This publish accommodates spoilers for Andor Season 2, now streaming on Disney+.

The unflinching Star Wars prequel collection Andor continues to ship not solely among the greatest storytelling within the franchise’s historical past — from one week to the subsequent, viewers are repeatedly offered with among the greatest, most emotionally devastating, and most politically pressing TV, interval.

Throughout the newly out there episodes 7 by means of 9 of Andor’s second season, the series reaches a blistering crescendo, stripping away any final hint of idealism and laying naked the complete equipment of fascism. These new chapters are the slow-motion shattering of a dam, one which’s been constructed brick by brick all through the show’s two seasons so far. And on the similar time, within the regime’s cruelty that lastly explodes into the open this week, we additionally see the formal outlines of the insurrection taking form.

For fighters like Cassian, the Empire’s brutality turns into each a wound and a motive to preserve going.

The entire of Andor has at all times been greater than the sum of its components — these components together with spy missions, rousing monologues, and the various outright clashes between good and evil. It is a show that’s dressed within the trappings of an area opera however unfolds like a tense political thriller — grounded, deliberate, and full of ethical weight. It’s not about some summary notion of insurrection; it’s about the associated fee, the grief, and the readability that comes after all the pieces comfy has been destroyed.

This week’s new episodes are largely involved with the brewing storm on Ghorman, a planet the Empire has marked for useful resource extraction, no matter its price to life or fact. ISB supervisor Dedra Meero has orchestrated a false-flag operation so as to blame the Ghorman Entrance resistance group for the violence, laying the groundwork for a bloodbath in episode 8. What unfolds within the metropolis sq. of Palmo is among the most harrowing sequences Star Wars has ever dedicated to display — a peaceable protest shattered by Imperial hearth, with stormtroopers and KX droids unloading blaster hearth right into a crowd of civilians.

And it’s not simply the size of the violence, however the methodical method it’s unleashed that makes it virtually unattainable not to really feel echoes of the actual world past the display.

“Wow. What an episode,” one viewer wrote on X after watching episode 8. “That is a completely devastating and highly effective episode of tv. The performances, the rising pressure, character arcs, the proper ending to an eight-episode buildup — this is the proper episode of Andor and an ideal episode of tv.”

One other viewer declared episodes 8 and 9 to be “two of the best episodes of tv of all time.” Raves a 3rd: “Episode eight of Andor will not be solely the most effective episode of Star Wars tv — it’s probably the greatest episodes of TV I’ve ever seen.”

For some viewers, although, Andor resonates on an excellent deeper, extra private stage — as this YouTube commenter movingly explains:

“I have no words to describe how much this show means to me. Presently, in my nation, 1000’s of parallels are being drawn with what we see within the collection: The whole rupture of fact, the destruction of information as the last word motive… the imposition of regimes based on concern, and the entire breakdown of neighborhood ties. I gained’t have the ability to reside lengthy sufficient to categorical my gratitude for the existence of a collection like Andor, which exhibits like no different what many select to ignore.”

For the show’s titular character, the Ghorman bloodbath leaves him so shaken that it virtually hollows him out. Cassian confesses to Kleya at one level, “I’m completed after this,” although neither of them actually believes it. He tries to make a break for peace with Bix — a fleeting second beneath the celebrities on Yavin, however a return to regular life is clearly a fantasy, and Bix is aware of it. In a goodbye video message, she makes a alternative for each of them and tells Cassian: “In case you have been to give this up for me… I’d by no means forgive myself.

“We have to win,” she continues within the message. “We have to beat them. And I consider you have a goal in making that occur. So I’m selecting for the each of us. I’m selecting the insurrection…. And when it’s completed, when it’s over and we’ve gained, we are able to do all of the issues we ever wished.”

In the meantime, Mon Mothma dangers all the pieces to converse the reality out loud. In a speech that ought to shake the galaxy, she calls the Ghorman bloodbath by its identify: Unprovoked genocide. “Of all of the issues in danger,” she warns, “the lack of an goal actuality is probably essentially the most harmful. The demise of fact is the last word victory of evil. When fact leaves us, once we let it slip away, when it’s ripped from our arms, we grow to be susceptible to the urge for food of no matter monster screams the loudest.”

However fact, in fact, has grow to be contraband in this galaxy. The Empire smothers truth with propaganda, and Cassian barely will get the senator out of the chamber alive. “I’m unsure how to thanks,” she tells him afterward.

Cassian’s reply: “Make it price it.”

What Andor is doing right here is nothing in need of astonishing. This isn’t simply TV. It’s a political mirror held up by means of the lens of science fiction — a show that is aware of insurrection isn’t about spectacle, however survival. It’s not glamorous. It’s filled with compromise, sacrifice, and loss. If Season 1 whispered that darkness was coming, these new episodes make it unavoidably clear: The evil is right here, and there’s nowhere to conceal.

“I hope somebody who labored on the show sees these feedback,” one other YouTube commenter wrote about this week’s episodes. “You guys made one thing actually particular. I imply actually actually particular. Bravo and thanks for elevating Star Wars to a stage I by no means dreamed it might obtain.”