We Are Not Who We Were When We Started: Notes on a certain economy of affection in Season Two of Andor

Fabio Fernandes

1. The second season of Andor starts in medias res, with Cassian Andor stealing a TIE fighter in a less than subtle way. This shows he is still learning the ropes after the first season. He is alone.

2. The last time we were here, we concluded our essay on Season One saying that the moral of the series until that point was strength in numbers. When Cassian escapes the Narkina 5 prison, he succeeds only by enlisting his fellow prisoners, demonstrating that unity is strength. This is something that the imperial regime knows very well and always seeks to dismantle.

3. But the Empire is strong in numbers as well, even if it is not as well organised as its propaganda organs would have us believe.

4. Propaganda, by the way, is one of the keywords of Season Two.

5. When Orson Krennic calls two officers of the Ministry of Enlightenment (echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four here, anyone?) to describe their strategy to weaponise the public opinion of the galaxy against Ghorman, we take notice of a side of the Empire we had never really known until now, though we obviously suspected of its existence.

6. The Ministry of Enlightenment does exactly the opposite of its name (just as the ministries in Orwell’s novel): it muddies the waters, acting as a powerful imperial tool of fabrication of fake news.

7. Their mission is to prepare the terrain for the displacement of the Ghor, since their interest in kalkite, a mineral abundant in that planet, will leave it utterly destroyed. This is the same fate that befell Kenari, Cassian’s homeworld.

8. Kalkite will be used in the construction of the Death Star. Much as the material the prisoners in Narkina 5 (Cassian among them) were forced to assemble.

9. However, the people of the galaxy are not aware of that. Their hearts and minds must be convinced that Ghorman should be punished for its irrational disobedience to imperial orders.

10. We are talking here about emotions. Propaganda manipulates emotions.

11. There is a certain economy of affection in action here: not exactly the kind of economy proposed by Göran Hyden in his classic text, but a kind of emotional web that entangles the characters of this series.[1] This happens not (only) because of the propaganda of the Empire, but also through the grapevine of the Rebellion.

12. That said, the tableau of the drama is set. Let’s see the characters and how they fit the bill.

13. First, Mon Mothma. The rich senator representing the world of Chandrila (a coded reference for Shangrila/Shambala?) is radicalised in this season, when she goes from a politician who still has some hopes regarding the return of democracy to the galaxy to finally abandoning the senate and family and becoming the political leader of the Rebellion on Yavin 4.

14. Luthen Rael returns as cunning as ever – but he is not the only cunning one in this story. This role is shared by Saw Gerrera. They seem to be both sides of the same coin – except they’re not. Both are ruthless, but Luthen seems somehow saner, if that’s possible. Saw doesn’t. He rambles, he mistreats his comrades, and he kills a supposed traitor (but we don’t know if he wasn’t really a traitor).

15. Luthen is Machiavellian in the sense that, for him, the ends justify the means: he will do what he needs to do by whatever means necessary. When he talks to Cassian about the possibility of a massacre in Ghorman, he says simply: “Ghorman will burn very brightly.” Luthen is willing to sacrifice that planet to the cause.

16. Saw is almost the same, except that he does not see the need to justify himself. He suffered torture (Luthen never did) and embraced the pain and the suffering. Maybe he is, in fact, mad, and he decided to embrace the madness. And yet, he displays a very clear view of things when he says to Wilmon: “Look at us: unloved, hunted, cannon fodder. We'll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet ... here we are.”

17. (As an aside of sorts, I am really not sure this isn’t a very biased take on the Sierra Maestra revolutionaries – at first in a cosmetic fashion, that is, showing a bunch of ragged men hiding in the wilderness. But: are they mad? Or: are they really wrong here? This should have been better explained by the writer. But it wasn’t.)

18. I’m inclined to see a bit of structural racism here. Luthen, as a white man, is ruthless, but he seems to be able to explain It rationally. We finally see a flashback this season to when he was Lear, an imperial swamp trooper who rescues a young girl who is a stowaway on his ship and has defected from the Empire. He changes his name to Luthen Rael, adopts the girl (who will become his assistant, Kleya Marki). He witnessed (and is also responsible for) a massacre in her homeworld.

19. The black man, though, is a different story. Saw Gerrera tells Wilmon he was a prisoner in a work camp in the jungle, in ghastly detail. But we are not shown this as we were in Luthen’s case. We must take his word for it. But we already know he can’t be trusted, so them’s the brakes.

20. Two sentences seem to encompass the whole spectrum of emotions across this season: “Pain will find you” and “Revolution is not for the sane.”  Maybe this last one should have been the title of this essay.

21. Because every single major character in Andor will suffer major losses, and many of them will die.

22. Maybe the only one who will not die a violent death – in fact, who do not die along the whole chronology of movies and series – is Mon Mothma. She will command the Rebellion until the fall of the Empire… and later, according to the Legends books, will be the New Republic chief of state, eventually preparing Leia to become her successor.

23. Not a single one of the rebels who interact with her along Andor, however, will survive beyond Rogue One. Such is her rich white woman’s privilege.

24. Speaking of privilege: I wrote at length in the other essay about Luke Skywalker and his blue milk-fed countenance, and how privileged he was to never have known pain and suffering on Tatooine, unlike Cassian. But we never see Luke Skywalker in Yavin 4, even though, in the last episodes, he should have already arrived there. But it’s good that he doesn’t appear.

25. We see a Force healer, though – it’s not clear if she is a Jedi in the strict sense, but she can use the Force all the same, and sense Cassian’s pain (something that, if we are to be honest about it, anyone who looked into his eyes would have noticed).

26. But fortunately, the Force is not in question here. No esoteric tricks in this series. Andor is nothing but blood, sweat, and tears.

27. We are far from the scarce-but-existent theoretical approach of young Nemik, who died in Season One. Instead, we are left with the praxis, namely, the fight. But there are different kinds of fights here.

28. There is Mon Mothma and her political approach, who has been compared with Nancy Pelosi by Tony Gilroy: “(she is) sort of a Nancy Pelosi character ... She's kind of trying to do good ... and she's losing (…) She[‘s] a powerful presence in the Senate but she’s facing defeat after defeat after defeat as the Empire is taking over.”[2]

29. And there is Luthen Rael and his insidious, spy-like approach. He is infiltrated in Coruscant society, mingling with the powerful in order to gather intel for the rebels – even though he doesn’t trust the Rebellion as well.

30. There is also Saw Gerrera, who also doesn’t trust the Rebellion – or rather, he doesn’t trust anyone, not even inside his own “band of brothers.”

31. And there is the Rebellion itself, a militarised group hiding in Yavin 4, with no apparent generalissimo (thank the Maker for that!).

32. None of the abovementioned really want to work together, but they are forced by circumstances to be actants in a Latourian network of sorts.[3] As I said in the other essay, there are also non-human actants, such as the droid K-2SO, who follow orders but can reflect upon them (and criticise them quite a lot, actually). But this droid is the only non-human entity that is really active in the story. B2EMO, which belonged to Maarva Andor in Season One, is now relegated to help the farmers in the agricultural planet Mina-Rau and doesn’t really do anything to further the story in Season Two.

33. But there is also another couple of actants who are on the opposite side: Dedra Meero and Syril Karn. They have become a couple, living together in Coruscant and later in Ghorman, and, if their relationship seems at times cold and distant, they also display some measure of affection. Throughout the entire series, we only see one kiss exchanged between the two, when Dedra eagerly grabs Syril’s head and kisses him.

34. There is only one other scene that seems to foreshadow a romantic or sexual interaction between the two, when Dedra tells Syril to turn off the lights in their room, and we don’t see anything else. We can only speculate: maybe Dedra is somehow ashamed of having sex with him, or even of having sex at all? Or maybe their intercourse is sadomasochistic, as we can surmise from the scene when Syril strangles Dedra just before the Ghorman massacre … and she simply stands there, letting herself be manhandled by him.

35. Just like the rebels, the ISB couple will not be forgiven: Syril will be killed during the massacre, when trying to murder Cassian, and Dedra will end her days (as far as we know) in Narkina 5 prison, weeping. Pain has found her.

36. Saw Gerrera also says to Wilmon: “We are not who we were when we started.” As good, round characters (according to E. M. Forster) in a well-written screenplay, the main characters of Andor are complex and multidimensional, and their actant network entails an economy of affections that encompasses love and hate, necessities and interests, and transforms every one of them through the series. Those who survived – even Cassian, who will die his foretold death (see García Márquez) later in Rogue One – are not the same as when it all began.

37. Neither are we, dear reader, neither are we. There’s something to be said about catharsis here, especially in this moment, when the eyes of the world are upon Ukraine and Gaza.

38. That said, who are the Ghor in our reality? And who is the Empire? And who are the rebels right here, right now? I’m sure you, dear reader, already know the answers to those questions.

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[1] Göran Hyden “The Economy of Affection Revisited: - African Development Management in Perspective” In: Improved Natural Resource Management - The Role of Formal Organisations and Informal Networks and Institutions, Nr. 17. January 1st, 2014.

[2] Proma Khosia. Tony Gilroy Unpacks Andor Ep. 4: Mon Mothma Is 'a Nancy Pelosi Character'. IndieWire. September 28, 2022.

[3] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007).