Coming Home to Yourself: Perilous, precarious, and private prequel lives in Star Wars Andor

Christoffer Bagger

“You’re coming home to yourself.” Cassian Andor’s reassurance to a trembling fellow rebel at the opening of his show’s second season. He means to ease her fear and trepidation about her status as a mole within the Galactic Empire, aiding the nascent rebellion by allowing Andor to steal a model TIE Fighter. His reassurances seem to work, and he makes it away, but not without a fight. Her fate is never addressed again. But at least one plausible extrapolation is that she, left behind at the base, will be interrogated, tortured, or even outright killed by the Empire. This is what she must come home to.

I treat Andor’s reassurance as a thesis statement for the season, analysing how it applies in both a thematic and metatextual sense. On the one hand, I outline how the season shows a preoccupation with homes, and how these gradually deteriorate, dissolve, or are destroyed, leaving characters with nothing but themselves, and sometimes not even that. It is the case for Andor’s band of refugees from Ferrix, for Mon Mothma’s family, for the toxic relationship between Syril Karn and Deedra Meero, for the self-effacing father-daughter unit of Luthen and Kleya, and, of course, for the planet of Ghorman itself, whose population is bound for forcible displacement. 

On the other hand, I take an oppositional reading and argue that Andor’s characters are compelled to find their ‘home’ by conforming to their roles within the Star Wars canon. In this way, the season provides a complex treatment of the idea of a “home” or a place of refuge or belonging. This is a tension which persists all the way up to its final frame, of Bix holding Cassian’s unknown child, a frame which I argue seeks to resolve this tension.   

The Fall of the Ferrix Family

“Kill me now or take me in.” Cassian Andor’s ultimatum to the Rebellion’s unsung engineer, the cynical Luthen Rael, at the close of the show’s first season. In my initial viewing of the first season, I was convinced that even if Andor expected to make it out alive from his standoff with Luthen, he would act as if he were dead to everyone from his past life. In a dark repeat of his foundational childhood trauma, his life on Ferrix would now be as distant from him in his life with the Rebellion as his life on Kenari had been to his life on Ferrix. Hours before, Andor had just snuck around the funeral of his last living relative, Maarva, to free his former lover Bix from Imperial torture, and send her into hiding along with his buddy Brasso, youthful insurgent Wilmon, and their robot BMO. As they take off without their rescuer, they send him a longing look as if they were indeed looking at a dead man walking.

Instead, we find Andor, Bix, Brasso, B2EMO, and Wilmon living in hiding as itinerant refugee workers on the planet Mina-Rau. Among the rye fields, they have shacked up in a single room and seemingly found a dynamic within their found family. Ever since the popularity of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), in which the titular character imagines himself returning home to his lost family, while brushing his hand through fields of wheat, the popular filmmaking vocabulary has been ripe with images of corn fields that showcase a yearning for a lost home.  

However, this is not to say the home on Mina-Rau is a haven in the heartless galaxy. Our first introduction to the setting makes this obvious through the eyes of Bix’s post-traumatic nightmares. Not long after this, the Empire announces its arrival as a means of immigration control, putting the Ferrix family’s entire existence in jeopardy. Supplementing the first season’s exploration of occupation, colonisation, and forced labour as tenets of fascism and totalitarianism, the opening arc of Season Two explores the tension of migrant worker marginalisation, and quite viscerally so. Not only do our characters come under literal fire, costing Brasso his life, but Bix is also the victim of a sexual assault. This assault hangs as a blanket of trauma across her character for the following episodes, even more so as her next “home” on Coruscant is also introduced to us through further post-traumatic nightmares. Two of Bix’s homes throughout the series are thus inextricably linked to her trauma. The heartless world is not outside the haven; it is well within the walls.    

The ersatz son of the family, Wilmon Paak, also undergoes his own arc of separating from his family. The storyline is vaguely reminiscent of a teenage rebellion. Wilmon is not only torn between the safety of his own family versus the camaraderie of a gang of dubious strangers, he is also torn between two divergent approaches towards rebellion. Fittingly, this culminates in a scene not unlike that of a cult initiation, Wilmon inhales forbidden fumes and all but implicitly swears fealty to the crazed commander Saw Gerrera. “You think I’m crazy? Yes. I am. Revolution is not for the sane”, as Gerrera implores. “You’re here with me.” Gerrera assures, underlining both Wilmon’s commitment to the cause and his estrangement from Bix and Cassian.      

A Whole Galaxy of Homes in Decline

The Ferrix found family is not the only domestic unit under considerable strain throughout the course of the season. It is practically a foundational tenet of all the character’s plotlines. After a last-minute rescue of his stalking victim, Deedra Meero, our imperial fanboy, Syril Karyn, finds himself in a committed and cohabitating relationship with her. The relationship is so glaringly wrong that even the actors were initially hesitant about it.[1] As Deedra lays out the terms of their relationship with his mother, Eedy, Syril pouts in his bedroom as one manipulative matriarch replaces another. Deedra Meero herself brushes off concerns about her upbringing in foster care. “We had everything we needed”, she insists, “except a mother’s love”, retorts Eedy with sweetened sarcasm. This mercenary approach to what constitutes a home is also present in how the set design of Meero’s apartment shapes her relationship with Syril. The apartment consists entirely of open spaces, with no sense of privacy. When an affection-starved Syril is paying her a brief conjugal visit during his stint as a double agent, he is not only curtly told how long he has (“an hour”, “are you kidding?”) but also told to “turn out the lights” before anything else happens. Viewers are left to speculate who exactly the cover of darkness is meant to serve.  

In the first season of Andor, perhaps the most well-explored domestic situation is that of senator Mon Mothma and her family. It continues into the second series, where we see her marriage and relationship with her daughter (who she has all but sold off to fund her insurrectionist activities), and even her former implied fling with Tay Kolma (whom she had made complicit in her money laundering activities) completely fall apart. On the same day she loses her daughter, she finds herself forced to let Kolma be assassinated. In the closing shots of the episode, we see her trying to numb herself to these realities on her daughter’s wedding dance floor, with only her estranged husband, Perrin, seeming to take an interest in her well-being.

While this thread is unfortunately underexplored, we get the sense that Perrin is far from happy away from his wife, even in the arms of a mistress, if his final brief appearance in the series is anything to go by. His father-of-the-bride speech to his daughter does much to paint him as a tragic character in his own right. “You simply stand still and the galaxy will deliver a daily basket of fresh anxieties to your door without fail,” he warns his daughter and her betrothed, advising them to seek out the treasures of pleasure and gaiety. This is his “hope”, as he repeatedly stresses, and it is hard not to read this hope to be one of the next generation creating a home different from the one he has known. Perhaps he has also felt that he was just himself when he came home.         

The mid-section of the season also explores the idea of a home gradually being lost. The strip-mining of the planet Ghorman is said to finally leave the planet “uninhabitable”, and we see the gradual, methodical, and euphemistic process of engineering consent for the displacement and massacring of its native population. In the process of the Ghorman people fighting back impotently, an almost incidental casualty is the romantic unit of Cintha and Vel. Another potential home and family unit destroyed in the battle. In parallel with Ghorman’s deterioration, the familiar Star Wars location of Yavin 4 gradually emerges as a refuge for many of the characters in the series, although many of them do not accept it until the closing moments of the series. I will return to this point in the final section.     

Finally, the third from last episode of the series “Make It Stop” recontextualises the relationship between Luthen Rael and Kleya. They are functionally an adoptive father and daughter. Luthen, whom we learn had a shell-shocked crisis of conscience as he participated in the mass slaughter of Kleya’s people, took her in. He built his rebel network side by side with her. This episode perhaps also delivers the most succinct visualisation of the theme of “coming home to yourself”, as Kleya stands stock-still in the now-dilapidated Coruscant safe house which our Rebel characters have used as a base throughout the season. This is what she has come home to, herself.

Her moment of contemplation is but a brief rest before Kleya embarks on her final mission: Euthanising her gravely wounded father figure before the Empire can interrogate him. It represents perhaps the clearest instance of a family unit’s self-destruction within the context of the series, even as the found father and daughter might protest the closeness of their relationship to hide their true feelings. “Am I your daughter now?” asks Kleya as a child. “When it’s useful,” Luthen dismisses her. I doubt either the viewer or Kleya is convinced by the mercenary nature of his words.    

This final point is worth exploring further. A throughline of Andor has been that our heroes' interpersonal relationships are not merely transactional or means to an end. Communities and families are rife with tension and strife, and the camaraderie of the rebel alliance is decidedly questionable (“I have friends everywhere” is nothing if not an ironic refrain as a code phrase). But these relationships stand in contrast to the cold bureaucracy of the Galactic Empire. This is what makes Andor’s status as a prequel particularly tension-filled for the characters, as I will discuss further below.

Prequel Lives

Just as Andor’s reassurance that his mole was “coming home to [her]self” can be read as a compartmentalisation of the fact that her own role in the story will lead to her doom, so too it is for most of the characters of the series. While Andor has been lauded as an exceptional entry in the Star Wars under the auspices of the Walt Disney Corporation, it also serves as a prequel to a prequel. This predestination hangs over the entire series. Characters are meant to arrive at where we find them in Rogue One, and otherwise not contradict the established canon of the Star Wars universe if it can be helped at all. Luthen Rael needs to die not only because his role is played out, but because there is no reference to him in the following movies. Mon Mothma delivers a rousing speech, and an exciting escape, but must be escorted to Yavin 4 by other means, because that is what happened in Star Wars Rebels. Why does a traumatised and near-suicidal Andor pick up the remains of a KS droid as his final act before leaving Ghorman? Because the audience needs to see where Alan Tudyk’s character in Rogue One came from. 

Perhaps the most conspicuous scene highlighting this is the one where Cassian interacts with Yavin’s resident force healer. This is the series’ only token acknowledgement of the more fantastical elements of the Star Wars franchise, which are otherwise absent in Andor. It is also one of the more transparent ways in which Andor wears its prequel status on its sleeve. Cassian is told his instrumental role in the larger canon, and this is ultimately what spurs Bix’s decision to leave him. With a shot from canon, the momentary attempt at home on Yavin 4 is blown to pieces.  

The closing montage of the series reiterates the final positions of all the major characters. The use of montage to close out seasons or series is a staple of the recent decades of prestige television, perhaps made most famous by the television show The Wire (2002-2008). Andor has quite a lot in common with that series, not least its focus on multiple storylines, and an emphasis on characters fighting against systems and bureaucracies, possibly more so than flesh-and-blood antagonists. This, along with the wide critical acclaim of both shows, has led to no small amount of comparison. The montages of The Wire often emphasised the cyclical, and often futile nature of the struggles underlying the War on Drugs. Addicts on the street are replaced by new generations. Murderers and hucksters walk free to do their bidding again. Incompetency is often rewarded, so people fail upwards and perpetuate institutional failure and vulnerability.

By contrast, Andor’s final montage could be read as reminding viewers of the incoming collapse of the Galactic Empire, and thus decidedly more hopeful. This is certainly a reading which is present, which also requires a somewhat selective reading of the Star Wars canon. After all, it will not be another twenty years from the imminent collapse of the Empire to the supremacy of the First Order. In this way, Andor struggles with the tension of creating a cautiously hopeful ending, giving the viewers a sense that a better home and resting place awaits on the other side of all this struggle. This tension is persistent all the way up to the final moments of the series.           

Final Family Photo

The final two shots of the series recontextualise this entire discussion. Returning to the enticing fields of rye on Mina-Rau, we see BMO playing around with another robot at the feet of a long table, a cross between a child and pet frolicking. Off in the distance, we see Bix walking into the fields, her back turned to us. In the reverse shot, we get the reveal: she is cradling a toddler, whom we are meant to infer is her and Cassian’s child. As she looks longingly into the distance, the series ends. The viewer may be intertextually aware that Cassian Andor is walking to his doom, but we are assured that his family (if not the Andor name?) lives on.

What are we to make of this closing? I find it hard to argue that it is not an extremely ambiguous ending, and it certainly has stirred up no small amount of controversy among commentators. While it arguably gives some closure to Bix’s character, insofar as she exhibits a willingness to be at peace in a place that, by rights, should be a locus of trauma and bad memories for her, it casts a long shadow over the season and series. However, it also casts Bix in a very morally questionable light, in that she not only removes herself from Cassian’s life but seemingly leaves him with no knowledge of their shared child’s existence. 

Perhaps the redeeming quality is that it gives the viewer a more hopeful recontextualization of Rogue One’s otherwise mostly tragic ending. However, this is knowledge Cassian is never privy to, and we can speculate about whether he might have been quite so self-sacrificing and mercenary in that movie, if he knew that someone might be waiting for him at home. In this way, both Cassian and his (blood) family become victims of canon. 

It is undeniably a dark aspect of the finale. However, I also find it worthwhile to consider it in light of the intended reading. As explained by showrunner Tony Gilroy, the final shots are meant to spark hopefulness as “it would be a crime against nature to not finish with something hopeful, because what else do we have?”[2] Characters throughout the series have reiterated that the hopeful future they wish to create is one they can never live within, or even come home to. “We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet... here we are.” Saw Gerrera muses, blitzed, as he initiates Wilmon into his ranks. Luthen rages in the first season, “I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” But what Bix’s final moments of the series show us is that someone might get to see that sunrise. Homes are not just homes because warriors return to them from their heroes' journeys, they are spaces in their own right. Away from all the fighting, and perhaps beyond the claws of canon (if Bix and her child can avoid being roped into future appearances) is where the hope of peace can be found in the galaxy far, far away.

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[1] See: Ethan Sacks. “Even These Andor Stars Were Creeped Out by the Series’ Strangest Power Couple.” StarWars.Com, May 15, 2025. https://www.starwars.com/news/andor-season-2-interview-denise-gough-kyle-soller.

[2]  Dalton Ross. “Andor Creator Tony Gilroy Explains That Surprise Ending and Final Shot.” Entertainment Weekly, May 14, 2025. https://ew.com/andor-creator-tony-gilroy-explains-surprise-ending-final-shot-11731474.