They know I would have happily watched an entire episode of Cassian and Melshi trolling K-2SO, but I guess they had a series to finish.
“Make It Stop”
One year before the Battle of Yavin. Kleya gives Luthen a blaster and tells him not to engage Lonni for their emergency meeting unless the conditions are perfect, but Luthen thinks they’re past that. Lonni reveals that Dedra Meero has finally pieced things together with all the intel that’s run across her desk, and she’s likely found them both out, and is coming for Luthen. Lonni has found out something major from getting access to Dedra’s files, and wants a guarantee of safety for himself and his family; he tells Luthen that the Emperor’s energy program is a lie. Orson Krennic has been using it as a front to build a secret weapon for the past decade. Luthen promises Lonni that he’ll be safe with his family on Yavin and asks for everything that Lonni knows. Lonni tells him, and Luthen kills him to guarantee his silence. He gives Kleya all the information: Jedha, Scarif, and Ghorman are all related incidents, Galen Erso is involved, they want kyber and are mining for it. He goes back to their shop to destroy evidence, telling her he’ll get the word out against her protests.
As he pours a corrosive over the communications switchboard, Dedra Meero arrives. Luthen lets her in and shows her around the shop, and she asks if anything in the gallery is a fake. He tells her there are only two pieces that are questionable, and shows her a dagger that purports to be 60,000 years old. She offers him a piece on consignment; an Imperial Starpath unit, the same one he and Cassian worked so hard to retrieve. She tells him she’s dreamt of this moment, and that he disgusts her. He tells her she’s afraid of freedom; she insists that he doesn’t want freedom, he wants chaos. He tells her that she’s failed anyway, that the Rebellion is everywhere now. Dedra notices the burning in the back room and Luthen stabs himself with the dagger while she looks away. She calls in her team to take control of the shop and get Luthen medical attention, telling them to keep him alive at all costs. Kleya sees him taken away.
Heert has gotten word about Lonni’s death, but their ISB meeting has been called off because of Dedra’s failed raid and they’re all scrambling. Heert tells Partagaz about Lonni, and the Imperials find Luthen’s secret back room. Kleya makes a plan, fetching gear from the safehouse while remembering how she met Luthen: He was an Imperial officer named Sargeant Lear, who defected after his unit destroyed her home. He finds her as a child hiding on his ship, and keeps her safe. In the present, Luthen is on life support in a Coruscant hospital, and Dedra demands the floor is evacuated to have maximum security, and tells them to do everything in their power to get him talking again. Kleya breaks into the hospital, steals a medical staff uniform, and begins making her way up to Luthen’s floor. Dedra is arrested by Heert on Partagaz’s authority, and he assumes command of the situation. Kleya remembers starting to sell antiquities with Luthen, pretending to be father and daughter. She helped him negotiate a better price. Kleya asked if she was his daughter now, and he told her sometimes, when it suited them. They assumed their new names.
Kleya tries to break onto Luthen’s floor, but her plan is scuttled by the trooper on the elevator. She remembers seeing a group of innocent citizens executed by the Empire, and catching up to Luthen, asking why they weren’t fighting back. He told her that they were, but had to be smart and hide until the time was right. Kleya manages to get onto Luthen’s floor, causing a distraction explosion and killing the few remaining officers. She remembers when Luthen told her to enjoy the sight of her home, to remember what she was fighting for. He told her that she shouldn’t look away, she should know that she had a choice in this, something he didn’t believe he had for years. He set off an explosion they planted and they left her homeworld. Kleya makes it to Luthen’s room and turns off his life support. She cries, kisses his head, and rushes to leave the hospital.
“Who Else Knows?”
Heert threatens to arrest the hospital owner if he doesn’t cooperate with their investigation now that Luthen is dead. Dedra is being held at ISB headquarters and is questioned by Krennic himself. He asks her who else knows about the Death Star project; Dedra knows because intel bundles have been forwarded to her office by mistake and she kept them, sifting through everything, without notifying anyone. Krennic asks when she gave Lonni access to her account, and she insists that he must have stolen it. He accuses her of being a scavenger and a rebel spy. Dedra admits to being a scavenger, claims that she’s had to be because of how she’s been treated. Krennic calls her out for making the mistake of confronting Luthen on her own, claiming that if she isn’t a spy, she’s missed her calling. She tells him about Luthen’s assistant, telling him that she’ll know everything that Luthen knows, if they were informed about the Death Star.
Heert enlists the man in charge of hospital security feeds to help them find out who killed Luthen. They find Kleya on the video feeds and realize that she did this entire operation without help. At the safehouse, Kleya unearths comms equipment, pieces it together, and begins sending out a signal. On Yavin, Wilmon comes home to Dreena, who tells him that something under the bed has been beeping. Wil brings this information to Cassian and Melshi, who are currently playing a game with K-2SO and teasing him. Heert is told by Krennic and Partagaz to put out Kleya’s identity immediately, claiming that she’s carrying an infectious disease to get her found. Partagaz takes Krennic to task for how long he’s forced them to keep the Death Star project quiet, but Krennic is unmoved. On Yavin, K-2SO is pointing out that Wilmon shouldn’t have a device that gets unauthorized radio transmissions. Kleya’s code comes through again, and Cassian leaps into action, saying they’re going to take a ship, and claim it’s a test run to avoid needing an official flight path. K tries to make note of how many orders he’s disobeyed with Cassian so far, but they head to Coruscant anyway.
Heert comes to talk to Dedra about how to catch Kleya, and she tells him it’s probably too late, but advises him to check the old radio frequencies they used in the Axis files. Wilmon is confined to quarters by Draven for refusing to adhere to the base rules. ISB tries to piece together what’s left of Kleya’s shop switchboard as Cassian, Melshi, and K make it to Coruscant, and Cassian directs them to the old safehouse. Kleya begins transmitting again, giving ISB a lead on her location, and they get to work. Cassian and Melshi head into the building, right as ISB cuts off comms to the entire area. K-2SO sees the ISB operation arrive and exits their ship. Cassian knocks on the door to the safehouse and Kleya lets them in, telling them that Luthen is dead. She gives them all the information he gave her, but Cassian insists that she comes with them anyway. She doesn’t want to go somewhere they hate Luthen, but Cassian is insistent. Heert heads into the building with a team while K-2SO takes out the agents on the Imperial ship.
“Jedha, Kyber, Erso”
Cassian is still urging Kleya to leave, telling her that she needs to see Yavin, a place she helped to build. Heert’s team arrives on their doorstep right as they’re leaving, and a firefight begins—Kleya is injured. K moves quickly through the troops, gets upstairs, uses Heert’s body as a shield, and kills the entire team. He proudly tells Cassian he’s cleared a path for them. There’s no one available to help the team because they were all advised to get Kleya’s name out, and the board is jammed with those requests. Cassian and company escape. On Yavin, Saw is on the line with Bail, Mon, and Draven, refusing to take their advice because he doesn’t trust them. Cassian arrives back, and Bail is dismayed that they’re allowing him to land after disobeying protocol, but Draven insists. Cassian begs for medical help on landing, and Draven gives it, though he commands that the ship and K-2SO are shut down until further notice.
Cassian is brought before all the present leaders to tell them the information they have. He tells them about the weapon and all the sites that are connected by the energy program. Half of the group are openly hostile to the intel because they don’t believe in Luthen, but Cassian makes his case and tells them all that he is disappointed to see them treating the man’s memory this way, when most of them never gave half what he did. He asks for permission to go to the infirmary after being grounded; Draven lets him know that Saw is on Jedha, making it clear that he thinks Luthen’s intel is correct. Cassian goes to see Kleya and apologizes for how difficult everyone is being. Mon goes to see Vel—she wants Vel to talk to Cassian about the intel he received and help her believe it’s real because she wants to. Cassian tells Wil that Luthen is dead; the Yavin base gets a message from Kafrene, and the informant won’t talk to anyone but Cassian. Vel and Cassian toast fallen comrades, and she admits to him what Mon asked her to do. Cassian tells her everything he knows.
On Coruscant, Partagaz is playing Nemik’s manifesto; they never could quash the thing, despite constant attempts. He’s called to a meeting with Krennic and the Emperor, and asks for a moment to collect his thoughts. Once alone, he kills himself. Kleya wakes in the infirmary and walks out into the rain. Vel tells Cassian to get in touch with Bix soon, not to wait until it’s too late. She heads out and finds Kleya, wrapping her in a rain jacket and getting her inside. Kleya tells Vel she doesn’t know where she is anymore; Vel tells her she’s with friends. K-2SO and Melshi are released by Draven, who tells Cassian that Tivik is on Kafrene and demanding to speak with him—too many things are lining up and making sense. Draven and Mon go to Bail to make this case. In the morning, K wakes Cassian because Bail has arrived to talk to him; he is to proceed to his contact and do what he can. Bail tells him that if he’s going to die fighting the Empire he’d rather go down swinging; Cassian tells him he had more in common with Luthen than he might think.
Cassian goes to his ship. On Coruscant, Perrin is drinking with a beautiful woman in his car—she’s asleep, and he continues to drink, looking empty. Kleya wakes to see the alliance moving and working. Dedra is in the cell of a Narkina prison, bursting into sobs as the lights go out at night. The Force healer sees Cassian about to leave. Saw watches the Imperial Star Destroyer over Jedha. Krennic watches the Death Star undergoing completion. Cassian and K-2SO begin their flight to Kafrene. On Mina-Rau, B2EMO plays with another droid. Bix is in the fields with a baby clutched to her chest, telling them everything is okay.
Commentary
Unfortunately, the cognitive dissonance of those last few minutes really did something to me.
They had it.They stuck the landing, whatever you can say about the interim, and then they had to go and end on that shot. I’m absolutely furious. They just undermined the entire story they told in a few soppy frames. Stop leaving women alone to raise children when their man heroically dies. Stop acting like someone leaving a child behind makes for a more bittersweet ending. (It doesn’t!) The point of this series has always been knowing exactly how Cassian Andor meets his end. Don’t try to uplift us at the very last second—make us sit with it. That has always been the point this entire show was working toward. The inevitable knowledge of what this costs.
And just like that, it’s ruined.
I… am going to have to get those thoughts out in a separate place and really dig into all the reasons why that trope in particular is one of the laziest, hackneyed choices you can make in fiction at this point. (And one that they’re literally copying from the other Star Wars story that is closest in plot to this one: Rebels.) So I’ll leave this fury here to bake, I guess. But boy did that throw me right out at the very last second, when moments before, I had been weeping.
It feels like a Disney addition, but apparently showrunner Tony Gilroy made this choice because he “wanted to end on hope,” according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly. No! The ending is Rogue One! Rogue One ends on hope, quite literally—the word and the feeling both! That’s the entire point! Helpfully relegating Bix’s entire (non-existent) character into a vehicle made to carry Cassian’s baby is not how you end on the concept of hope. Nope. Nope.
Okay, gotta focus. Erase that from my memory. Other things happened, and much of it was excellent.
Let’s talk about Dedra Meero, who is exactly what I was hoping she would be by the end—basically the anti-Kallus, another ISB operative who managed to fully deprogram and switch sides, joining the Alliance in Rebels. Krennic tells Dedra that if she isn’t a spy for the Rebels, she’s missed her calling—and that’s it, that’s the whole tragic thing. She would have been in incredible spy, she had that potential. She’s got two things working against her in that: ambition and brainwashing. Dedra tells Heert earlier this season that he can have “the glory” on Axis if he lets her help him, and he points out that he was put on the case because he’s not about glory. Dedra wants the recognition, and she wants it for work she is personally proud of, not what she’s told to do. Because she’s not a busybody, she’s exceptional: And the Empire has no room for exceptional. In fact, the Empire destroys exceptional with great prejudice—Dedra simply didn’t understand that was always their aim.
That and the fact that she’s been in the Imperial system since childhood, that she was molded in an Imperial orphanage, means that she truly cannot conceive of a worldview outside of this. Watching her go down this road, triumphing in her own goals, and it landing her in that same prison (I gasped when I saw that cell), it’s horrifying because we can see the hints of possibility. Without that fear of freedom and disorder, without the Empire carving her brain into their preferred shape, Dedra Meero could have been something extraordinary.
I did not want them to show this much of Luthen’s past, honestly. It’s always so tidy when they do things like that, and he’s too complex of a character for it. I can buy that he’s an early defector of the Empire, but it might have been much more effective to have him as a defector from the Grand Army of the Republic, years before the Empire took power. Introducing us to him right at his breaking point also leaves all the ambiguity out of it; if you’re going to show it, I’d like to know how he reached this point. The child actor playing young Kleya (April V. Woods) is flawless, however, and she really makes all their flashback scenes. Seeing how early that hardness developed in her, how she and Luthen became family in everything but name… even if it was dysfunctional a family as you could get. All of that rings true. Her dedication to him makes that hospital infiltration riveting.
Luthen Rael dies quietly and without fanfare, and that feels exactly right. He was never the blaze of glory type.
I was worried that with all the need for seriousness, we wouldn’t get enough time to see K-2SO being himself, but something in the ether heard me, and gave him a little wiggle room here. His ability to simply take out Heert’s squad also deescalates the action beautifully—these episodes aren’t about big explosions and wartime trauma, and the script uses K perfectly to that end. His presence allows for their escape, giving us more time to simply let people connect and convene and argue. This finale is about moving pieces into position, about the inexorable call toward momentum. Cassian taking so much time to talk to Kleya, to convince her to come to Yavin, is frustrating because we’re accustomed to wanting things to move along when we know the action is mounting, but this is Cassian’s true power, as we’ve seen all season: He cares about people’s humanity more than anything. That’s how he’s survived this. He’s going to take that time with Kleya whether our internal narrative clocks want it or not.
He takes that same time in front of the Rebel leaders to talk about Luthen. He acknowledges the man’s flaws, but insists upon their recognizing his humanity as well. And it makes the point that the show has built to with precision, whether intended or no: Rebellions aren’t really built on hope, they’re built on people. Flawed, frightened, impossible people. And it shows us, particularly through the various forms of in-fighting that we see between the Alliance and Luthen’s faction, and Saw, that you need everyone, even if they’ll never see eye-to-eye. It’s not actually about who is right here, or even who is trustworthy. It’s about the fact that all of these things together eventually got the work done.
That touch of destiny about Cassian, it’s a fine thought to end on, I suppose. But this being the setup to what comes next is the real gift of this series. Getting to see all the gritty, awful work of people just being people who want to do what’s right. Loving who they love, wanting to believe in each other, and doing everything they can to make it through one more day.
I said nine years ago that someone was eventually going to make a prequel that made me care about Cassian Andor, so Rogue One would finally land emotionally for me. Tonight I’ll cue up the movie and see if my prediction holds true—but I’m pretty sure it will.
Bits and Asides
- Timeline is a major issue on all things concerning the Empire because I think most folks forget that, uh, it doesn’t actually last that long. It hilariously results in many of these actors playing much younger than they are—Luna is, for the fact that he’s been playing a part that he started playing a decade ago, and for the character being younger than when he first played it this entire time. But Denise Gough is also older than Dedra Meero must be: If she grew up for even part of her childhood in an Imperial orphanage and the Battle of Yavin is 19 years after the Empire’s establishment, she’d have to be in her twenties (max, early 30s?) throughout this series for those dates to work.
- Luthen says the words “Rosh ne luts,” when he’s talking to himself in the ship during the flashback. It’s the only time we’ve heard him speak his native tongue.
- Kleya’s homeworld looks a lot like Naboo? Probably not because we don’t see any Gungans, but I wonder where it is…
- I have many thoughts about Heert and his fate (that might or might not absolutely extend in the Log Cabin Republicans direction), but that feels like a tangent for another day.
- They don’t overdo it on the cameos and connections on this series (which I appreciate dearly), but that doesn’t mean I don’t perk up instantly when Admiral Ackbar shows up.
- Hopefully Wilmon and Dreena have a long happy life together. Of course, thinking in that direction only throws light on all the characters who are technically missing in Rogue One, Vel and Kleya very much included. It was inevitable, I suppose.
And with that, we sign off to steal some Death Star plans…