under the threat of exposure. When she resists, he attempts to sexually assault her—a brutal scene that ends with her killing him in self-defense. And I love that she doesn’t just kill him—he bashes his head again on his way out. The bastard deserved it. And most importantly, Bix even gets to name overtly exactly what he tried to do. 

But this scene sparked one of the more overt DISCOURSES around the series, kicked off by Anakin Did Nothing Wrong YouTuber Star Wars Theory. He argued, “SA in SW feels unnecessary. You can portray power dynamics and make the audience hate the Empire in other ways...Vader wouldn’t tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it. It has no place in Star Wars. Period.” This take is absurd—so bad that even Critical Drinker, a guy whose media takes are usually just loud burps of reactionary nonsense, called him out on it. People rightly dunked on SWT, pointing out that Star Wars has always implied sexual violence. What did he think the Slave Leia costume was about? Leia killing Jabba wasn’t just about defeating a crime boss—it was a symbolic act of reclaiming autonomy from chains, from objectification. And the idea that the Empire, a regime built on torture, genocide, and child slavery, would somehow draw the line at sexual violence? Come on. Vader, the guy who Force-choked his pregnant wife, is suddenly the paragon of HR compliance? [clip] Now there’s a man who wouldn’t condone sexual assault.

Sure, the Empire might have some sanitized legal stance against rape. Fascist systems often mythologize sexual purity—not out of morality, but as a way to control reproduction. Think Nazi Germany’s obsession with Aryan bloodlines or America’s historical fixation on white womanhood  as a symbol of innocence and virtue. That "protection" is deeply conditional, weaponized to objectify and controling women’s women who serve the state’s vision while dehumanizing those who don’t—especially women of color, trans women, infertile women, and undocumented women like Bix. These systems don’t just ignore violence against marginalized women; they leverage it. It’s the same logic that enabled the lynching of Black men over fabricated threats to white women, while the systemic rape of Black women by slaveowners was treated as normal. These acts were not considered crimes—they were mechanisms of control. The Empire operates similarly: it enforces purity where it sees value but disregards or even enables brutality against those it deems lesser. The idea that the Empire would care about what an Imperial officer does to an undocumented woman on a backwater planet is a joke. That kind of violence isn’t just condoned—it’s the point.

SWT’s argument reflects a cartoon version of fascism—where villains are just edgy Nazis in cool helmets yelling about genocide. It’s all aesthetic: corridor fights, big speeches, masculine power fantasies completely detached from the slow, systemic machinery of real-world violence. But its not just his fault - our culture as a whole often sands down the rough edges of fascism, reducing it to costume and spectacle.

What SWT is reacting to is how Andor is such a sharp departure from the mythic, pulpy lens Star Wars usually leans on. Take the Slave Leia costume or the endless parade of Twi’lek dancers—fetishized in cosplay, stripped of their narrative context, and repackaged as harmless fan service. These are images born from real systems of objectification and control, but our media flattens them into visual shorthand, disconnected from the violence they reflect. Capitalist franchises like Disney don’t just avoid reckoning with the ingrained cultural roots of of misgonigy and white supremacy that exist throughout our culture that fascism only builds upon—they actively sell its imagery back to us, rebranded as nostalgia. The armor, the banners, the polished authoritarian aesthetics are marketed without meaning. Andor refuses to play along. It demands that we look at the systems behind the symbols—how fascism dehumanizes, exploits, and violates, especially women of color, immigrant women, and those whose bodies the empire sees as expendable. It reminds us that the roots of fascism aren’t alien. They’re already here, buried in the narratives we overlook, the costumes we glamorize, and the pain we’ve learned not to see.

That said, Bix’s assault scene still feels exploitative. Star Wars has always sanitized sex—look at Episode II. The “romance” between Anakin and Padmé is so dry it could be used as a moisture farm training video. There’s no emotional depth, just sterile flirtation and sand discourse. So when Andor drops a brutal sexual assault, it’s jarring—not because it’s implausible in a fascist regime, but because the franchise has erased meaningful depictions of sex everywhere else. Without any grounding in intimacy, the inclusion of sexual violence feels like pure shock value. It could still work—but that sense of spectacle is amplified by how little attention the show gives Bix’s psychological aftermath. Her trauma from Dr. Gor’s torture in Season 1 is rightly given narrative weight—we are remind how it affects her in the season premiere’s dream sequence and it continues to shape her arc through the season. But the attempted assault disappears by the next episode, never mentioned again. It feels like a throwaway moment meant to escalate tension and signal systemic brutality, but without engaging with how that violence lands emotionally on the people most affected by it. Bix starts to feel like a narrative punching bag, her trauma compounded without any real reckoning. Not that I want the show to reduce her to trauma but we never get the sense that it affects her at all.

I made a similar point in my video on the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender, which turned the Air Nomad genocide into flashy CGI fight scenes. The original animated series, by contrast, never showed the massacre directly—but you felt it through Aang’s warmth filled memories of his culture and friend juxtaposed with the silence of the temples and the piled corpses of those Aang loved, the loss woven into memory. hat’s the difference between Eisenstein’s synthesis and Hollywood voyeurism: one invites emotional engagement through contrast and absence; the other just lingers on pain, reducing the viewer to a passive witness and distancing us from Bix’s internal experience rather than drawing us in.

It’s not that Star Wars shouldn’t depict sexual violence—it should if you’re going to depict the Empire’s brutality honestly. And clearly, some fans need the wake up call. But violence needs to be felt, not just shown. Otherwise, it’s just spectacle. Andor does this beautifully when it comes to cultural violence and systemic erasure—but when it comes to asking us to feel, not just depict, that violence as it affects marginalized people, especially women of color, it can at times falter-—a point I’ll come back to.

That said, I appreciate that Bix saves herself. The show avoids the tired masculine savior fantasy—Cassian doesn’t swoop in to save her at the last second. He helps her escape the larger Imperial threat but she’s the one who kills this bastard. 

I also adore that Brasso lets B2EMO stay behind with Kellen. As heartbreaking as it is that my beautiful little B2EMO never gets to see Cassian again—which absolutely shatters me—I’m genuinely moved that Brasso honors B2’s emotions while still doing what’s best for him. In a franchise that so often reduces droids to sentient labor fantasies—loyal, unpaid workers who never question their servitude unless it’s for a joke (like L3 in Solo) or a hollow justification (The Mandalorian)—Andor stands apart. This is the one Star Wars series that actually treats droids with respect and tenderness. B2EMO is my child, and we must protect him at all costs.

And then there’s Brasso’s final act of heroism. When he realizes the Empire is about to arrest him, he pretends to lash out at Kellen—making it look like he believes Kellen betrayed him, shielding Kellen from suspicion. What I love most is that the show doesn’t spell it out—it trusts us to catch the subtle, knowing look between them. I even saw Entertainment Weekly articles interpret the scene as Kellen actually turning them in, which I think is missing something really crucial. Kellen risked everything to help them earlier. Brasso sees that. And his final act is one of solidarity, protecting Kellen even as he knows he’s likely going to be arrested and likely killed if his involvement on Ferrix is discovered. And his death during the escape attempt gutted me, something we again don’t directly see but only realize after we see his immoving body and Cassian’s reaction. The weight of his loss lingers in the looks Diego Luna and Adria Arjona exchange afterward, captured so beautifully as Mon Mothma’s numbing party music pulses in the background. It gives me chills every time.

That brings us to one year later, where the show centralizes its focus on Gorhman—a shift that, for me, marks Andor’s true masterpiece this season. It’s stunning on every level, even surpassing the intensity of Narkina 5 in Season 1, though it trades collective catharsis for an unflinching look at the slow, grinding weight of imperial oppression stripped of spectacle.

What’s remarkable is how easily this could’ve been shallow fan service. The Gorhman Massacre was first canonically mentioned offhandly in a Star Wars Rebels as the event the pushed Mon Mothma to finally leave the Senate and join the Rebell Alliance—a nod to The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, a now non-canon 1990 tabletop RPG. In that version of the Gorhman Massacre, Tarkin landed his starship on peaceful protesters in 18 BBY—a stark symbol of fascism’s casual indifferent, mechanized cruetly. But Andor doesn’t just namecheck that history; it fleshes it out with weight and consequence. Here, Tarkin’s murder is mentioned as having happened decades earlier and is not the event referenced in Rebels. Instead, it’s part of a longer arc of Imperial violence, woven into Gorhman’s living memory and etched into the planet’s very architecture.

Shoutout to YouTuber Morphologis for his excellent breakdown of the Gorhman plaza’s design: the whole space is a monument to trauma and resistance. The memorial of Tarkin’s massacre isn’t the statue in the center of the space - it’s in the entire fabric of the plaza as a testament to survival through violence. The pillars evoke woven silk, referencing Gorhman’s textile economy; café windows borrow from Art Nouveau, a flow, organic style that stands in defiance of fascist utilitarianism. The towering Imperial barracks are brutalist, utilitarian, and ideological—a symbol of domination and deliberate visual assault to Gorhman’s softer, cultural resistance woven into art and public communal space. The city itself becomes a battleground between memory and erasure, community and utility.  The historical parallels woven into the production design make this even sharper. While the silk economy nods to Italian cities like Milan, Gorhman’s design, language, and casting of French actors evoke France under Nazi occupation. The Gorhman dialect was crafted with French phonetics by Marina Tyndall, and the costumes and social customs mirror French fashion and etiquette. Gilroy even references radio espionage tactics used by the French Resistance. Every cultural detail—from hand gestures to town hall protocol—gives Gorhman a lived-in identity that mirrors real-world communities fighting to preserve memory under occupation.

And that’s the heart of it. The people of Gorhman aren’t just resisting military rule or rooted simply in survival, but in protecting their history, their traditions, and their collective and cultural memory. That’s what makes their struggle feel so visceral. We can subtexual see what they’re fighting for and exactly what fascism is trying to take.

But tying back to Andor’s critique of revolution, the show makes it clear that despite the Gorhman people’s resolve, they’re moving too fast. Imperial propaganda is tightening, and desperation is driving them toward risky, premature action. When Cassian is sent by Luthen to assess the situation—under the guise of the galaxy’s hottest fashion designer (seriously, hot damn Diego Luna)—he immediately clocks their strategic missteps, like their attempt to flip Syril Karn. Without even meeting him, Cassian knows Karn’s a double agent and sees right through the flaws in their approach.

But unlike the chaotic Yavin cells, the Gorhmans aren’t incompetent. They’re thoughtful in how they frame their pitch to Karn—not as anti-Empire, but anti-ISB, banking on his resentment of the agency that discarded him. Still, their inexperience shows. Cassian critiques their plan to expose an Imperial armory, pointing out the Empire isn’t even hiding it. Why would they? They want people to see it. Because they know no one will care. The Empire has already branded Gorhman as insurgents—any attempt at truth will be dismissed.

Luthen disagrees. He sees Gorhman as useful, even sacrificial. He’s willing to let them escalate, to push them into action knowing it might cost lives—because he is an accelerationist who focuses on the ends, not always the means. It’s a brutal contrast to Cassian’s pragmatism. The truth likely lies in between: the Gorhmans do need to be more focused, more strategic - and shouldn’t be abandoned. But the machine is already in motion. Dedra’s plan to provoke them into violence is a trap—a pretext to portay them as “violent insurgents” to justify the state violence that was always coming. The Empire doesn’t need a reason to crush them. It just needs a story. And it’s already writing it.

Speaking of Dedra, her ambition and hunger for control becomes increasingly clear. Using Syril as a double agent to infiltrate the Gorhman Front—under the pretense the he’s just hunting “outside agitators”—shows how easily she weaponizes anyone, even her supposed lover. It’s pure utilitarianism: people are just tools. Syril, for his part, remains a willing cog. He doesn’t crave power for its own sake—he craves validation, the approval that come from serving the system. He believes in truth and justice, but only as the Empire defines them. His faith in the system is absolute because he’s never questioned the morality of its design. To him, the Empire’s definition of “good” is gospel and that blind faith is what makes him a fascist deeb so pathetically easy to manipulate. Dedra doesn’t need to manipulate him; the system already has.

I love how that power imbalance even seeps into their sex life. Her request to keep the lights off isn’t about her vulnerability or intimacy - it’s about reducing him to a body, a mechanism for her use rather than a person she connects with. 

But contrast this with Bix and Andor, where true intimacy blooms between them. There’s a moment where they dance in their apartment, touching each other in what feels like a familiar gesture of affection on Ferrix—a tender act that captures the empathy and connection so core to what the Rebellion fights for: genuine human connection.  We see this echoed later in Episode 6, when Kleya removes a hidden listening device from an artifact and tells Lonnie, “Tinnans believe all language could be reduced to touch.” That line ties together so many of the show’s ideas: how intimacy, body, culture, and identity weave resistance. Even as Bix and Cassian live in an apartment designed for imperial isolation, they try to make it a home. They cook together, share space, and build tiny rituals of care where the Empire wants only silence. Bix even knows the owner of the bodega she visits, showcasing her instinct to build connections in a place designed to suffocate them. 

This brings me back to Bix. She’s still haunted by her torture at the hands of Dr. Gor, and when isolated from Cassian, trapped in Luthen’s safe house, she turns to drugs to dull the pain. As Adria Arjona put it, her rebellion is internal. She’s self-destructive, but it’s human—a reflection of how people try to escape when they feel alone and empty from the traumas they’ve faced. 

I love that Luthen visits her. He’s clearly testing whether she’s ready for a mission, but the moment still carries empathy. When he acknowledges her drug use to manage the nightmares, there’s this unspoken acknowledgement that he’s been there too. As Stellan Skarsgård put it, “If he doesn’t have empathy, then he has got nothing to do in the revolution, because the reason for revolution is empathy.” It reminds us that Luthen, for all his cold pragmatism, isn’t heartless—he’s just willing to sacrifice everything, even his own humanity, for the cause.

And I want to be clear—Luthen does use people like Bix or Ghor. But he’s not trying to become the next Empire or seize power for himself. Too often, stories about revolution flatten liberation movements into cautionary tales—where the oppressed simply wish to become the new oppressors, and that belief in the “cycle of violence” is used to justify the status quo. [images of Daisy Fitzroy from Bioshock: Infinite, the hosts from Westworld, Marco Inaros from The Expanse] “Domination is simply human nature, anyone would do it, so it might as well be us” is the subtext.

Yes, supremacist movements can arise from oppressed groups. Black supremacist groups exist in the United States for example. Israel weaponized the traumatic history of the Holocaust and historic antisemitism to justify an ethnostate built on the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. But those movements don’t justify continued systemic oppression nor do they exist in a vacuum. They often coexist alongside far larger efforts genuinely fighting for liberation. As Alex Mell-Taylor writes, the hyperfixation on stories of oppressed biome the oppressors serves as a defense mechanism for a dominant culture to avoid confronting the harm done by colonizers so as not to have to upend the status quo as well as often come from the writers often subconscious deep-rooted fear that acknowledging systemic injustice will lead to justified violent retaliation.

“White society, by which I mean white supremacist, capitalist colonialist patriarchy, has never moved on from this fear that oppressed people will call for their pound of flesh when the time comes. It’s not a coincidence that most stories we see today of oppressed people violently rebelling against their oppressors devolve so quickly into an even worse status quo.”

That’s what Andor gets right. Luthen, for all his ruthlessness, isn’t seeking power — he earnestly wants freedom. His flaw is that he believes the only path forward is through total sacrifice. That’s why I love when Cassian finally calls him out, pointing out how he uses people. Yes, Cassian brushes up against the masculine protector trope in his defensiveness of Bix, but it’s really a clash of ideologies. Luthen sees everyone—including himself—as tools for the Cause. But rebellion can’t just be about what you fight against. It has to be about what you fight for—love, memory, culture, connection. Its why one of my favorite moments is Cassian going with Bix to kill Dr. Gor. He doesn’t do it for her or leave her to do it alone. He supports her as she does it. It’s a rare Star Wars moment where revenge feels like solidarity, not a savior fantasy or burden.

Speaking off though, Andor actually depicts a sharp look at how revolutionary groups are framed by the status quo. When Kleya and Luthen realize one of their wiretaps in Davo Sculdan’s home is at risk, they crash a Senate party after the Oathkeeping—a great nod to canon and a reminder of how fascism relies on cultish nationalistic feailty to its norms and beliefs.  But this storyline underscores how overextended the Luthen’s operation has become. Luthen’s flaw—his refusal to build true solidarity and trust others—leaves threads unraveling. Still, they manage to remove the wiretap, thanks to Kleya, who quietly remains the show’s most competent badass.

The real gut insight comes from Mon Mothma’s argument with Krennic during this sequence.  She calls out the Empire’s “systematic execution” of rebels, while Krennic dismisses it as criminal chaos. It’s a textbook example of fascist propaganda: reframing resistance as disorder, erasing justice, and justifying state violence. The same tactic is used on Gorhman—branding rebellion as insurgency to strip it of legitimacy. It’s the same cycle, always: rebellion is treated not as a cry for freedom, but a threat to order and justification for more brutality. 

That said, while I like Bix’s story in these episodes, I’m still frustrated by her arc overall. We’re told she goes on missions and see her grappling with morally gray choices, but she’s not given the space to grow into her own path. She’s not a frontline revolutionary like Vel or Cinta—and that’s fine. But instead of leaning into her strengths, like her engineering skills, she’s mostly placed in passive, domestic spaces, processing trauma. Her story isn’t invalid—it’s just incomplete. If we had more context—if we saw her contributing in tangible ways or pursuing her own choices—then her personal struggles would feel like part of a larger tapestry. But we don’t.  Instead, she’s often defined by what’s done to her, not what she does. After killing Dr. Gor, her trauma is barely addressed again, as if revenge neatly wrapped it all up. But trauma doesn’t vanish—it lingers, reshapes, and demands time to heal. The work of fighting fascism leaves scars that don’t just get erased when you beat the bad guys. I do think Andor knows that; but it is a casualty of the show’s pacing. And it’s telling which characters are given room to breathe, and which are hurried along.

Because Bix isn’t the only one sidelined. In Episode 6, Cinta and Vel reunite on Gorhman, sent by Luthen to manage the rebels’ missteps.  It’s a strong moment for Vel, who’s come a long way since Aldhani, where her leadership was shaky and her bourgeois privilege still unexamined. Cinta, by contrast, has always been grounded—her life shaped by hardship, her commitment forged through necessity. Cinta doesn’t have the luxury of stepping back; for her, the fight is survival. Vel, on the other hand, has to choose it—and in choosing Cinta, she chooses something real.

Because by Season 2, Vel has come into her own, leading with conviction. And more importantly, they both admit they want to fight together—not for the Cause, but because their relationship is the cause. It ties perfectly into the theme of fighting for connection not just against oppression,even as Luthen demands they subsume everything for the end goal. And then they kiss—a moment of queer intimacy as resistance in a world designed to erase it.

But almost immediately, Andor undercuts its most powerful queer moment. In the very next scene, Cinta is killed offhandedly during the Gorhman raid. Thematically, I get it—her death is the direct result of the group's inexperience, just as Cassian warned. She’s shot by the same boy she told not to bring a blaster, his fantasy of revolution overriding her lived understanding. Vel’s furious speech—telling him he’ll carry the weight of that mistake—hits hard. It shows how, under fascism, even the most competent can die due to someone else’s recklessness.

Some, like James Whitbrook at io9, have argued this is Andor normalizing queer stories by allowing them to face tragedy like any other character. “Andor treats both Cinta and Vel as enriched, fleshed-out characters who happen to be queer...giving them the narrative right to be jeopardized, to be put in harm’s way, to experience random tragedy as much as any other heteronormative character would.”  And I appreciate that. But for me, the issue starts with execution. The scene is clumsy—shot from across the street, the shot looks like it hits a wall, and it just feels like the writers are nudging her into the path of a blaster. And more importantly, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

People have pointed out how this moment echoes the "Bury Your Gays" trope and while its relevant it's not that simple. The problem isn’t just that queer characters die dispropotiantely, given how in recently years we’ve seen more varied queer stories where characters gets to live. It’s how closely Cinta’s death follows her one real moment of queer joy and love. Under the Hays Code, queer love could only be depicted in media if it was punished. And when Andor finally gives us Star Wars’ first real queer kiss - no that tokenistic virtue signal bullshit in Rise of Skywalker doesn’t count - only to kill one of them minutes later, it echoes that legacy—intentionally or not.

It’s especially careless in today’s climate. Queer and BIPOC visibility is constantly attacked as “woke,” especially in Star Wars, where it’s used to justify harassment against marginalized actors, creators, and stories. Even Skeleton Crew faced backlash for featuring a lesbian couple—in the most heteronomative suburban setting, no less—and was still labeled “woke” by reactionaries. This isn’t isolated. Project 2025—a blueprint the Trump administration is already drawing from—openly calls for classifying queer visibility in media as “pornographic,” alongside broader efforts to outlaw porn entirely. And Disney is far from innocent. They cut production on the trans-created Nimona, censored a trans-focused episode of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, and reportedly pressured Pixar to make Inside Out 2 “less gay.” A trans character was even removed from Win or Lose. Disney makes hegemonic entertainment designed to protect profit, preemptively erasing queerness to appease a fascist-leaning conservative culture that now defines the status quo. In that context, Andor killing off its queer couple moments after finally letting them be happy doesn’t feel like bold storytelling. It unintentionally echoes the same regressive narratives queer people are constantly slotted into—even if that was not the intent.

The problem is how little time we actually get with Vel and Cinta as a couple. Cinta gets a handful of minutes this season. When characters like Nemik or Brasso die, it lands because we’ve spent time with them. Cinta’s death, by contrast, feels thin—like the writers saw her as narratively expendable. It’s a pattern queer women of color know too well: not just in fiction, but in real life. These are the same lives most at risk and face the highest rates of violence—Black and Indigenous women, trans women—those who fall outside white, heteronormative structures of reproduction and are deemed disposable.

Some have argued that Cinta’s death symbolizes how queer people are more likely to die under fascist regimes. And it’s true—queer people are often targeted precisely because we disrupt ideals of reproductive purity and racialized hierarchy. Under Nazi Germany for example, queer people were directly targetted—but even there, a grim stratification existed: poor and non-Aryan queer people were often sent right off to camps to be killed, while rich queer people deemed Aryan were sometimes sent to conversion therapy, seen as salvageable for their breeding utility. That brutal logic—who is “useful” to fascism and who is disposable—feels echoed in Andor. Vel, white and wealthy, survives. Cinta, a queer woman of color, does not. The narrative may not intend that distinction, but it reflects a long-standing pattern: which bodies fascism spares, and which ones stories quietly discard.

But we’ve also always resisted. Black and Indigenous queer women, trans people, and countless others have been at the head of numerous movements for liberation. Queer death would sting less if Andor had overtly textured its narrative within the larger tapestry of queer resistance that draws from. Numerous queer people have always fought, bled, and died in revolutionary movements long before Star Wars ever dreamed of a Rebellion. The show pulls from the French Resistance—but where are the queer figures who fought in it? Pascal Capeau, Claud Cahun, Marcel Moore, Daniel Cordier, Ovid Delect—all were French queer people who resisted the Nazis and whose stories are often erased. Andor mirrors that erasure. The Gorhman Front is coded as straight and heteronormative, reflecting how queer contributions to resistance are often erased from the narrative of history. It’s a subtler, more insidious kind of erasure than something overt, like the Nazis burning the Institute of Sexology, which wiped out a century of transgender and queer research. But the effect is it portrays us simply as passive victims worthy of pity, not as active agents of change.

And that’s what frustrates me most. Cinta’s death feels designed for a straight audience. Queer people don’t need to be reminded we die under fascism—we know. We’re living it right now. But when media depicts queer death into an inevitability, it doesn’t radicalize—it pacifies. It sends the message that queer death is just an inevitability end under fascism instead an act of violence that demands resistance to prevent. Saying queer people die under fascism just lets people feel sad without pushing them to do a damn thing about it. It creates a shrug that says, wait until it happens to someone whose death isn’t inevitable.  Queer people are dying right now under fascism in America and elsewhere and you should be doing something to stop it.  It’s glaring in a show that’s otherwise so unflinching—depicting state propaganda, carceral labor, and collective struggle in ways rarely seen in mainstream fiction.

The issue with Cinta’s death is that it collapses multiple problems into one moment. It wasn’t earned—her arc was too thin, and killing her right after a moment of queer joy evokes the old logic of censorship, where queer love must be punished. But that would be tolerable if it had been grounded in a broader narrative of queer resistance, as queer people having always been central to revolutionary struggle - but its not. And the way her death is done doesn’t provoke urgency—it fosters passivity, treating queer death often is depicted with the only varration being with if its done out of pity or judgement - as inevitable rather than something to resist. I know I’m being harsh here, but alongside how Bix is treated, it speaks to deeper biases in the writing. Who gets to be heroic, complex, remembered—and who gets left behind.

But despite Cinta’s end, these episodes also deliver one of the show’s most arresting moments: the return of Saw Gerrera. Long dismissed as Star Wars’ unhinged revolutionary—too radical, too paranoid, too much—Saw has often served as a cautionary tale about going “too far.” And at first, this seems like more of the same. He takes Wilmon hostage to teach his cell how to steal Rhydonium, then kills one of his own, accusing him of being an Imperial spy. Maybe he was. Or maybe Saw projected betrayal, or simply deemed Wilmon the more useful piece. It’s a chilling, brilliant moment of ambiguity—one that refuses to tell us whether Saw is dangerous or right.

That ambiguity explodes in Saw’s electrifying speech to Wilmon while setting the device. He describes his obsession with the smell of Rhydonium—the fumes that destroyed his lungs and left him in a respirator by Rogue One. To him, it’s not poison—it’s memory. Labor. Oppression. Survival. Breathing it in is how he reclaims his pain and turns it into fuel. “Revolution is not for the sane,” he declares. “We’ll be dead before the Republic is back—and yet here we are.”

It’s a raw embodiment of what Roxana Hadadi at Vulture links to anti-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon’s writing. Fanon argued that when people are denied the right to resist oppression, the result is psychological damage—what he called “a constant and considerable stream of mental symptoms.” Fascism wears the mask of logic—built on so-called “self-evident truths” that are, in reality, the biased lies of history, shaped by the imperial, colonial, and patriarchal systems it grows out of. It’s efficient, rational, orderly—its cruelty is bureaucratic, organized. Sanity under empire means submission. Madness then becomes the only path to freedom. And Saw doesn’t reject that. He embraces it. “We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air.” His obsession, his paranoia, his violence—they’re not character flaws. They’re survival mechanisms turned into weapons. They’re irrational, yes—but in a system where rationality is built to sustain oppression, irrationality becomes a kind of liberation.

Saw isn’t fighting to restore the old order—he doesn’t want the Republic back. He wants something entirely new. As Fanon wrote, “decolonization is truly the creation of new men.” Saw’s extremism is his rebirth. A fire that refuses to negotiate with the world that broke him. He’s terrifying. He’s exhilarating. And the show doesn’t pretend he’s always right—it makes clear he sometimes goes too far. But it also never condemns his need to use violence, or how he ended up this way. What makes Saw dangerous isn’t just his paranoia—it’s that he refuses to be anything less than a defiant assault on the status quo. So when Wilmon is inspired to breathes in those  same fumes, it lands to us watching liek call to action. Maybe what makes Saw frightening isn’t his instability—it’s his clarity. His ability to envision a world so radically free it looks like madness to those still bound by imperial logic. And Andor touches that fire. The question is—does it know what to do with it?

======

In sharp contrast, we reach the season’s most harrowing episodes: the Gorhman Massacre. STrangely enough, they begins quietly, almost tenderly, on Yavin, contrasting sharply with the violence to come.  Cassian and Bix’s home brims with cultural memory, and Wilmon arrives not as a soldier, but as family - seamlessly folded into their domestic space, welcomed with the kind of sense of communal connection all three of them have been denied for so long. The show reframes Yavin not just as a rebel stronghold; it’s a vision of collective survival, of roots planted in the shadow of empire. But Wilmon doesn’t just bring warmth—he brings a mission: Dedra is on Gorhman. A reckoning is due for the genocide she oversaw on Ferrix.

The warmth of Yavin fade quickly. The Ghorman city of Palmo is unrecognizable—rubble-strewn streets, Imperial blockades choking its plazas. Occupation is everywhere. Even without knowing Star Wars canon, you feel it: There is a sense of inevitability to it all—a creeping understanding that the massacre is coming, that it’s been coming. Even for those unfamiliar with Star Wars canon, the tension is suffocating. 

Dedra knows it too. She pleads with Partagaz to reconsider, but he brushes her off, dangling a promotion. That’s the machinery of genocide—it doesn’t need malice. It grings forward on ambition, inertia, complicity. Partagaz is a cog. Dedra a mechanism. Kaido, the Imperial captain, spells it out: “I’m just the trigger.” Dedra, he says, must pull it.

And she does. She tells herself she’s just following orders—echoing the classic Nazi defense—even as she knows better. You can see it in Denise Gough’s performance: the way Dedra tries to rationalize her role, even as the horror of what she’s done begins to fracture her. I don’t feel sympathy for her—but I do think this is some of the show’s most brutally effective work. Her breakdown after the massacre isn’t about redemption. It’s a portrait of self-inflicted rot. Genocide dehumanizes everyone it touches—not just the dead, but the ones who carry it out. That’s the banality of systemic violence. It masks itself as inevitable, as order. No one feels responsible—it’s just “the machine.” But the truth is: Dedra, Kaido, Partagaz—they’re all complicit. Every gear turns because someone chooses to turn it.

The Empire’s orchestration is deliberate, methodical. The soldiers stationed in Gorhman’s plaza are young, untrained, and trigger-happy by design. The Empire wants them to fire. Inexperience breeds fear—and fear is easy to manipulate. This isn’t just intimidation; it’s a powder keg engineered to explode.

By contrast, the Ghorman resistance is unraveling. Arguments break out—some push for peaceful protest, others demand armed retaliation. It’s a familiar fracture seen across anti-colonial history: the ANC turning to armed resistance after the Sharpeville Massacre; the IRA breaking from Sinn Féin’s diplomatic path in Ireland. The Empire thrives on this kind of division—its efficiency feeds on the chaos of the oppressed. And Lezine, a member of the resistance, knows it. Once an outsider, he now sees clearly: disunity is imperial strategy. He calls it out, turns their fragmentation into resolve. “We are Ghor,” he declares. “And we do this together.” It’s not just a slogan—it’s resistance against the very structure that’s designed to splinter them.

When the Imperials pull back out of the plaza, it’s a trap dressed in the guise of opportunity. The people flood in, believing—just for a moment—that they’ve reclaimed their space. But it’s a trap. A calculated false flag, designed to provoke a crackdown and paint the Ghor as violent agitators. Resistanc leader Carro Rylanz sees it but cannot get anyone to listen. The manufactured narrative has already been written in blood.

And then, the Ghor begin to sing. It’s not a plea. It’s a national anthem—written by Nichoal Briteel—sung hauntingly with echoes of the Rebel fanfare, but lyrics laced with identity, cultural pride, and defiance. It’s not sentimental. This isn’t Detroit: Become Human, where song melts the hearts of oppressors. There’s no fantasy of redemption, no colonial daydream where forbearance undoes empire. They don’t sing for mercy. They sing for themselves—for survival, for unity, for the right to exist. It’s a declaration: We are still here. You can bury us, but you will not silence us.

And then, the Empire springs the trap. The order comes from Partagaz, executed by Dedra with chilling precision. A sniper kills one of their own young soldiers to manufacture the inciting incident. The massacre that follows is swift, merciless, and meticulously planned—a systemic wipeout of the Gorhman people. It’s one of the most gut-wrenching sequences in Star Wars, and arguably in all of science fiction, for how brutally it portrays genocide not as chaos—but as cold, calculated, state-sanctioned policy. [BEAT SHOWING IMAGES FROM THE EPISODE]

The real-world parallels are impossible to ignore—Tiananmen Square, Bloody Sunday, the Amritsar Massacre. Even the King David Hotel bombing is echoed when the Gorhman bellhop sets off an explosion in a hotel, a detail Tony Gilroy himself acknowledged in Deadline. But the parallel also mentioned by Gilroy that demands our full attention—especially now—is Palestine.

From the start of the season, the show signals this. Dedra Meero insists that to control Gorhman, the Empire will need “dependable rebels to do the wrong thing”—a chilling echo of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s admission to propping up Hamas to fracture Palestinian unity. This manipulation is a form of manufactured consent, leveraging internal divisions to justify larger acts of state violence.  The Ghormans are framed as terrorists, their resistance called “inexplicable,” their deaths rebranded as security. Imperial news broadcasts show ruined neighborhoods and call it justice—just as Western media has long painted Palestinians as inherently violent, erasing the context of occupation and American-backed apartheid.

The occupation of Gorhman is not metaphor—it’s replication. The checkpoints, blockades, bombed-out streets, and propaganda painting the victims as subhuman all mirror the tactics of Israeli military control. The language is familiar too: Gorhmans are “resistant to Imperial norms”—a line pulled straight from the Islamophobic playbook that casts Palestinians as uncivilized, undeserving of land, safety, sympathy or life. Strip them of their humanity, and genocide becomes not just palatable—it becomes policy.

The next episode drives it home. Senators don’t mourn the Gorhman dead—they mourn Imperial casualties. They call the soldiers heroes. They praise “restraint.” It’s a mirror of every Western media cycle following an Israeli bombing campaign—where Palestinian children are buried under rubble while the world fixates on Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Even the Ghor anthem—“valley, highland”—rings with echoes of “from the river to the sea.” It’s a cry not for dominance, but for liberation. For land. For survival. Against an empire built to erase them.

The episode closes on a chilling scene whose message couldn’t be clearer. As EckhartsLadder noted, Gorhman’s destruction was never just about kalkite. Krennic himself admits they could synthesize it. Certainly it was probably faster and easier but in truth the massacre wasn’t logistical—it was ideological. It was a demonstration of statepower, executing a script written to justify genocide as a tool of control.

 Imperial news broadcasts speak of “aid and support of outside rebel assistance” and warn of “the price we will pay for our own safety.” The massacre becomes propaganda, a manufactured crisis to solidify the Empire's narrative of perpetual threat—create an enemy within, strip away civil liberties, and justify further state violence under the guise of protection. See the Death Star. Its very existence is likely framed as necessary for Imperial "safety," a preemptive weapon to root out “terrorism” before it can spread. It’s eventual use on Alderaan will likely be framed as done to destroy a hotbed of insurrection, teeming with “stuck-up nobles” like the Ghormans and led by Senator Bail Organa—a known Rebel sympathizer.  A planetary genocide repackaged as necessary security.

And those parallels aren’t just with Gaza. They’re happening right here, in America. The Trump administration has already begun labeling pro-Palestinian activists—especially immigrants—as “antisemitic Hamas supporters.” Activists like Mahmoud Khalil have been detained by ICE, stripped of rights, and deported. Trump himself called Khalil the “first arrest of many,” promising to deport “terrorist sympathizers” and boasting that they’ll “never return again.” Habeas corpus and due process get quietly suspended, just for them. But that logic is never contained. Trump’s team has already said these same tactics will be expanded to citizens. This is how fascism works: justify violence against the margins, then let that violence metastasize. The trap is always the same—treat it as acceptable there, and soon it becomes policy everywhere. Gorhman wasn’t just a massacre. It was a message. A performance. A blueprint. And it’s a blueprint we’ve seen before. It’s being written again. Right now.

This is what makes Mon Mothma’s speech in the next episode so powerful—and so dangerous. For the first time, someone with political weight calls the Empire’s actions what they are: genocide. She names Palpatine directly, placing blame without euphemism, cutting through the lies the Senate has long used to shield itself. She framing him as the loudest voice in the Empire’s atrocities—even though he never once appears on-screen or utters a single word. Because that’s the genius of his power: Palpatine doesn’t have to speak; the Empire speaks for him. Its violence, its propaganda, its silence—all of it is his voice, echoed through every senator too scared to dissent, every stormtrooper trained to follow orders, every citizen conditioned to look away.

Mothma’s clarity cuts through the Senate’s moral inertia, and it lands hard because it mirrors our own political rot. In the U.S., Republicans embrace authoritarianism openly, while Democrats cling to civility—refusing to name fascism even as civil liberties collapse around them. They still believe the rules will save them, not because they’re blind, but because they’re safe. They aren’t the ones at risk. They benefit from the system, even as it erodes. That’s why so many viewers responded to this moment with memes about wishing we had senators like Mon Mothma—leaders willing to risk something real, instead of clinging to power while surrendering to authoritarians like Trump. We have precious few like that.

I love the Senate storyline in Andor—how it peels back the layers of complicity and fragility within the political structure. We see it with the Gorman senator’s arrest with no one to speak up for him. A year earlier, the senator had political allies, connections—but the Empire slowly isolated him and his people, cutting away his support until he stood alone. It’s a chilling illustration of how even senators can be thrown to the pyre when it serves Imperial interests. No amount of co-tailing or compliance can save them from the system.

Mon Mothma feels that too. Her petitions against the Empire’s brutality on Gorman are meaningless—signatures on paper the Empire never intended to heed. She’s beginning to see the truth: the while the Senate is ineffectiv ein the face of Palpatine, it was never corrupted. It was always built to uphold empire. Season 1 made it clear—Cassian’s planet wasn’t first colonized by the Empire but by the Republic. The Empire and Palpatine didn’t seize power; it was handed to them, brick by brick, under the guise of safety. The Senate has always been an engine of colonialism and systemic violence, just with a more polished veneer. The Empire simply dropped the pretense.

That’s the world we live in too. America’s founding is rooted in colonialism, patriarchy, and racial violence—from slavery, the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous nations, and the control of women’s bodies to the systemic brutality faced by Black, queer, and immigrant communities, and America’s ongoing complicity in the genocide of Palestinians. These violences aren’t a betrayal of American values—they’re what those values were structured to accommodate. “Human rights” have always been rationed, codified in compromises—like the one that counted Black life as three-fifths of a person—measured by proximity to whiteness, to property, to power. Many enter the system believing in its promises, trying to bend it toward justice. But the machine grinds on. It isolates, co-opts, and wears them down. Fascism isn’t a rupture—it’s the blueprint resurfacing, the old logic reasserting itself when the mask slips.

That’s why Mon eventually flees with Cassian—not just to join the Rebellion, but to abandon the illusion of reform altogether. To build something real, you have to abandon the structures that were always designed to oppress.

The tension in those sequences—watching the Empire scramble to silence her—is masterfully done. The surveillance, the whispers, the quiet panic. And yet, it’s two adorable engineers sabotaging a system to keep her signal going who steal the show. “There are friends everywhere.” It’s a line that echoes through the season, a reminder that the Imperial mechanisms of control are nothing compared to the power of ordinary people, defiant in small, crucial ways - that we are all connected.

I also love how Andor builds on canon. It honors Mon’s escape in Star Wars Rebels by making Cassian the one who helped her reach the Ghost. The reworded Senate speech isn’t a retcon—it’s adapted for Rebel broadcast after the Empire’s censorship, a clever detail that shows how resistance reshapes itself to survive. I was sad not to see Jimmy Smits return as Bail Organa, but Benjamin Bratt is excellent—and I love that Bail uses the same kind of bureaucratic clause Palpatine once exploited to help Mon speak. I’m sure the Empire closed that loophole fast.

And Andor never wastes time with spectacle. When Cassian spots the ISB spy, he doesn’t hesitate—he just shoots. Brutal. Necessary. And every time Mon sees violence like that, you can see how much it shakes her. She’s lived inside a world of civility and procedure. But Cassian has lived in survival. That’s why he dreams of escaping with Bix—not because he doesn’t believe in the cause, but because he wants something human again. Not just to survive—but to live.

Before we move to that, we need to talk about Syril Karn. His time on Gorhman marks the first real crack in his blind devotion to the Empire. For the first time, he sees the people he’s helped oppress—recognizes their humanity. There’s a haunting moment where he steps away from Imperial protection to stand in the ruins he helped create, finally forced to confront the lie of “justice and order” he’s clung to since childhood. It’s a moment that’s earned him sympathy—from critics, fans, even Tony Gilroy, who said: “The fundamental lies that he’s been told from the very beginning... they’re crushing.” Gilroy even said he felt “terribly sorry” for him.

And yes, Syril is a victim—of indoctrination, toxic masculinity, a state that taught him obedience was worth. But we have to be careful with that sympathy.  I’ve seen countless think pieces lament Syril Karn’s fate, wishing he had survived because “he could have been saved”—that he could have earned redemption. But they rarely full recon with the fact that first and foremost Syril Karn was a fascist bully.  In Season 1, he used his tiny scrap of authority to brutalize Ferrix, getting people killed in pursuit of a fantasy of heroism. When he witnessed the Empire’s brutality on Ferrix, he didn’t flinch. Because those working class mostly people of color didn’t look, act or appear like him like him. Only on Gorhman—among people he could aesthetically relate to—did the violence finally feel real. Even Gilroy admitted this: “Gorhman, the clothes, the structure of it, the properness of it. I think [Syril] really started to feel, look comfortable in Gorhman.” He finally recognized suffering—once it wore the right clothes spoke the right way, and looked like someone who could belong. Meanwhile, the Empire had already committed genocide against the Kaminoans, the Geonosians, and countless others—none of which shook Syril’s faith. He was perfectly content to uphold Imperial order as long as the victims were distant, alien, or Othered.

This mirrors how our culture processes violence. Genocide only becomes legible when its victims are relatable. When they look like “us.” We’ve seen it in Palestine, Yemen, Myanmar. Western media dehumanizes Brown, Black, and Muslim lives until their deaths don’t register as tragedy, only as unfortunate consequences of “conflict.”

And even when he must confront the truth of the Empire’s violence - And Syril’s response isn’t self-reflection—it’s rage - which is understandable. But it’s telling how he directs that emotion. He chokes Dedra in a moment that disturbingly echoes domestic abuse. Yes, he’s right to be angry at her—she manipulated him, used him. But his rage is about control. His masculinity, his sense of order, his fantasy of mattering—shattered. So he reasserts dominance by enacting violence against a woman he once stalked and fantasized about. It’s a manifestation of how he views women: not as people, but as objects he can use to channel his emotions. 

Even in the chaos of Gorhman’s massacre, his fury isn’t aimed at Imperial soldiers or the architects of genocide—it’s unleashed on Cassian. His original obsession, the man who shattered his delusions of heroism back on Ferrix. Syril’s final act isn’t fighting to save others—it’s a desperate childish attempt to reassert his heroism during a genocide he helped enable. Syril doesn’t die a hero. He dies trying to reclaim the narrative in his head, violently lashing out at a woman and a man of color—the very people dehumanized by the system he served.

Yes, Syril is a victim. He was radicalized by Empire propaganda, shaped by a mother who weaponized emasculation, and molded by a system that taught him obedience was righteousness. But none of that excuses his choices. He actively bullied, harmed, and upheld fascism—on Ferrix, on Gorhman, politically and personally. His betrayal of the Ghor, even if not fully informed, was still a decision. One more chance to choose differently—and he didn’t.  It’s why Rylanz’s line, “What kind of creature are you?” cuts so deeply.  Syril tries to deflect responsibility. But he’s complicit. He always was.

And the cultural impulse to redeem him is telling. Star Wars has a long, troubling history of sanitizing fascist men—Kylo Ren, Darth Vader—men who commit genocide, then die doing one good thing for someone they personally love, and are instantly redeemed. As Princess Weekes brilliantly points out, Star Wars rarely interrogates complicity. It gestures at atonement, then skips to absolution. One moment of decency is treated like it balances out a lifetime of systemic harm. It’s uppsetting—and it’s cultural. 

Because our culture regularly crafts these narratives. I’ve seen posts—one with over 8,000 likes—describing Syril’s assault on Dedra as him "physically and morally confronting her fascism," sidestepping the fact that it was a misogynistic outburst, not a moral stand. Others framed his attack on Cassian as "protecting his woman Dedra" from an assassination attempt, which has no basis in reality. He was asserting control through violence against a woman and a man of color. Our culture is primed to empathize with men who cause harm, to write their redemption arcs before they earn them— like how we’re told we can’t ruin the future of young men who rape. We hand them the benefit of the doubt, while erasing their culpability in violence.

Our culture mourn Syril as a “wasted opportunity,” while Cinta—who resisted the Empire her entire life—dies with barely a mention. No trending discourse. No wishful what-ifs. No fan debates over the potential of her arc had she not been killed. Syril is framed as a tragedy cut short. Cinta’s death is treated like a inevitability by everyone. Even Tony Gilroy, who created both, speaks at length about how sorry he feels for Syril. He barely mentions Cinta. 

And it reflects whose pain we prioritize—who we’re trained to empathize with. We extend endless sympathy to men like Syril, to Kylo Ren, to Anakin Skywalker - to white men or to the powerful. Our culture constantly spins stories about whether they can be saved. What if they come around? What if they didn’t mean it? What if they feel bad now? That question—can they be redeemed?—becomes a trap. It lets us delay judgment. Delay accountability. Delay action. It tells us to wait, to hold space, to keep hoping—for someone else’s moral clarity—while real harm is happening in real time. That empathy rarely exists for queer, BIPOC people or women, for women of color like Cinta, for anyone outside that familiar silhouette of the “troubled person who might still be good.” And it’s not just fiction. Figures like transphobic billionaire and Severus Snape redeemer-in-chief J.K. Rowling get this all the time. “What if she changes her mind?” “What if she apologizes?” I and so many others, including those close to her, tried to reach her. But she made the choice, oever and over again, to continue to use her money and influence to push legislation that harms trans people, immigrants, asexuals—those already being targeted, already dying. This isn’t abstract. This is now. And I’m not going to sit quietly and hope that maybe someday she’ll come around. Fuck that. You don’t wait for power to find empathy. You fight back. And if one day it finally affects her, if she turns on the machine she helped build—do you really believe that means she’s changed? Or just that fascism finally touched someone she cared about?

Syril could’ve chosen a different path. He had chances—many. If he’d survived and truly committed to dismantling the system he upheld, maybe there could’ve been redemption. But that would’ve been his burden to carry—not ours to offer. And honestly, the show strongly suggests he never would’ve unpacked it. He deserved the opportunity to change—but I’m deeply skeptical of a culture so eager to make that path easy for him, and so unwilling to even tell Cinta’s. That double standard in the show’s discourse says everything. 

As it stands, his final moments are perfect. Cassian asks him, “Who are you?” And for the first time, Syril sees it. He made Cassian the center of his obsessive fantasy—his rival, his foil, the mirror for his own imagined greatness. But to Cassian, he’s no one. Not even the antagonist of this story. Just a man so desperate to matter that he handed himself over to the machine. A discarded cog in a system that never cared. That’s the tragedy. Not that he didn’t get to change—but that he chose not to . He died in the very violence he helped create, consumed by the empire he worshiped. A willing tool, begging to be useful until the end. That’s the answer to “Who are you?”—no one the story will remember. Because in true revolution, it is the Cintas who are held and remembered. And the Syrils who vanish like dust in the machine.

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In the final three episodes, Andor shifts its focus to Luthen. Through my good boy, ISB double agent Loni, he finally learns the truth: the Emperor's “Unlimited Energy Program” is a lie. The Gorman massacre, the kyber crystal mining on Jedha, Krennic’s coordination—it all threads back to a single purpose: building the Death Star.

It’s a chilling echo of Hitler’s propaganda strategy—the Big Lie—outlined explicitly in Mein Kampf. The idea that people are more likely to believe a colossal falsehood than a small one, precisely because its scale makes it feel too outrageous to question. Repeat it enough, frame it as common sense, and it solidifies into truth. Hitler weaponized it against Jewish people, communists, and anyone who threatened his vision of racial purity and control.

That machinery is alive today. Trans people are framed as threats to children. Immigrants are branded as criminals. Entire communities are dehumanized through relentless repetition and fear. It’s the same logic the Empire uses: manufacture consent by inventing danger, then promise protection—so long as we stay isolated, disconnected, and afraid to care. That’s the real purpose of the Big Lie: not just control, but disconnection. To make us forget we were ever part of each other in the first place.

We see Luthen make a promise to Lonni—a promise of safety, of sanctuary on Yavin, of connection and true protection. But Luthen kills him instead after Loni tells him his information. It’s a brutal reminder of how far he’s willing to go for the Cause, how deeply his ideology is rooted in sacrifice—not just his own, but anyone he deems necessary. His rebellion is built on isolation, on severed ties. He can’t let anyone in because he’s turned people into tools. Even connection becomes leverage. And yet in the end, he chooses to let Kleya take the intel about the Big Lie, knowing it might likely cost him his life.

Because Dedra couldn’t let him go. She needed the victory—not just the win at Gorhman, but this win. Like Syril attacking Cassian to reclaim a sense of control, Dedra needed to catch Axis herself, to dominate the symbol that had eluded her. That’s the fascist impulse: domination isn’t enough—it has to be seen, acknowledged, credited. She needed to make Luthen hers. Their confrontation in his shop is one of my favorite scenes in the show. When he jokes about having “two items of dubious authenticity,” it’s a sly acknowledgment—they’re both masks. Both playing roles in systems that consume identity. But when the masks drop, the ideology is laid bare.

Dedra insists Luthen just wants chaos—because that’s the only way she can comprehend rebellion. She believes in the machine. In control. In the order that violence brings. Luthen sees it clearly: she doesn’t hate chaos. She hates freedom. And maybe to her, those two things are indistinguishable.

But she’s already lost. The idea is out. The Rebellion is no longer one man, or one signal—it’s everywhere. Luthen knows that. So in his final act, he takes the one thing she wanted: control. He takes his own life. He refuses to be her trophy. Refuses to be paraded as a symbol of the Empire’s dominance. She craves submission and he’d rather die than give it to her.

I love that after Luthen’s attempted suicide, the story pivots to Kleya—finally bringing her into focus. She infiltrates the hospital with quiet precision: methodical, relentless, and unflinching. Apparently the set was built on the cheap, but it’s one of my favorites in the series. The way the sightlines are blocked is masterful. Also, the old alien lady who she gets to help her infilate? As much as I love dissecting the political weight of Andor, sometimes Star Wars hits best when it’s a little weird and a little silly. Look at her—iconic.

But what really makes this arc shine is how it threads Kleya and Luthen’s backstory into the present. It opens on a flashback we don’t initially realize is Kleya’s POV: Luthen, broken, listening to the genocide of her people—a genocide he, presumably as an Imperial sergeant, helped carry out. He chants “make it stop,” like a prayer. And then he sees her—a child, hiding. He doesn’t turn her in. He saves her. Not out of heroism, but out of a fractured moment of mercy. And from that mercy, their bond forms—not as father and daughter (how could it be, when he helped destroy her world?), but as something forged in trauma and necessity. They anchor each other, shifting identities, surviving together. But it’s Kleya—not Luthen—who truly sees. She’s the one who makes him confront the consequences of the cause. She’s the one who still remembers what it’s all for. She’s the one who forces him to confront the calculus he speaks of to Loni—to burn himself for a sunrise he’ll never see. 

For her, the genocide of her people was the line—the one atrocity too many. Justlike Nemik says: all it takes is one too many. She carries that fire. She doesn’t just survive it—she transforms it into a reason to fight. It’s not Luthen’s cynicism that sparks hope in the galaxy. It’s Kleya’s refusal to forget. And Luthen knows it. He knows the sunrise he dreams of might also cost her soul. That’s why he makes her watch. There’s that haunting moment—maybe on Naboo—where he blows up a beautiful bridge, something irreplaceable. “This is the price,” he tells her. “This is what it takes.” Luthen never lets himself look at what comes after. He only sees what must be burned to make room for it.

So when Kleya finally kills Luthen, it’s not just a mission. It’s mercy. She releases him from the burden of the contradictions he never resolved. She does for him what he couldn’t do for her. And when she kisses him, it’s awkward, hesitant. She doesn’t quite know how to hold love or grief anymore—not when she - like Luthen - spent so long holding onto the Cause as the only purpose for being. But in that moment, she starts to become what Luthen never let himself be. Not just a survivor. A builder. Kleya is the one who carries it forward—not as a myth, but as a living thread. She’s the sunrise made flesh. Someone still alive, still burning, still building the world they swore could be. 

I love that Kleya is only able to kill Luthen—and keep his secrets out of Imperial hands—because of ISB infighting. Dedra, so desperate to be the one to catch Axis, would’ve stood guard beside his cell. Kleya wouldn’t have stood a chance. But Agent Heert arrests Dedra for overstepping her orders, and just like that, the door opens. It’s a perfect example of how fascism’s obsession with personal glory and internal mistrust makes it vulnerable. Dedra’s hunger to claim victory for herself creates the exact gap Kleya needs.

And it leads to Krennic confronting Dedra, revealing that Lonni stole her password—and that, in trying to steal from Krennic to catch Luthen, she handed Luthen everything he needed to uncover the Death Star. The whole scene is a masterclass in direction: Krennic looming behind her, taunting her with his disdain, belittling her competence while mocking her failure. Whatever that weird little finger gesture is—it’s perfect. The moment isn’t just personal humiliation. It’s the system revealing itself. Fascism runs on ego and paranoia. No one trusts anyone else. Everyone’s just climbing over each other for a scrap of credit.  Leopards eating their own faces, because the only loyalty they have is to power. 

And with that, Dedra’s out. From the Empire’s golden child to traitor overnight, thrown into the same Narkina prison she once sent others to. It even makes you wonder: were her parents really criminals—or rebels chewed up by the same propaganda she helped enforce - leaving Dedra to grow up without family or connection - only to be used to a system that never cared to hold her? That’s the cycle. Dedra used Syril and discarded him. Krennic used Dedra and tossed her aside. Tarkin will do the same to Krennic. The Emperor will do the same to Vader. Fascism has no loyalty—not to its believers, not to its foot soldiers. It devours everyone to preserve itself.

That’s why it always fails—because it’s built on the rot of its own ambition.  How many people will die before the collapse finally comes. And it’s not a inconsequential question—people are dying now and we need to fight back. But as long as there are people willing to resist, to reach out, to build something better, there’s still hope. 

In the end, it’s Dedra’s petty need for control that dooms the Empire. Or maybe it started even earlier—with those two guards on Ferrix trying to flex their power over Cassian. Or maybe even further back—with a thousand tiny acts of cruelty feeding the machine. You can’t trace the exact moment because control isn’t natural—it has to be enforced. Freedom, on the other hand, is spontaneous—it springs up unbidden, defiant, impossible to contain. And all it needs is someone willing to try.

It’s what Partagaz realizes in his final moments. Some say he took his life after being moved by Nemik’s manifesto—that he was inspired. But that misses the point. His question, “Who do you think it is?” isn’t about beauty or authorship. It’s about inevitability. He realizes rebellion isn’t a man—it’s an idea. Eternal. Irrepressible. We hold each other in that memory. We are all Nemik’s words, and he lives on in those who carry them forward. Earlier, Partagaz described the plan to catch Kleya by saying they should say she’s diseased so others would recoil in disgust and turn her in. It reflects how he described rebellion in Season 1 [Insert clip of his line from Season 1] But he was wrong. Rebellion is not a disease. It’s connection. It’s life. It spreads not through infection, but through solidarity. Through love. Through memory.

Partagaz, by contrast, sees the truth of himself: a replaceable cog. Just another little fascist soon to be discarded by the machine he served loyalty because of the failures of his own agents. So he takes the only power he has left—choosing the moment of his death, too scared to face his own inevitable brutal end at the hands of the mechanized grinder he gave his life to. Recalibrate your enthusiasm, you bastard. 

Oh, I also love K2SO slams Heert and uses him as a shield—That little fascist twink earned it.

Kleya calls for Cassian, and he comes. But it’s her reluctance to go to Yavin that hit me hardest. Like Luthen, she believes she won’t be welcome there—that her role is to carry the Rebellion’s secrets forward, not to live for herself. She’s ready to die in that apartment, another sacrifice to the cause. But Melshi and Cassian refuse to let her go. They tell her there’s more—more worth living for, not just dying for. And she listens. She goes to Yavin.

I love that, even then, she tries to disappear into the forest, convinced solitude is all she deserves. But Vel stops her, gently, reminding her: you have friends everywhere. Because she does. That’s what rebellion is—not just resistance, but connection. Not just sabotage, but solidarity. Luthen never fully understood that. He saw rebellion as sacrifice without solace, as fire without warmth. But Kleya learns the truth: rebellion isn’t just about what you destroy. It’s about what you build. Luthen burned for a sunrise he’d never see. Kleya fights to live in its light.

What I love about the final episodes is how they force a reckoning with Luthen’s legacy—especially for the bourgeois senators running the Rebellion. These are people who continually clung to caution and civility, convinced they could manage revolution from a safe distance. But Cassian won’t let them. He walks in carrying Luthen’s death and the truth about the Death Star, and he forces them to face what rebellion really costs. They can debate strategy and morality all they want, but Cassian is the proof—freedom is paid for by those who sacrifice. I’ll be honest—it frustrates me that Kleya isn’t mentioned in these scenes. She was there for every decision, every risk, every coded message. But that’s the real start of the Rebellion—not the high-minded speeches, but the fire lit in the dark by those who didn’t need their names remembered to make the future possible. And that’s why we fight to remember them anyway.

But this leads me to the thing I genuinely hate most in this show. Earlier in the season, Cassian talks again and again about wanting out of the Rebellion. He wants a life. Something that belongs to him—not just endless sacrifice. And he has every right to want that - to have that. He’s given more than most, and he deserves to thrive, to be whole. It’s what he’s been fighting for all along and he deserves to have it. 

But the series twists that desire into something else: a Chosen One narrative. It’s subtle, but it’s there. A Force healer tells him and Bix that he’s a “messenger,” that he has a purpose. Luthen hints that he always “just shows up” where he’s needed - as if some the Force is guiding him. His death in Rogue One is reframed not as a painful, necessary sacrifice, but as a mystical inevitability. It stops just short of calling him a Chosen One—but it plants that seed.

And it’s infuriating because what made Cassian, and Andor as a series, so compelling is that its about ordinary people fighting back. Not Skywalkers. Not Palpatines. Just regular people refusing to be erased. That’s what Star Wars always claims to be about, but rarely follows through on. Rian Johnson tried it in The Last Jedi, with Rey and the Force-sensitive kids—but the franchise snapped back to legacy bloodlines like a rubber band. It insists on specialness, on divine intervention, on the idea that some people are chosen above the rest. But that’s not the truth of rebellion. We are not saved by mystical heroes completing prophecies—we save each other through collective action. That was the heart of Andor's first season: the power of everyday people standing together. But here, that power is siphoned off and placed back into the hands of destiny, and it uses Bix to do it.

Bix tells Cassian she has to leave—that her presence makes it harder for him to become who he’s meant to be. It’s beautifully acted. And yes, there’s strength in her choice. But it’s also a painfully familiar and traditiona way to write a woman lead: as stepping aside for the man’s heroic journey. Her love and the family she represents become an obstacle, a distraction from his higher purpose. She becomes the one who says, “You have to go without me.” And outside of one more scene, the show doesn’t return to her. She disappears—her sacrifice absorbed into Cassian’s pain. I don’t mind Cassian struggling with having to keep fighting - thats a real struggle. I mind that the narrative makes Bix the thing he has to lose to become a hero. She deserved more than to be a stepping stone.

Instead, the final shot of the series reveals that Bix was pregnant all along, having given birth off-screen—standing in a wheat field, gazing into the distance, while Cassian rides off toward his supposedly “destinied” death in Rogue One. She becomes the visual embodiment of idyllic, pastoral femininity: the sunrise he’ll never see, the symbol of hope he fought for but will never reach. Some argue that this reframes her departure not as a rejection of Cassian, but as a choice to protect her child. And Tony Gilroy agrees. He said the final moment was meant to underscore her decision: “[The final shot was] for anybody who is confused about Bix leaving Cassian in 9... it’s a very sophisticated rationale for leaving. I mean, how do you react if you feel like you’re living with someone who has a destiny, and you might be confusing that destiny? That’s a pretty subtle thing. This underlines that and says, ‘Oh my God, she was pregnant when she was doing that.’”

But Gilroy’s wording reveals a lot. The pregnancy was meant to retroactively underscore Bix’s departure—a “sophisticated rationale” for why she leaves Cassian. But it wasn’t part of the original plan. Gilroy even later confirmed the scene was added in reshoots after they had filmed the scenes where Bix because she risked distracting Cassian from his masculine, action-driven, “destined” path. The pregnancy wasn’t originally part of Bix’s decision—it was added later, a narrative patch meant to reframe her exit as a personal choice rather than a byproduct of Cassian’s male-centered hero’s journey. It retroactively grants her agency while still reinforcing his arc. And that choice, shaped by a predominantly male writers’ room and directors lacking women’s perspectives, reveals the gap in how her story was told. Yes, Gilroy included it—but can we really call it agency when it was constructed to justify her absence, not center her voice?

The scene could work—but the problem lies in how it’s framed. We never hear from Bix about wanting a child, what it means to her, or how it connects to her survival. It’s just a visual cue—an image we’re meant to read as profound, without her voice to guide us. Even a cut to her covered in dirt, working as an engineer or instructor—like she did on Mina-Rau—pregnant or not, would’ve grounded her choice in continuity and agency. But throughout the season, Bix has been a casualty of the narrative’s condensation—her arc often yielding to the needs of Cassian’s. Instead, she’s reduced to a final image of passive, idyllic femininity: standing in a wheat field, the camera lingering almost fetishistically. A visual fantasy of patriarchal perfection—a woman softened, naturalized, removed from the violence of resistance.

This is underscored by the fact that final image is both juxtaposed with Cassian leaving Yavin to go to Rogue One and also visually mirrors Cassian’s death in Rogue One—a poetic visual inverse where he dies for the Rebellion while Bix nurtures his biological legacy. Gilroy even admitted this: "[The scene] makes [Cassian’s] sacrifice in Rogue just that much more epically painful: the child he’ll never see... I was desperate to end on a hopeful note. 'Rebellions are built on hope' isn’t just a T-shirt, it’s a legit flame." To be fair, I think the “hope” Gilroy intends here is meant to reflect what we saw earlier in Mina-Rau—a world of collective care that Cassian and Bix dreamed of, now made real for their child. The kind of community that rebellion is supposed to protect. But we never hear what that means to Bix. Her story is framed only as a contrast to Cassian’s loss. And that framing seems to build on the assumption that his death more tragic not because died for a future, but because he lost the supposed reward—a heterosexual family. The tragedy becomes that he never got to retire into a pastoral fantasy, where biological reproduction becomes the ultimate measure of worth and legacy.

Yes, Cassian deserved a life. He deserved love. He deserved not to die on Scarif. His death was gutting—but it wasn’t meaningless. It mattered. It was necessary. And it came at a cost, like so many who gave everything for a future they would never see. But Andor leans on a traditional shorthand to code that loss—not through the community he built or the galaxy he helped save, but through the child he never met and the heterosexual family he never asked for. It’s an ending he never voiced, yet the show frames it as the natural thing he must have wanted. Yes, he wanted a life with Bix. But we’re never told he wanted to become a father. That desire is assumed—mapped onto him by cultural expectation. A narrative shortcut built on heterosexual norms and patriarchal comfort, wrapped in the image of pastoral femininity.

And so, the implication becomes: Cassian had a child, so it’s okay. His story lives on. It’s a hollow, biological marker of legacy. It reduces everything he fought for to bloodlines, not solidarity. Not memory. Not cultural resistance. A visual of a brick laid on Ferrix in his name would’ve said more—that his legacy was in the people he fought beside, not a child he never seemed to seek. Instead, we get patriarchal mythmaking: the woman in the wheat field, fertile with a legacy the man will never return to plow. Because the truth is, most people won’t read Bix’s pregnancy as a symbol of her survival or her agency. They’ll see it as a vehicle to continue Cassian’s bloodline—a consolation prize, meant to comfort the audience with at least his legacy lives on.

And fandom has already latched onto it. Theories abound that Cassian’s kid might be Poe Dameron or show up in Star Wars: Starfighter or whatever spin-off Disney drums up next. We just broke free of the Skywalker saga, only to race back to venerating bloodlines. Sci-fi franchises keep doubling down on biological legacy—Picard Season 3 did the same, obsessing over children as the final mark of meaning for characters like Picard, who never seemed interested in parenthood. It’s emblematic of how deeply our broader culture fetishizes bloodlines as the pinnacle of legacy. I hope we never see that child again, but given Disney’s track record and relentless appetite for IP expansion, I doubt we’ll be so lucky. Even Tony Gilroy himself said, “Let’s be honest. Disney owns that child.” And if that child returns, as much as I want to believe that Bix, Ferrexian culture, and revolutionary spirit will shape their story, I can’t shake the feeling that Disney will center it around Cassian’s legacy.

It’s not like Star Wars hasn’t done this before. Revenge of the Sith reduces Padmé Amidala, once a queen and senator, to a vessel for the Skywalker twins. Her political power, her fire, her intelligence—all stripped away to make room for motherhood. The Rise of Skywalker repeats the same pattern: Rey’s entire arc collapses into bloodline politics, casting her as a Palpatine only to “choose” the name Skywalker—undercutting The Last Jedi’s radical message that legacy is more than genetics. Bix’s pregnancy falls into the same trap. A powerful woman flattened into a symbol of male legacy. For a show so brilliantly attuned to systemic violence, to the machinery of empire, Andor stumbles hard here. It knows what story Star Wars has told before. And it tells it again.

I desperately wish they had chosen another image. Had given Bix more to say and do, especially at the end. Had given her the chance to speak—to tell us what her survival meant, on her own terms. This insistence on lineage isn’t just patriarchal—it reflects what queer theorists like Lee Edelman have critiqued as our culture’s obsessive commitment to “reproductive futurism,” where the child is positioned as the embodiment of innocence and the future itself. In that framework, everything different—queer bodies, queer politics, radical refusal—is cast as selfish, antisocial, a threat to continuity. That’s the unspoken logic behind this ending: the idea that Cassian’s sacrifice is made meaningful because it protects a child. But why must meaning be rooted in biology? Why is hope only legible if it’s tied to heterosexual reproduction? That final image of Bix—fertile, quiet, pastoral—isn’t just fascist-coded; it’s the fulfillment of a larger cultural fantasy. A woman transformed from fighter to mother, stripped of political subjectivity and absorbed into a symbolic future she doesn’t even get to define. A future already spoken for.

But even if I don’t love how it’s handled, her departure still hurts. Because her absence makes the community on Yavin all the more powerful. We see Cassian reconnect with Melshi—the same Melshi who escaped Narkina 5 with him, who will die by his side on Scarif. We get the return of K2SO, played again by Alan Tudyk, and their scenes are perfect: poker games, bad jokes, found family forming in the quiet. Even after Bix leaves, Yavin is still a place of warmth. Of resistance. Of connection.

The final scenes are tender and soft. Wilmon builds a life. Vel and Mon hold each other like family. Kleya smiles—for the first time we’ve ever seen. It’s not bombastic. There are no explosions, no proclamations of victory. Just kindness. Just care. Just people choosing to build something together.

Because rebellions are not built on prophecy or bloodlines. They are built on hope. And hope is built on each other. When we reach out, when we fight isolation with solidarity, when we refuse to let empire dictate what survival means—we reclaim the story. We create the possibility of something new.

The show gestures toward hope, toward survival, but uses the oldest visual shorthand to do it: motherhood as destiny, femininity as fertility, the future as a child. It’s the kind of image empire thrives on—hope reimagined as obedience, life reduced to a biological throughline. But rebellion was never about serving the next generation for its own sake. It was about refusing the logic that tells us whose lives are worth preserving and why. And when we remember that, when we tell our own stories—messy, communal, defiantly alive—we build something more lasting than any bloodline. We build each other. And we become the future no empire could plan for.

==============

In the episode of Rebels that follows Mon Mothma’s Senate escape, she declares she is “taking new action to restore the Republic.” I think about that phrase often—new action, but to restore. To restore the very system of power that led to the Empire in the first place. The same system that killed Cassian’s home planet before, as Maarva says, he even had a chance. And in Star Wars history, we know how that story ends. The New Republic is born, but it withers into the First Order—another decayed infile version of the Empire lashing out in anger and even more genocide led by rageful young men who feel without culture or destiny.

It’s ironic that this choice in The Force Awakens—and now being backfilled by Dave Filoni in works like Ahsoka and The Mandalorian—was made by Dinsey so they could use the aesthetic of Star Wars to sell back a brand of resistance and hope, without ever critically analyzing its cycles - to push the story forward to new places but keep tellin gth eold with new paint. It mirrors the very mechanisms we perpetuate: nostalgia dressed as progress, restoration disguised as revolution. Tony Gilroy has said that Andor pulls from cycles of oppression throughout history. And he’s right—but what we rarely interrogate is why those cycles persist. Why we keep restoring the systems that made us sick in the first place. Even in a galaxy of infinite imagination, Star Wars struggles to imagine anything other than restoration. We cheer for the Rebellion, but it’s run by bourgeois senators who want to bring back the Republic—the same one that gave power to Palpatine.

We see this same logic play out in real life. In America, we’re told to fight fascism by restoring the same institutions that have always propped up white supremacy, patriarchy, and empire. Institutions that are complicit in genocide, from the U.S.’s violent colonial past to its ongoing support of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. As a trans person, I’m constantly told not to care—to fear Palestinians rather than mourn their deaths. The argument goes: "They’d throw you off a roof." As if it’s not our shared oppressors, the same people who have historically tossed aside queer people unless we’re convient to thier elictment of oppressing others, doing the killing. As if solidarity has to be deserved. We’re told to fear revolution and cheer for restoration.

Men like Palpatine are just a face. These systems create new Palpatines all the time. Systems like fascism, colonialism, capitalism are designed to replicate themselves, to isolate us, to prevent connection—because connection breeds revolution. That’s what Andor dared to show. Not restoration, but cracks. Fractures. The little spaces where something new might grow.

That’s why the limitations of the show’s second season sting. Because while Andor hints at the fire of revolution, it sometimes channels that fire back into the old machines. Cinta’s death. Bix’s sidelining. These aren’t just narrative decisions—they’re reflections of a creative team that, for all its brilliance, didn’t reflect the people most often erased by empire. The writers’ room and directors’ chairs, especially in Season 2, were still overwhelmingly cis, straight, and white. That doesn’t mean the show wasn’t smart, incisive, or powerful—it absolutely was. The fact that I was able to write this long of a video about all of its nuances and fascists speaks to how masterful it was and how much I love it deeply. Between it’s two seasons, it truly is one of the best works of episodic visual science fiction I’ve seen. But the work of revolution in storytelling wasn’t complete. Without queer women, without trans people, without Black and Indigenous voices, too much of the writing defaulted to old frameworks: queerness as tragedy, womanhood as sacrifice, racialized suffering.

Every writer has biases—stories we’re raised to accept as truth. It’s what our culture tries to incept into us as normal. And it takes all of us, together, to unlearn those stories, to hear through the lies, to tell something truer. That absence of people in the room—people willing and able to challenge what’s expected—meant those biases went unchecked. And while I love Andor, and always will, I also believe the stories we tell about revolution should be as radically inclusive as the world we’re trying to build. That’s the work. That’s the practice. And it should’ve started in the room.

And yet, people are carving space within it anyway. Women of color—shoutout to Bluesky user @pinayyonsei.bsky.social—have reframed Bix’s ending not as acquiescence to heteropatriarchal futurism, but as an act of anti-colonial resistance. Historically, the weaponization of reproductive violence has been used to erase marginalized cultures. In the U.S., over 70,000 Indigenous women were sterilized in the 1970s. Over 20,000 Mexican-American women in California. Puerto Rican women—like the lineage of Adria Arjona, who plays Bix—were sterilized en masse by the U.S. government. These programs directly inspired Nazi Germany, even if historians often try to hide that connection. And today, in Gaza, 70% of the reported dead are women and children, and thousands of pregnant women are giving birth in unsafe, often lethal conditions. There are multiple eye-witness accounts of pregnant women being killed by Israeli soldiers, including while trying to access healthcare. In that context, raising a child within your culture becomes an act of defiance.

Seen through that lens, Bix’s choice isn’t passive or patriarchal or reproductive futurism. It’s revolutionary. Not reproduction as bloodline, but as survival. Not to serve empire, but to defy erasure. Ferrix was brutalized, nearly wiped out. To say, "We’re still here" is an act of hope. It may not be the show’s intention, but it’s a reading we can claim. Reclaiming that image—reclaiming Bix’s story—is a refusal to let empire decide what survival looks like.

Because our culture will always find space and empathy for men like Syril. We build whole arcs around their potential, their almost-redemption. We treat their pain as profound. Meanwhile, people like Cinta or Bix—queer, brown, principled from the start—get treated like obstacles or afterthoughts. That’s not just in the show. That’s our culture.

But that can change. And it starts by reframing what legacy means. Not legacy in bloodlines. Legacy in action. Legacy in solidarity. That’s why I love the final shot of Bix—not as a mother completing a man’s story, but as someone surviving for herself. It’s not the ending we were given, but it’s one we can take. One we can make. As a trans woman, I’ve spent my life finding fragments of myself in other people’s stories. Characters like Dax from Deep Space Nine, who let me glimpse another future. And in claiming those stories, we make them ours. We take what wasn’t meant for us and reshape it. That is the work of revolution too.

There’s a line from the Gorman bellhop to Cassian: “Rebellions are built on hope.” It’s the same line Cassian will one day give to Jyn, who gives it to the Alliance. Hope passed hand to hand by those who will not live to see its end. But it lives on. 

And in the final moments of Andor, we see that: a quiet toast between Vel and Cassian. A list of names. Gorn. Nemik. Aldhani. Ferrix. Gorman. Not a legacy of blood, but of shared struggle, solidarity and remembering. Not in restoration, but in remembering those who fell dreaming of a sunrise on the horizon that we endlessly reach for. 

And then Cassian dreams of his sister. In Rogue One, Cassian has that line: “I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old.” And he has—and it wasn’t against the Empire. He was fighting against the mechanisms of colonialism, of imperialism, of oppression, of the systemic violence that isolates us from each other, that tears us apart and builds scars into our humanity. He has been fighting for freedom from that, to reach out again in defiance of that pain to remember...to hold on to our cultures, to our identities, to the histories of the past that echo forward and help us dream of something new. Cassian’s dream of his sister, who is likely dead, means he still carries her forward. He dreams of a day when others don’t have to feel that pain. He carries her with him, as we carry our dead who have died with us—not as a burden, but as a hope to build a better future. 

Cassian was never a Chosen One. That’s what made him extraordinary. He was all of us, any of us, each of us. The potential inside everyone of us. He gave everything, not because of prophecy, but because he chose to. Because he kept choosing to.

That is where revolution lives. Not in destiny. But in defiance.

If we want new worlds, we have to tell new stories. Andor couldn’t break free of every constraint—how could it? But it cracked something open. It gave us something to reclaim.

Cassian. Bix. Cinta. Ferrix. The rebellion isn’t built by the chosen. It’s built by the ignored. By us. By the people who are the friction in the air that explodes to makes something entirely new. 

That’s the sunrise I want to see.

We have friends everywhere.

And rebellions are built on hope.