Andor Season 2 Review

A prequel to a spin-off, about a character whose death date was fixed before filming began, inside a franchise that had spent a decade mining its own nostalgia. Everything about Andor should have made it minor. Instead Tony Gilroy has finished the most adult, most politically serious and best written show Star Wars will probably ever get, and the second season is better than the first.

The Four-Arc Structure Is a Gamble That Pays

Gilroy pitched five seasons and got two, so season two does something no other show of this scale has attempted: it covers four years in twelve episodes, split into four blocks of three. Each block is a tight few days of story, and then the show jumps a full year to the next one. No catch-up montage, no explanatory voice-over. You simply arrive a year later and have to read the room.

The effect is remarkable. Because you are dropped into each era mid-motion, you learn the state of the galaxy the way a person living in it would: from what has become normal. In one arc an Imperial checkpoint is an irritation. A year later the same checkpoint is a fact of life nobody comments on. The show never tells you the occupation has deepened. It just stops being remarked upon, and that is far more frightening than exposition.

It also solves the prequel problem. Everyone knows where Cassian ends up, which kills suspense about outcome, so Gilroy redirects the tension onto cost instead. The question is never whether the rebellion happens. It is what each of these people will have to become first, and how much of them will be left.

The Most Serious Thing Star Wars Has Said

The franchise has always had an empire with fascist iconography and almost never had anything specific to say about how fascism operates. Andor is specific. The Empire here runs on committees, performance targets and career ambition. Its worst acts are approved in meeting rooms by people worried about their own promotion prospects. The most chilling scenes in the season are conversations about policy.

Dedra Meero and Syril Karn remain the sharpest thing in the show for exactly this reason. Denise Gough plays Dedra as a competent official who has correctly identified a real security threat and is rewarded for pursuing it with increasing brutality; her tragedy is that she is good at her job. Kyle Soller’s Syril is the more disturbing study, a man whose need to matter makes him the perfect instrument, and whose eventual collision with the truth of what he has served is the single best scene of the season.

On the other side, Mon Mothma’s arc is a quietly devastating portrait of what respectable opposition actually costs. Genevieve O’Reilly spends the season being asked to trade a piece of her private life for every inch of political ground, and the season’s most famous sequence pairs her daughter’s wedding with a massacre, intercut so that the dancing becomes unbearable. It is the sort of formal risk this franchise has never taken before.

Ghorman Is the Season’s Centre of Gravity

The third arc is the best three hours Star Wars has produced in any medium. The Empire needs a mineral that can only be mined by destroying a populated planet, so it manufactures a pretext: seed unrest, provoke a response, then answer the response with overwhelming force while the galaxy watches a version of events the Empire has carefully pre-written.

What makes it extraordinary is the patience. The show spends real time on Ghorman as a place with a culture, an accent, a weaving industry and a town square, so that when the square is used for what it is used for, you are not watching a plot beat. The massacre sequence is staged with absolute clarity and no triumphalism, and the immediate aftermath, in which the official account diverges from what we just saw, is the most pointed thing the franchise has ever done about propaganda.

It also gives Mon Mothma her moment: a speech in the Senate that names what has happened, delivered in full knowledge that it ends her life as a legitimate politician. The show has spent twenty hours earning that scene.

Luthen, Kleya and the Cost of Being Early

Stellan Skarsgard’s Luthen Rael was the first season’s best invention: the man who started building a rebellion before there was anyone to join it, and who has accepted that he will not live to see it. Season two finally shows us where he came from, in a flashback episode that recontextualises his entire relationship with Kleya and gives Elizabeth Dulau the season’s breakout role.

His conclusion is handled with a restraint I did not expect. There is no speech. The season understands that a man who has spent fifteen years sacrificing other people is not owed a good death, and it gives him an appropriate one instead. Kleya’s arc afterwards, carrying the network alone, is the season’s quietest and most affecting stretch.

Cassian himself is the least showy part of his own show, which is deliberate and occasionally costly. Diego Luna plays a man steadily hollowing out, and the performance is excellent, but by design Cassian has less interiority than the people around him. He is becoming a tool, and tools are not introspective. The finale’s handoff into Rogue One lands precisely because of that erosion.

Where the Structure Costs It Something

The time jumps are the season’s great idea and also its one real weakness. Some relationships develop entirely in the gaps, and you are asked to accept a year of change you did not see. Bix and Cassian in particular carry a year of unseen history into the second arc, and Adria Arjona does a lot of work to sell a state of mind the script skipped over.

Arc one is also the roughest of the four. It braids a wedding, a stolen prototype and a stranded squad of rebels with wildly different tones, and it contains a scene of sexual threat that is staged to be horrifying but has been fairly criticised as a blunt instrument in a show that is otherwise so precise. The arc works, but it is the only one I would not hand to a sceptic as a sample.

And the show asks something of its audience that not everyone will want to give. There is no comic relief, no droid to defuse a scene, no fan service for a decade of viewing. K-2SO arrives late and is funny, and the relief in the room when he does tells you how austere the preceding ten hours have been.

What Works, What Drags

Where to Stream It and What to Watch Next

Andor is a Disney+ exclusive, and both seasons plus Rogue One sit on the same service, which makes the ideal viewing order easy: season one, season two, then Rogue One immediately. Watching the film straight after the finale is the single best recommendation in this review. Scenes that played as competent in 2016 become devastating with twenty hours of context behind them.

A technical note. The season is graded very dark and much of the Ghorman arc is shot in overcast daylight with deliberately desaturated colour, so it is worth checking that your television is not in a motion-smoothing or dynamic picture mode. The cinematography here is doing real work and a bad preset flattens it.

The Verdict

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