Season 2 “Andor” Is the Best Show About Fighting Fascism—Full Stop

This is an Andor recap — the Star Wars show about rebellion, surveillance, trauma, and kindness. Back to your regularly scheduled Chicago news tomorrow.

If you haven’t seen the first three episodes of Andor Season 2, close this tab immediately. Go touch a lightsaber. Go sit in the corner and think about what Tony Gilroy would say about why you’re depriving yourself of having watched this. YOU HEARD ME. Come back when your mind is a sunless place. Then watch tonight’s episodes and text me what you think.

1. Bix’s Only Respite from PTSD is Being a Hater

Bix has lost everything. She's been tortured, imprisoned, and has now survived an attempted rape while hiding out as an undocumented fugitive, targeted just for existing outside Imperial control.

Gilroy said it clearly: you can’t tell a real story about empire and revolution without showing how violence really works. Of course, Star Wars fans are being so normal about this.

And yet — she’s still here, mocking a teenager about his crush. I trust Tony Gilroy to give her a full revolutionary arc, but I love that — until we get there, her coping mechanism (beyond murder in self-defense) is trolling a teenager. Revolutionary.

2. Kleya’s Only Hobby is Tormenting Vel

People who are not me love Kleya, that hyper-competent, silent-burnout type organizer who can no longer contain her irritation with dumb questions from her superiors no matter how much they have sacrificed for the rev. Luckily, there is an open bar at this wedding and also that Vel is here, someone she can be Annoyed At while she waits to get a ride back to the place where she actually do Work

It makes sense that Vel is conflicted about her commitment to v. her commitment to Cinta, her cold Empire murder loving ex girlfriend —criminal espionage for the revolution seems terrifying, boring, and lonely, while being in love is cool. This is a reasonable conflict, one that she navigates with integrity and true to life gay pessimism. “It was never going to work,’ she tells Mon Motha. “Or be… good. And there’s work to do.” That’s like the gay national anthem.

But I kind of needed the hammer-to-the-face melodrama of her showing up solo to the Make Chandrila Great Again wedding to fully feel for her, cringing through the tradition and the Gender of it all. It really couldn’t have helped that her assassin ex showed up right on time for a hit after ghosting her post-bank robbery.

Vel, Kleya, I’m sorry. I hope the food at this expensive wedding is good and that you don’t have to talk to anyone after 10 PM.

3. Cassian’s Speech to the X Wing Resistance Spy

Toni Morrison once said writing about goodness is more interesting than writing about evil: “You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good—and that's complicated.”

What makes Andor so powerful (beyond the thrill of using Disney money to tell a story about revolutionary morality) is how it explores this question: what does it mean to choose goodness in a brutal world? How do you keep your humanity when everything is built to strip it away?

When Cassian speaks to this woman on the Death Star who is about to give up everything, it’s not just moving—it’s the thesis of the show: goodness is a choice. Resistance is hard. And compassion matters, even when people fail.

One of the things that feels most radical about Andor to me right now is how consistently kind the revolutionaries are to each other, even under horrifying circumstances, even when they’re not exactly… nice (see: anything Luthen says to anyone at any time). At a moment when cruelty feels easier than hope, that lack of ego, the way they treat each other’s grief, doubt, and mistakes feels as important as the parts where they take over an empire prison.

4. Mon Mothma Microexpressions Are An Entire Horror Genre

HAHA she looks so happy here because HAHA everything’s fine and there is NO NEED TO WORRY but two seconds ago while no one could see her face she looked like THIS

This happens about 80 times in the span of 90 minutes.

Mon Mothma’s having a bad time. The woman is holding together an entire rebellion, a failing marriage, and a teenage daughter, all while pretending she LOVES WEDDINGS, especially one with creepy traditional norms she spent her whole career defying...

All of her faces deserve an Emmy. And also a Xanax.

5. Syril’s Bed Rot

Dedra and Syril’s scenes together evoke uncanny domesticity of authoritarianism: a routine middle-class horror show where you’re rooting for them in spite of their past uh… war crimes.

What’s fascinating—and tragic—is how Andor keeps showing us love and care in compromised forms. The show doesn’t flinch from depicting how even intimate relationships get warped by the revolution, and I think it’s interesting that of all our main characters, Syril and Dedra face the LEAST amount of conflict between their goals and their love right now.

Sidenote: Dedra looks so happy here. You just know she had a lovely childhood full of casual fascism, like getting tased for minor infractions. We love you, Dedra. Kind of, you evil fascist.

6. EDM Space Crashout

Sometimes Andor is about moral clarity in the face of empire. Sometimes it’s about subtle, slow-burning narrative tension.

And sometimes… it’s about Mon Mothma dissociating to EDM.

7. Even Space Nazis Hate McKinsey

One of Andor’s greatest feats is making the Empire’s bureaucracy feel not just cursed, but extremely compelling, leaving the audience dying to get back into what happened during yesterday’s budget call.

Season 2 doubles down on this with a Special Projects Retreat—a genocide-planning session disguised as a fracking efficiency meeting, attended by COINTELPRO Girlboss Dedra Meero and her deeply unimpressed boss, who is simultaneously the world's worst genocidal Pinkerton and better than any boss you've ever had in real life.

The meeting is led by fan-favorite villain Krennic and includes a retro propaganda video and two “Ministry of Enlightenment” PR guys who manage to horrify even him with their plan to “weaponize galactic opinion.” Everyone hates consultants! Even in space!

8. “They’re Trying”

Flying back with the X Wing, Cassian gets captured by a group of Rebels, but not a particularly well-organized one. The group fumbles the mission, argues on the ship, then starts breaking off and fighitng each other.

And look: I honestly hated these scenes, even though I got that… well, they weren’t exactly incorrect as far as leftist infighting goes. They dragged. They were painful. They made me want to scream “shut up and do literally anything useful.” But maybe that’s the point.

Andor doesn’t glorify rebellion—it shows how even people with the right politics can self-destruct. How good intentions and bad ego can derail a mission, especially when your only mediation tool is Goofy Rock Paper Scissors.

“Can they do that?” at one point part of the faction asks, as the side in the rain tries to attack.

“They’re trying.”

They sure are. Aren’t we all. Even the Neo-Republicans.

9. Camp Luthen Gathering Intel

As always, in the first act of season 2 Luthen gets some of the show’s most devastating lines—“Sometimes people fail,” or “How nice for you”—as he prepares to murder Mon Mothma’s childhood friend for attempting to blackmail her and compromising her cover.

But my favorite part is how insanely camp he is at that wedding. He’s gathering intel while acting like the life of the party. The double life is destroying Mon, but Luthen thrives in it—his joy, his danger, his drag show of duplicity. His mind may be a sunless place, but he can still pretend to have fun at a wedding. Good for him.

10. Spaceship.

Sometimes I’m a little embarrassed about how much I love this space show, but at the end of the day, and all of the nerdy, high-minded political intrigue or nods to Mexican Revolutionary history, I’m a Star Wars nerd.

Watching Cassian fly that X-Wing out into the middle of a weird space cornfield made me feel real emotion in the way that nerds do, even if we won’t admit to anyone.

That's part of why I found that New York Times article arguing Andor couldn’t inspire action so baffling.

When people talk about “how to save Gen Z from Andrew Tate” or “why the Left needs a Joe Rogan,” I’m always surprised they don’t talk more about fiction like this.

Tony Gilroy managed something almost impossible: he smuggled real values—real moral weight—into a high-profile, high-budget franchise, one that is continuously marketed to young men and reaches way more people than his standard Mark Ruffalo crying movie.

But just as important: he made people feel something.

I push Andor hard—even to friends who hate Star Wars—because it captures something rare: how it feels to act with courage and compassion when the stakes are real, the odds are bad, and the future isn’t guaranteed.

See you tonight. ✊🚀