We’re not even halfway through 2025 yet, but I feel pretty confident that I’ve already watched what will likely remain my favorite streaming TV moment of the year.
It came during the just-ended second season of Andor, the Star Wars live-action prequel to 2016’s Rogue One — and the scene that left me reeling the most didn’t come during a climactic battle sequence, nor a turning point in the Rebellion or some other kind of pivotal twist. It unfolds, instead, during the preparation for one of the many paramilitary missions led by the battle-hardened warlord Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who’s about to bomb an Imperial pipeline.
In this particular scene, which comes at the end of the fifth episode of Andor’s sophomore season, Whitaker’s Gerrera is coaxing the soft-spoken young rebel mechanic Wilmon Paak to breath Ryhdonium, the potent gas that Gerrera is addicted to huffing. At first, it feels like more of the same from the unhinged fighter — a grizzled radical whose volatile mix of zealotry and paranoia makes him too extreme for the Alliance but to committed to the cause to quit. Gerrera gets high on spaceship fumes; of course he would.
Only, there’s actually a powerful metaphor wrapped up in it that makes this scene with Paak so unforgettable.
Gerrera isn’t just huffing gas; he romanticizes it, because it’s fused to his identity as a foot soldier in the Rebellion. He needs the stuff, the same way the Rebellion needs soldiers willing to give their lives for it.
He reminisces about growing up in a camp where children harvested the gas until their clothes melted off and their skin blistered from radiation leaks. “How can you do that?” Paak asks, after Gerrera takes a deep, almost reverent breath of the gas. It seems to give him so much pleasure as to resemble a kind of out-of-body euphoria. And he wants Paak to come along for the same ride. “Because I understand it,” Gerrera answers. “Because she’s my sister, rhydo, and she loves me. That itch, that burn. You feel how badly she wants to explode?
He continues: “Remember this. Remember this moment! This perfect night. You think I’m crazy? Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us: Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder. We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet… here we are. Where are you, boy? You’re here! You’re not with Luthen, you’re here! You’re right here, and you’re ready to fight!”
Paak removes his mask, letting the gas fill his lungs. He gasps. His face contorts in shock.
“We’re the rhydo, kid. We’re the fuel. We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air. Let it in, boy! That’s freedom calling! Let it in. Let it ruuuun! Let it run wiiiild!”
The scene is poetic, tragic, and pure Andor — a show that strips rebellion of its romance and reveals its machinery that runs on the fuel of sacrifice. In this scene, the firebrand warlord and the quiet mechanic don’t just prepare to light a fuse; they understand that they are the fuse. And in that shared recognition — one born of trauma, the other of awakening — it produces a scene as powerful as the gas they breathe, charged with madness, clarity, and the aching inevitability of what comes next.
