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The denouements to the first arcs for both seasons were uncanny as they were somewhat contrastful. Both Kassa and Cassian in Reckoning were embarking into the unknown with regards to their jouneys; Kassa to a new home after being forced to leave Kenari, and Cassian to a new environment after being forced to leave Ferrix, and both fleeing destruction. There was a certain hope and curiosity in their eyes; as if they were ready to embrace what they were going into, regardless of whether they did or didn't know what the future held.

In Harvest, the life has been drained from these characters. They may have fled death and destruction on Mina Rau but they can't escape the weight of the hardship wrought on them by their experience. Cap it all off with Brasso's death. And now, their eyes harbour despair, pain, fatigue, fear of what is coming ahead. But the last shot of Cassian as he dons that 1000-yard stare is one of resolve. As if he is steeling himself for what he knows is an even harder journey ahead in the Rebellion.

A similar scene must have happened off-screen when the Ferrix gang were escaping on Pegla's ship at the end of ep12. And I think that version of reverie they each must have had was something between the one in Reckoning and the one in Harvest.

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...have to die.

Luthien and Mon had to make decision to cut Tay out of their group permanently and they did make the right call but I see if Tay did 2 very specific things that rush to murder wasn't necessary.

The first problem is the fact he was getting visibly drunk.

That lack of self control automatically sealed his fate because you never know when he would unintentionally make a mistake talking to the wrong people.

Not only did he not to be impaired by drugs or alcohol he also needed to apologize for even asking for money; because of how it would impact Mon's own investment in her Foundation after complaining about how rebel activity hurt his investments, and that he wants to continue assisting Mon make up for that financial hit to her Foundation fundraising.

This sequencing would signal that Tay is willing to invest more of his time helping the rebellion and he will be more mindful in the future of how he invests his money to reduce the risk of getting blown out so hard by growing conflict.

Mon in episode 1 literally told Vel in episode 1 they can still be able to find some time to enjoy their lives when it was clear to Mon Cinta has been avoiding Vel.

If Tay had done these 2 things he wouldn't be no different than Mon when both would be trying to do their best to soften the blows to their own privileges' while supporting an insurgency movement.

To go one step further, part of their power and what makes them important is their money . Mon being a Senator gives her access to tools to influence people but Tay has none of that.

As long as Tay accepted the reality the Foundation needed to be supported in some way then he would continue to be a reliable ally.

But that's not what happened here. He crossed 2 lines and technically he crossed 1 more by informing Mon he is going to cozy up to Sculdan but that bad sign is just an extension of how he failed to internalize some amount of sacrifice will be incurred while supporting the Foundation.

Q

After watching the first 3 eps, I was thinking about how things inevitably end up, and had a few thoughts.

1. Since Luthen is not in Rogue One, but there is instead a different spymaster giving Cassian orders, obviously Luthen must die. I'm not convinced yet about Bix's or most other characters' fate yet.
2. It's obvious in Rogue One that Cassian has had to make some very hard decisions and sacrifices to become who and what he is. We see early on in Rogue One that he is willing to kill - even members of the Rebellion - for the cause. He's had to do it before.
3. Therefore, I believe that it's Cassian who ultimately kills Luthen. Most likely because Luthen's cover has become compromised and the Empire will find Mon Mothma and the Rebels if he isn't taken out. I believe Luthen knows this, and asks Cass to do it. Luthen probably sets up the Rebellion with a new spymaster and resources before dying.
4. Diedre (and possibly Syril) will probably be involved with catching "Axis" - perhaps because we see Kleya taking bigger risks when it comes to communication - or perhaps through an investigation (including Davo Sculdun or Leida). If they catch Kleya, it would certainly lead them to Luthen. I like the idea that Perrin would take the fall for Mon to protect her.
5. I think it would be a perfect end for Diedra and Syril to end up stationed on the death star at the end of the show - we wouldn't see their deaths, but we know what will happen.

What do you guys think?

The entire theatre got up and started screaming "cristal jockey" and we got kicked out.

I am aware of all the criticisms and maybe some others weren’t satisfied. However for me I am still getting that same itch of curiosity when it comes to a show. Felt like it hasn’t really missed a beat for me. I am excited for more and discussions here!

Krennic hand picked people that aren’t under his direct control, encouraged them to not divulge his scheme to hollow out and destroy a planet despite it being filled with very wealthy & powerful people for a mineral to coat a “reactor” that’s obviously for the Death Star under the guise of a “perpetual energy project” with a window of 3 years.

The fact that he chooses NOT to divulge the real reason for the Kalkite extraction makes me absolutely believe that he’s going to kill everyone in that room whether they fail or succeed. He has created the conditions for them to be considered traitors acting outside the chain of command with no trail to link him & plausible deniability of their actions after he gets what he wants to further his ambitions.

It would make his death in Rogue One incredibly ironic given that he dies at the hands of another highly ambitious superior, Tarkin, who steals & kills him with his own weapon under the guise of plausible deniability because of the rebel attack on Scarif.

…At least that’s what I think will happen.

Link for Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/56kmRJLcpDChxT96ttkIKB?si=uYOmqrFiTaGggdYhHBH7Gw

Syril, Galactic beta male so whipped he proves himself useful to the alpha girl boss dedra. Working away behind the scenes to provide to his new found love and master that it shines a strong comparison to real life values and dynamics. Alpha males truly are, for once, being shown as superfluous.

My wife has never watched Star Wars anything. Movies, shows, nothing. She’s very into spy dramas. Think Andor S1 is a good intro into SW universe or would she miss out on a lot of context from the movies?

I've always had a soft spot for Mon Mothma, even as a kid. Playing "Star Wars" as a kid, there were only two speaking female characters in the OG trilogy to choose from Princess Lea and... Mon Mothma. So imagine 7 year old me running around the playground pretending to be Mon Mothma.

Andor has cemented her as my favorite character.

Source:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YG6B0q

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When Cinta and Vel are getting ready, they have to hide behind some rocks while an imperial patrol walks by. They look at each other in disgust when one of the soldiers stops to take a leak (I. E dick-in-hand) and says "Let's just say discretion was not the first thing on my mind when I saw her". The other soldiers act chummy and laugh it off.

The sexual exploitation of women has been an omnipresent theme since the start (yknow, in a literal fucking brothel) and is a main driver for characters like Cinta, Vel, and Mon to rebel not just against the empire but against a common culture of permissiveness.

I’m noticing that both visually and in the script there are a lot of circles in these opening episodes of S2. In contrast, the first image here is an iconic one from s1 - Mon trapped in the Imperial symbol, and the entire season was filled with echoes of this polygon motif (most notably, the Narkina 5 shot from above.

The symbol of the rebellion is circular in outline . Mon’s estate and the architecture on Ghorman in the information film all feature lots of circles.

In the dialogue I’ve spotted three examples…

• Cassian motivating Niya with the idea of her stepping inside the circle (of the rebellion )

• Krennic informing the Ghorman cabal that they are the “tightest of closed circles”

• The Chandrila wedding rite involving Leida being invited to “step inside my circle” and all the dancing in circles.

I have a feeling there’s more than one meaning at work here, but it will be interesting to see if this is something that’s developed in later episodes.

I’m on a third rewatch at the moment and I’m still discovering a whole lot more that I absolutely missed the first time round. Anyone spot anything else on this circles theme?

I hope she made it out and comes back!

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I see lot of discussion about the rape and why did Bix had to say "He tried to rape me".

I believe that was really genuine reaction and really realistic and powerful, Bix at that moment was scared and in a distress she was just attacked and in a self defense she killed the man and as far as we know, that could be her first time killing someone. At that moment when she said "that", she is trying to reach for humanity and understanding from that solider, some sympathy, but she doesn't get it, even if he was a nice guy it would change nothing, she would still be arrested or killed and the whole incident would be covered and she would be just a murderer of the officer, she would never get justice or due process.

And also what I like is that at the same time with all that happening we have parallel with Mon Mothma trying to fight her sorrow and troubles in alcohol and dance, trying to lose herself. But Bix doesn't have that privilege, she has to move, run, they even had to leave Brasso lying dead without moment to contemplate. People like Mon Mothma are no question crucial for success of the rebellion ,but people who suffer the most are people like Bix, Andor and Brasso, they are there on the ground facing the challenges every day and getting killed and tortured, they are nameless heroes who are first forgotten.

Mon :"I am not sure what you are saying"

Luthen: "how nice for you"

I wanted to point out how similar the two dancing scenes are in context and also visually.

At the end of the 3rd episode of season 2 we can see Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter's wedding as the only way right now of dealing with her life crumbling away.

There's a similar very sad and beautifully filmed scene at the end of Mother (2009) a south-korean film by Bong Joon-Ho. Mild spoilers ahead: This scene shows the mother the tittle refers to numbing herself and start dancing with the rest of the mothers on the bus. The way it's filmed was intended to seem like she's dancing in hell, surrounded by formless silhouettes, she's not herself anymore, her life is already over so the only option is to let yourself go.

Here's the link to that scene if you want to watch it: 영화 마더(Mother) 엔딩 ENDING - YouTube

I think it's a nice connection to make. I don't know if this was an inspiration, but I find it interesting that in two such different stories, cultures and universes, a mother expresses her grieve and pain by quietly-numb-suffering behind the mask of dancing, surrendering to it. They are not there, they are nowhere.

So much is covered in the first arc. We get fantastic, nuanced writing and acting. But there must be more that was shot than could be fitted into the time constraints of each episode. Some complain that the Maya Pei sequences are too long / are taking away from screen time from "everthing else". It would be great to see more of the "everything else", more Brasso, Bix, Wil on Mina-Rau, more Luthen and Mon, more Kleya and Val, more Eady, Dedra and Syril...

Hopefully that title isn’t a spoiler, and I did have a scroll down through the hot tab and couldn’t see anything explicitly similar to this so hopefully I’m all clear.

So, the Maltheen Divide Conference, the Ghormans. I want to tick off a few comparisons here.

1. Krennic says that he “would prefer relocation”.
2. Demonisation of the Ghormans amongst the galactic populous to discourage people to care about them, using potentially fabricated or exaggerated news.
3. Dehumanisation (or desentientisation) of the natives by suggesting that they have become more like spiders than sentients, explaining why they are so “different”. Or perhaps inferior.

I’ll make this explicit, this is nearly 1:1 what the Nazi’s did against the various ethnicities they targeted. Much has been made by holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathisers that “oh Hitler initially planned to relocate the Jews to other countries like Madagascar”. I don’t believe at all that Krennic intends to let the Ghormans relocate, just as how I don’t believe the Nazi’s ever intended to let the Jews leave, already in Star Wars lore we have the genocide of the Geonosians in order to cover up their part in constructing the Death Star, and I will not put it past Krennic to do the same here.

The campaign to sully the reputation of the Ghormans reeks of similar campaigns the Nazi’s ran to get the Germans to hate the Jews, Slavs, Romani, and the numerous other victims of their genocide. Caricatures of Jews, fabricating or over exaggerating tales of them being evil or unreasonable. All in the attempt to at least breed indifference or passive support when the inevitable happens. Plus it being done under the guise of “unlimited free energy” to place the Ghormans in opposition to the “good” of the galaxy.

And just, the conference itself is almost certainly a parallel to the Wannsee Conference where a bunch of middle management bureaucrats in the Nazi regime came together to discuss the mechanisms for what would become the “final solution to the Jewish Question”, just a bunch of people sat in a conference room discussing civilly the mundanity of how to conduct one of the largest industrialised genocides the world has ever seen. This entire conference feels like the exact same sort of thing, ironically on a smaller scale as it “only” concerns a few hundred thousand innocents compared to the multi millions that the Wannsee Conference concerned, and not driven by an ideological hatred of an entire ethnicity/religious group but simply because they are in the way of a few peoples ambitions.

I applaud the writers highlighting the sheer mundanity of evil that can propagate, not just through people like Syril, or those officers on Aldhani discussing the simple ways in which they inflicted a cultural genocide on the Aldani natives, but progressively getting higher up with not moustache twirling outright evil individuals gleefully celebrating their latest plot, but through the rank and file administrators just plodding along and being so indoctrinated that they can discuss how to suppress an entire ethnic group while snacking on finger foods, or the sheer joy at a job well done from those propagandists.

I just feel sad at how many people will watch this scene and completely miss the not so subtle (to me) real life comparisons it has or the deeper implications it holds,

I think its when Luthen is talking to mon in episode 3 about having to "take care of" Tay Kolma. Mon "But I've known him my whole life" Luthen "People fail, that's our curse"

Imo that 30 second clip is just incredible, the dialog combined with the fear and dread on mon's face, and the music ramping up too, it's all just perfect.

how would you rank the four main plots of the first arc?

Cassian and the Maya Pei Brigade

Mina-Rau

Mon and the wedding

Dedra

mine would go 1. Mon 2. Mina - Rau 3. Dedra 4. Cassian

George Lucas explaining how the heroes of Star Wars were modelled after the Vietcong and resistors to colonialism, while the villains represented American and British empires.

Star Wars was written when the Vietnam war had just ended and was still very fresh on the America's mind and anti-colonial wars were happening all over Africa.

The prequels were full of refences to post 9/11, including the war on terror and the Patriot Act.

This classic scene is literally an in your face reference to George W. Bush's 'you are either with us or you are with the terrorists' speech.

So if the "illegal immigrant" parallel in Andor offends and/or upsets you, then you were either too stupid to understand the previous political references done in Star Wars or you did not mind the ham fisted political commentary as long as your beliefs were not the target.

I totally get that some people might prefer fictional stories that are completely disconnected from our political realities. This is a fair preference. But if that is the case, then Star Wars was NEVER for you in the first place.

This is not new. Disney did not invented it. It is not part of the "woke wave". It was always like that. Lucas was always a hardcore, vocal liberal that put a lot of his political views into his work.

I said what I said. Please discuss.

Erskin Semaj has already shown up in the first arc. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen him in the trailers. He’s mentioned his connections to Chandrila, Naboo, and Ghorman. We know he appears in Star Wars Rebels. Do we think he’s being set up to play a major role, and become Mon’s confidante? Is he already on Luthen’s radar for recruitment? Will he be the one who’s pushing Mothma to denounce the Ghorman massacre?

As we know Jimmy Smits played Bail in AOTC, ROTS, Rogue One and Obi-Wan.

He was great but he is almost 70 and that doesn't fit with the age Bail should be in Andor.

The new actor to play Bail will be Benjamin Bratt. Loved his work and think he is a great replacement for Smits.

Maybe I missed it, but... does anyone think Tay wants money and not Mothma herself? She seemed fixated on a "number" but it seemed clear to me that's not what he was interested in.

It’s time for an Andor spinoff centered on the Karn family. Give us the Harlo Chronicles—and cast Walton Goggins as Uncle Harlo while you’re at it.