SPOILERS AND SKY! STONE AND SPOILERS!
“Rix Road,” the season finale of Andor is savage, inspiring, a mad scramble for freedom. It takes a starfield of elements and digressions and combines them into a culmination of the Ferrix Saga that feels inevitable and earned. It also offers Fiona Shaw as a towering hologram, so it wins all the awards, gets all my tears, and understands the true nature and purpose of the universe.
While its actual action is tightly focused (a funeral, a fight, an escape) it’s carb-loaded with characters. In this finale alone, we have Dedra, Syril, Syril’s buddy who he switches hats with, Dedra’s competition at ISB, the Imperial mole, Mon Mothma’s spy, the Imperial officer that shouts open fire, the Imperial spy who gets stabbed by Cintra, the head of ISB, Kreegyer (unseen, already dead), Cintra, Vel, that dude who wants money from Cassian whose name I forget who sells him out, Luthen, Bix, Brasso, the dude who runs the communication depot, the kid who throws the bomb, the giant ghost of Maarva, Clem in flashback, the voice of Nemik’s manifesto, Mon Mothma, her daughter and husband, the unsavory character she’s forced to deal with who has his own son and spouse, the heartbreakingly great B2EMO, guy who runs the shipyard with the dogs from Solo, one of the Daughters of Ferrix whose name is Jess I think, Hammer Man, Death Troopers and Storm Troopers, an entire Star Wars marching band and, of course, Cassian Andor.
(Please note that these are just the characters the finale has time for. The season itself had even more, including something like eight prisoners that had speaking roles, Syril Karn’s mom, the people who work with Syril, and many more.)
It’s some kind of magic trick that the finale clips along with speed and intention and fire, given what I’ve written above. The whole thing clicks, every character contributing to this whirring plot machine. Star Wars style storytelling is many things that Andor is not, including efficient. Andor sprawls and overflows, showing not a galaxy teeming with aliens in the background, but with the entire Royal Shakespeare Company in mining costumes and Imperial get-ups, having moments in close-up.
Because of this sprawl, not all of Andor ultimately comes together. Mon Mothma remains in her own show, solving her own problems, that are vaguely related to what’s going on outside her stylish prison. We see her ruthlessness come out, as she accuses her husband of gambling to cover her tracks and uses her own daughter as a bargaining chip. We’ve been waiting for her to compromise in service of the cause, and she does so here. (I’m not sure if we’re supposed to cringe or cheer, the show’s moral compass in this respect is uncertain.)
With all this going on, Cassian Andor himself winds up being the MacGuffin for a constellation of characters who are the protagonists of their own interlocking narratives. He is not Indiana Jones, he is the Lost Ark.
Lost, perhaps, is the most appropriate term for him. (The first reaction I wrote of Andor was called Lost and we come back to it again.) We’ve seen him as a fugitive, as a member of a tribe of children, as being adopted by people who swept him up from his own land in order to ‘save him’ (which the show doesn’t treat as dubious and maybe should), as displaced by the Empire, as displaced by his missing sister, who is from Ferrix or is it Kenari? He works for hire, and then is unknowingly hunted by the very Rebellion he’s aided, he’s used multiple identities, he’s even been in prison. Even when he does return to Ferrix to say farewell to his mother, it’s to a place that is only dangerous for him, and he has to skulk in the shadows. He is a man without a home.
Which is why his final words in the first season of Andor are such a perfect distillation of his journey. Other characters are given speeches, moments of decision, motivation and clarification. Cassian comes to Luthen without any of that righteousness. He’s not looking for answers or a purpose. He doesn’t seek Luthen’s promise that the fight is worth fighting. He does not refute Luthen’s amoral war. He doesn’t condemn Luthen from trying to kill him. He does not give us a speech about the nature of revolution or the evils of the Empire. He offers a choice:
“Kill me or take me in.”
What does Cassian Andor want more than to be, finally, taken in?
With Andor’s first season now wrapped up I have a lot of wrestling to do with my feelings about it. In many ways, Andor is Star Wars without Star Wars. There’s a freshness to it that I know a lot of the audience relished, and many of the fans I love most were in love with the series.
“Rix Road” ended the first season with well-earned catharsis. Still, it’s been hard to shake the feeling that Andor contains an implicit critique of how Star Wars usually tells its stories. I like how Star Wars tells its stories so this underlying idea kept me at a distance. I think for many others, it was an invitation to reenter a galaxy that had offered only the expected for quite a while.
“Freedom is a pure idea.” That’s what Nemik’s manifesto says in this episode, as Cassian reads it for inspiration or maybe just company. He poses that freedom is natural and tyranny must be imposed, that rebellions against tyranny happen all the time because they can’t be helped. That tyrants live in fear because their system is always about to break.
Perhaps Andor is a best understood as a declaration of creative freedom, a way of saying that there are those who want Star Wars to be one thing, and true creativity means human-scale insurrections against that status quo. Perhaps it’s saying that reverence for Star Wars can be its own internal oppressor, and that a show that doesn’t have that reverence is free to follow its own path.
There’s plenty of time of to think about that in the future. Star Wars versus Expectations is a battle that’s gone on as long as Jedi have battled Sith, after all. For now, I’m just happy to be engaged, challenged and riveted by this show about spies and survivors, about what it costs to make oneself free.
As I press publish, it’s Thanksgiving morning in the United States. I remain grateful for this fictional galaxy where I can put my own introspection and find some inspiration among the Easter eggs and blasters.
Thanks Star Wars, and thank you, whoever you are, for reading.