Andor Episode 10
Out of all contemporary Star Wars TV shows, Andor may end up becoming the most interesting rewatch. While the thrills and surprises in The Mandalorian are top-notch, those big moments (like Luke Skywalker going to town in “The Rescue”) don’t really make you feel like going back and watching previous episodes for context. Andor is the opposite. With episode 10, Andor has delivered a massive twist, but this surprise won’t be the thing you’ll want to rewatch. Instead, it will be everything leading up to it. Andor is a show about spies, and that means, with a twist like this, everything you’ve already watched has suddenly changed. Although “One Way Out” will likely be remembered as “the one where Cassian finally breaks out of prison,” the bigger twist is all about a Rebel spy we didn’t know existed. While many fans had speculated that Dedra was actually an undercover Rebel, it turns out that a pseudo-background character, fellow ISB supervisor Lonni Jung (Robert Emms), is really the mole working for Luthen. It’s the kind of reveal that feels realistic because of course a Rebel spy would be the one person hanging around with the ISB who we’ve all totally ignored. As is the tradition for good spy stories, Lonni’s situation is tragic. Even though he wants to get out, Luthen refuses to let him go. This climatic scene in this episode is also a bit meta: Luthen suggests that he and Lonni are serving a higher cause, which the audience knows is a reference to the films of the Original Trilogy. Essentially, Lonni and Luthen are toiling in the darkness so that later, Luke and Wedge can fly some X-wings in an open attack against the Death Star. By the time of Rogue One, Cassian Andor wears a Rebel uniform on Yavin 4, but at this point in the Star Wars timeline, five years earlier, that idea feels impossible. As Andor heads toward the end of its first season, it seems the blurry picture of the Rebellion is starting to come into focus. All of this begs a larger question. While it will be fascinating to rewatch all of Andor season 1 knowing what we now know about all the twists and turns, it remains to be seen if all of this will close on a satisfactory note. Andor has succeeded in making its myriad stories about more than just canon dot-connecting in the Star Wars timeline. This means it has its own internal emotional stakes which are not beholden to the rest of Star Wars. But, with only two episodes left, it’s not clear how many of those threads can truly be resolved or changed enough to feel like we’ve reached a good stopping point before season 2. Maybe that’s not the point, but there does seem to be a basic question about how much time is spent on each mini-story arc. Cassian was in the Narkina 5 prison for three episodes, which he’ll only be free for two more episodes before season 1 comes to a close. Will there be a time jump to get him to the next point in his story? We’ve only known Lonni was a spy for one episode, but now, this revelation seems essential to whatever table-setting is happening for the finale episodes. If Andor was biding its time to get to the main event, that moment seems to have arrived. Did the show linger on certain ideas for too long before pushing things forward? We’ll certainly know in two weeks’ time.
