Main cast: Diego Luna (Cassian Andor), Stellan Skarsgård (Luthen Rael), Genevieve O’Reilly (Mon Mothma), Denise Gough (Dedra Meero), Kyle Soller (Syril Karn), Adria Arjona (Bix Caleen), Faye Marsay (Vel Sartha), Elizabeth Dulau (Kleya Marki), Alastair Mackenzie (Perrin Fertha), Joplin Sibtain (Brasso), Muhannad Bhaier (Wilmon), Anton Lesser (Major Lio Partagaz), Ben Miles (Tay Kolma), Richard Dillane (Davo Sculdun), Sam Gilroy (Gerdis), and Benjamin Norris (Bardi)
Director: Ariel Kleiman
Well, folks, Disney pulled a Netflix move and dropped the first three episodes of the second season of Andor in one fell, joyless swoop. I can only assume this is because someone in corporate realized, “Oh wait, nobody actually watched the first season except for that one sweaty YouTuber with ‘Lore’ in his channel name!” and decided to just rip the Band-Aid off.
Now, about that episode title Sagrona Teema. What does it mean? A planet? A character? A type of exotic space cheese? Nope. A thorough trawl through Wookieepedia and the decaying husk of X—barely anyone is talking about this show—revealed absolutely nothing. At this point, it might as well be Shyriiwook for “clip show”.
Because that’s what this episode is: a montage of disparate, increasingly tedious plot threads, stitched together by editors who apparently thought Bohemian Rhapsody (the film, not the song) was a masterclass in pacing.
In the galaxy’s most boring wedding subplot, Luthen Rael and Vel Sartha are plotting something. What? Who cares. Vel wants to find Bix Carleen, which means at some point later, everyone will finally converge and exchange one-liners about hope or rebellion or beige tunics. In the meantime, Mon Mothma sweats buckets while Tay Kolma continues to out himself as a man who knows way too much about her secrets and isn’t above using that to his advantage. Perrin Fertha thinks she’s cheating on him. Honestly, Mon, you should be so lucky.
Meanwhile, in The Young and the HR Department, Dedra Meero has been demoted to the planet Hickweed-6 or whatever, and is now roomies with Syril Khan, the galaxy’s angriest hall monitor. Syril’s inexplicably doing well career-wise, proving that even in space, obnoxious bootlickers fail upward.
Over on Planet Symbolic Allegory, aka Yavin-4 (because of course it’s Yavin 4—subtlety was executed by firing squad somewhere around Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), our photogenic illegal immigrants are about to be raided by Imperial ICE agents. Prepare the X threads praising this show for being “timely” and “fearless” while it, in fact, lazily borrows its messaging from 2018-era protest memes.
And as for our titular hero, Cassian Andor continues his streak as the most aggressively mediocre protagonist in Star Wars history. The man’s criminal record at this point reads like a Looney Tunes short: imprisoned again, bumbles his way out again, rinse and repeat a few times, and now stumbles his way to Yavin-4. Diego Luna remains so wooden he might actually be a cosplay prop.
To sum it up: Andor keeps pretending to be this bold, adult political thriller, but it has all the nuance and pacing of a Wattpad fanfic hastily written during a Zoom meeting. It’s linear, it’s predictable, and it’s somehow duller than the monotone color palette every scene insists on bathing in.
At this rate, The Acolyte, for all its narrative dumpster fires, will be remembered in glorious infamy, while Andor is destined to be forgotten, brought up only when some poor soul on Reddit posts: “Why does no one talk about Andor Season 2? It was so deep.” Then the debate will spiral into how the carpet color in Mon Mothma’s house ruined the franchise. Again.
In other words, it’s perhaps better to be a train wreck you can’t look away from than a beige, glacially paced shrug of a show.
PS: Diego Luna still can’t act.
