ANDOR Spoilers: Today's Finale Sets The Stage For Season 2 And Includes Some Big Surprises

For some reason I keep thinking that Dedra is the long-lost sister of Cassian.

Absolutely stellar show, though I do have five critiques — two about this finale, and three about the show in general.

1) The finale: it was absolutely great and emotional, but it felt like it didn’t linger long enough for the emotional impact to sink in. We go from Maarva’s posthumous speech to a riot to Andor rescuing Bix to the main character leaving, without really resolving any of the character threads. We don’t get to deal properly with Bix’s reunion with Cassian. Given their last meeting, some sort of reckoning or reunion was in order. We similarly don’t get much more with Dedra’s arc, which is a shame because her entire story led up to this moment. There needed to be some hints at least of the fallout from her failure. The next season isn’t dropping until 2024, so the resolution to this finale is going to fall flat I fear. And it’s not like this was a gripping cliffhanger either.

2) That final scene (keeping it general): Honestly, I didn’t like it. It looked good, but I don’t think that has any business being in this show. That ground is very well explored including in Rogue One (not to mention A New Hope and Return of the Jedi), and this show needs to be about the broader conflict. It will be a very bad decision if Season 2 focuses at all on it. We got that story in Rogue One. We shouldn’t get it again in this show.

3) The Rebellion: I’ve loved everything they’ve done with Luthen and the network he’s trying to build. But there is one big problem: according to other Star Wars media, there is already a rebel network in existence — the one run by Bail Organa that leads directly to the Rebel Alliance. So what in the world is Luthen’s burgeoning network? Something separate? If so, then Season 2 is going to have a lot of ground to cover to get him from Luthen’s network into the larger Rebel network.

4) Mon Mothma: Mon is a very well developed character, and I like the more personal touch. But frankly, this seems like the weakest part of the show and I fear it’s wasted her character. Mon Mothma is the future leader of the Alliance to Restore the Republic and of the Republic that is restored. So why is her arc framing her as a struggling financier for Luthen’s network? Given that this is a story about the Empire’s oppression and the birth of rebellion, I think her story needed to focus not on money problems but on her attempts to save what little of the Republic remains in the Senate, with an eye toward her gradual realization that the existing Senate (and therefore the Old Republic) cannot be saved. The beginning of that journey could have been explored during this season and have dealt with the flip side of Nemik’s more grassroots ideology of revolution.

5) The Empire and the ISB: For some reason, Gilroy framed this season through the lens of colonialism under British India. It was compelling and amazingly written and worked well, for Cassian’s story, but I don’t think it was the best way to frame the Empire. For example, we really only see the ISB functioning like an intelligence agency dealing with foreign territories, and not like a security service managing a domestic environment. This gives us an incomplete portrait of the ISB and thus the Empire that, as Luthen says, tells people where to go, where to eat, where to sleep, etc. We don’t see any of that. I think it would have been more compelling and complete to also portray the Empire through the lens of the Soviet Union and East Berlin, especially in Mon Mothma and Luthen’s contexts on Coruscant. And if we saw Coruscant as, say, a near complete police state, then I think the various Coruscant-based arcs would have been more compelling and would have elevated the show. As just one example, portraying Coruscant that way would have served as a poignant harbinger of what awaited the rest of the galaxy.

All in all, I loved this season, but I do hope Season 2 gives us much more to chew on.