This post contains spoilers for Andor Season 2, now streaming on Disney+.
The unflinching Star Wars prequel series Andor continues to deliver not only some of the best storytelling in the franchise’s history — from one week to the next, viewers are repeatedly presented with some of the best, most emotionally devastating, and most politically urgent TV, period.
Across the newly available episodes 7 through 9 of Andor’s second season, the series reaches a blistering crescendo, stripping away any last trace of idealism and laying bare the full machinery of fascism. These new chapters are the slow-motion shattering of a dam, one that’s been built brick by brick throughout the show’s two seasons thus far. And at the same time, in the regime’s cruelty that finally explodes into the open this week, we also see the formal outlines of the rebellion taking shape.
For fighters like Cassian, the Empire’s brutality becomes both a wound and a reason to keep going.
The whole of Andor has always been more than the sum of its parts — those parts including spy missions, rousing monologues, and the many outright clashes between good and evil. This is a show that’s dressed in the trappings of a space opera but unfolds like a tense political thriller — grounded, deliberate, and full of moral weight. It’s not about some abstract notion of rebellion; it’s about the cost, the grief, and the clarity that comes after everything comfortable has been destroyed.
This week’s new episodes are largely concerned with the brewing storm on Ghorman, a planet the Empire has marked for resource extraction, regardless of its cost to life or truth. ISB supervisor Dedra Meero has orchestrated a false-flag operation in order to blame the Ghorman Front resistance group for the violence, laying the groundwork for a massacre in episode 8. What unfolds in the city square of Palmo is one of the most harrowing sequences Star Wars has ever committed to screen — a peaceful protest shattered by Imperial fire, with stormtroopers and KX droids unloading blaster fire into a crowd of civilians.
And it’s not just the scale of the violence, but the methodical way it’s unleashed that makes it almost impossible not to feel echoes of the real world beyond the screen.
“Wow. What an episode,” one viewer wrote on X after watching episode 8. “This is an absolutely devastating and powerful episode of television. The performances, the rising tension, character arcs, the perfect ending to an eight-episode buildup — this is the perfect episode of Andor and a perfect episode of television.”
Another viewer declared episodes 8 and 9 to be “two of the greatest episodes of television of all time.” Raves a third: “Episode eight of Andor is not only the best episode of Star Wars television — it’s one of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen.”
For some viewers, though, Andor resonates on an even deeper, more personal level — as this YouTube commenter movingly explains:
“I have no words to describe how much this show means to me. Currently, in my country, thousands of parallels are being drawn with what we see in the series: The complete rupture of truth, the destruction of facts as the ultimate reason… the imposition of regimes founded on fear, and the total breakdown of community ties. I won’t be able to live long enough to express my gratitude for the existence of a series like Andor, which shows like no other what many choose to ignore.”
For the show’s titular character, the Ghorman massacre leaves him so shaken that it almost hollows him out. Cassian confesses to Kleya at one point, “I’m done after this,” though neither of them really believes it. He tries to make a break for peace with Bix — a fleeting moment under the stars on Yavin, but a return to normal life is obviously a fantasy, and Bix knows it. In a goodbye video message, she makes a choice for both of them and tells Cassian: “If you were to give this up for me… I’d never forgive myself.
“We have to win,” she continues in the message. “We have to beat them. And I believe you have a purpose in making that happen. So I’m choosing for the both of us. I’m choosing the rebellion…. And when it’s done, when it’s over and we’ve won, we can do all the things we ever wanted.”
Meanwhile, Mon Mothma risks everything to speak the truth out loud. In a speech that ought to shake the galaxy, she calls the Ghorman massacre by its name: Unprovoked genocide. “Of all the things at risk,” she warns, “the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”
But truth, of course, has become contraband in this galaxy. The Empire smothers fact with propaganda, and Cassian barely gets the senator out of the chamber alive. “I’m not sure how to thank you,” she tells him afterward.
Cassian’s reply: “Make it worth it.”
What Andor is doing here is nothing short of astonishing. This isn’t just TV. It’s a political mirror held up through the lens of science fiction — a show that knows rebellion isn’t about spectacle, but survival. It’s not glamorous. It’s full of compromise, sacrifice, and loss. If Season 1 whispered that darkness was coming, these new episodes make it unavoidably clear: The evil is here, and there’s nowhere to hide.
“I hope someone who worked on the show sees these comments,” another YouTube commenter wrote about this week’s episodes. “You guys made something really special. I mean really really special. Bravo and thank you for elevating Star Wars to a level I never dreamed it could achieve.”
