Andor concludes and Rogue one awaits. Join us as we wrap up the second and final season of Star Wars Andor with the fifth in our five part series. Looking at the show, we're recapping the final three episodes released on May 13th, 2025, titled Make It Stop, who Else Knows, and Jedha Kyber Erso, and we'll provide our overall impression of the series as well on this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Let's get right to it.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. What makes a story a Star Wars story? Are there certain elements that let the audience know what they're watching? The give it away. Surely there's recurring elements and themes.

Is it the Jedi and the force? Those have been almost entirely absent through two seasons of Andor. Is it themes of empire and rebellion? Those are hardly Star Wars exclusives. Is it the tech, the droids, the starships, the blasters. Again, not exclusive to Star Wars, but some is the aesthetic. Definitely is.

Is it the characters? Well, again, no Jedi here. No Skywalkers in this particular saga, but. Maybe we're getting at something closer. I think in the final three episodes of the season two of Andor, we're clearly getting a Star Wars story, but we're also getting something much more. Let's get into how we can tell.

It starts in episode 10, titled Kleya's Story. Or maybe Make It Stop, which might have been what the show owners were told. A shame really, but it does help us focus. This episode is all about Kleya, the ruthless backbone of the rebellion up throughout the entire run of the series. It was during a review of season one that we've noted how the women were the rebellion, obviously by about episode seven from threads that were starting in episode four, and Lea was clearly the one people were lying on to get things done.

She filled an archetype in the Star Wars story, one that's been there since the very first release in 1977. One that we've come to expect and that clearly makes Star Wars. Star Wars. Now this archetype isn't unique to Star Wars witness, Christina Hendricks's, Joan Harris, of Mad Men or a different t Take with Amy Acker's Root and Person of Interest.

But having a character around kind of like Leia in the OG Star Wars really does help make. Andor fit within the universe with the diversification of roles and, Andor with more room for strong female characters, different elements of Leia's character can be ascribed to different people. So we don't have to have Leia being all things to fulfill every role needed.

Mon Mothma is the diplomat. Bix is the mechanic and the love interest. Vel is the heart Dedra the dark mirror. And Kleya, well, like we said above, she's the ruthless backbone. There's other character archetypes that we've become accustomed to as well. Ones that make Star Wars feel like Star Wars, the Rascal and Cassian, the idealistic youth like Nemik, the wise Council, like Luthen, or perhaps Saw Gerrara.

The Droid, B2EMO, the shaggy muscle, in this case, K-2SO and more. We're focused on archetypes here to distinguish them from say, stereotypes. Archetypes here aren't the Jungian archetypes that are ascribed to various elements of human psychology. They're more like story archetypes or character archetypes, personalities that we meet.

And they have a lot in common with the Star Wars tabletop role playing game from West End Games that we mentioned a few episodes ago in that game released back in 1987. The characters are defined by their quote unquote “type”. This could include several of the ones we've just mentioned, the smuggler, the bodyguard, the courier, and a few more similar to how we get a game like D&D would have a fighter, a wizard, or cleric.

And interestingly, force users were rare in that game too. At least according to the rules, but I think a lot of campaigns ended up with a Hidden Jedi or two. So those links to Andor are deep, the idea in the game that the type was more important than the specific character. And we're seeing that we're getting back to that archetype again.

But if I'm talking about roleplaying games, I'm digressing. This is Kleya's story, after all. let's get caught up with what's going on. We begin with Lonni requesting an emergency meeting and Luthen goes to meet him. Telling KIeya, "I fear we've used up all the perfect". He meets Lonni in public during daylight, and Lonni lets him in on the news of the plot, what he's just learned about the battle station in the last few hours.

Fearing he's been burned, Lonni gives Luthen all the details that he's been in Dedra's files for the last year. Luthen leaves and we later see Lonni found dead on the bench, though it isn't clear what he's died of, a blaster shot or poison or something else. Luthen sends KIeya off to get a message out and starts with destroying the equipment and prepping to leave, but Dedra shows up to the antiquities dealer.

He buys some time for the acid to do its work and then stabs himself, but is stabilized in time by a med team and he's taken to the hospital. We get KIeya's story, then told him flashbacks as she's reliving them. In the flashbacks with KIeya and Luthen, we see some of the events that turned him to the resistor, those small acts of rebellion in Nemik's words.

Taking place during a raid or some other military action where he subtly sabotaged the ship, allowing room for KIeya to stay aboard as a stowaway and likely preventing more mayhem. A young KIeya has witnessed to more imperial atrocities, including executions, as well as early acts of sabotage by Luthen.

She began picking up her skills at a young age. Some of these flashbacks take place while she's traveling to the hospital where Luthen is being held and we get another cyber punky plot: Is she there to rescue him or take him out before he can be interrogated? And I wanna point out that the level of detail in the show here remains amazing.

We see the same symbol on the hospital sign on the roof of the building that we saw in the arm bands of the rebel medics in the previous episode. There's a bit of a real-world conceit here as well, that of the hospital emergency that has played up based on the audience's knowledges of the tropes of that genre, things that don't necessarily make sense in a Star Wars universe, but are shown here as roughly analogous to our own, like the orderlies or the layout or the various wings in the hospital.

As we cut to the hospital, we see the Dedra is in charge monitoring Luthen's status, waiting for him to be ready for interrogation. But she's in charge only briefly, as she's soon relieved of her duty. Apparently it was, she was snooping a bit to make the caller, and she's overstepped her bounds. 

Any who in all this distraction, KIeya manages to sneak in, detonate a diversion, saying the least, and then proceeding to use a meal tray in a pistol against several armed guards and a storm trooper that stood in her way of getting to Luthen's room and she says goodbye. Before heading for the Exit, this is an amazing episode full of character and depth where we say goodbye to some of the most important characters of the series.

There's a thread here where I'd love to see KIeya as a rebel operative between Star Wars and New Hope and Return of the Jetta, acting as a body double for Leia, serving as a decoy or engaged more directly in her own right. She's already one of the most skilled members of the alliance. There'd be room to see more from her in the future.

But first we have to get there. It's time for a return to episode nine's cyberpunk plot. We need another extraction,

And we get that extraction in episode 11. An episode of CSI: Coruscant, or perhaps it's titled, who else knows? Because we start with an investigation. Looking at the body of a dead storm trooper, and I'm left to wonder for a second at the incongruity of it, we clearly have the apparatus of a surveillance state in the empire, especially on Coruscant.

We have cameras everywhere, though, not quite a full panopticon. I'm wondering why there weren't body cams on the storm troopers or officers to presumably show the imperials who was shooting them. It's a little weird. But we have an ISB investigative team. We're almost going through the motions of a buddy cop movie, and the detective here is issuing commands even as he's trying to puzzle out the mystery

He's introduced to the hospital director, which again, is a very modern conceit of how the hospital would operate. But the ISB detective is clearly flexing how he's in charge saying: “arrest him. You're slowing me down. That means you're a suspect.” To which the hospital director soon concedes.

And as the investigation continues, we shift a bit. As much as last episode was KIeya's story, this episode is Dedra's. We see her in custody in a windowed cell or interrogation chamber, and someone turns off the monitors. The panopticon is not watching; just we the audience, and it's Krennic that we see.

We've seen him earlier in the season, of course, during the fancy ball, but here on his own, he is not playing nice. There's a magnificently framed shot during the interrogation where we can see Dedra's eyes and only the lower half of Krennic's face asking the questions with pure malice because his pet project has been found out.

“Say the name, the one that matters.” “Death Star.”  “Who else knows?” 

“I want the names I don't know.” After Dedra offers up Partagaz and some other known parties, and here we start finding out how much Krennnic knows and how cooked Dedra might be. The scavenging, the rooting around in cases that weren't necessarily related to her department. The stuff that allowed her to succeed early on because she's able to draw those connections are what now have her in deep, deep trouble. 

Because according tore, “I should have pegged you as a scavenger years ago.” The ISB is all about control, and part of that control is very much for the officers to stay in their lane as Partagaz mentioned in season one, they’re healthcare providers, and that healthcare is very much about maintaining control of the situation, and the situation has been very much out of Dedrae's control.

The fact that Lonni had access to her files for a year, the fact that's now been discovered by Krennic and others is what's going to bring her down. As Krennic notes: “If you're not a rebel spy, you've missed your calling.” But Dedra seems to have caught some of that main character syndrome that Syril was feeling, one BBY ago as well.

Contributing and thinking that her compliance will get her out of this jam, not realizing that much like Lonni last episode, she's done. As Krennic states, we'll do our best to carry on without you. From there, we bounce around through our fractured narrative quickly, cutting between the hospital and the buddy cops trying to track down the suspect and the dimly lit tenement where KIeya is getting some work done trying to send out an emergency message.

The tension is increasing as we cut to Yavin, where the rebels are starting to actually look like rebels, and we're getting much closer to something from the original trilogy, which we may recognize, and we step into a situation that almost feels like something out of a Star Trek episode where we have a game of poker being played with Cassian and Melshi and K-2SO, having a moment of convivial downtime. 

And that Star Trek reference goes a little bit deeper for me because as they're playing poker with the droid, I, I almost feel like K-2SO sounds like Data in some ways. You know, this is, game is confusing, this isn't logical. And the Cassian and Melshi laughing as they say, oh, “he's going to droid you” here and start bringing out the, uh, the numbers where. K-2SO goes: “We've played 863 games. That's a solid predictive sample” and being confused by the seemingly random actions of humans. 

It's nice to see here this, uh, friendliness and the banter going back and forth, but the tension is still escalating as KIeya's message comes in and they have to decide on how they're going to address it.

The debate doesn't take that long, and they're soon off. Meanwhile, the ISB investigation is proceeding as well. The ISB is using fears of a virus to help in the arrest of the subject Kleya plan put forth by Major Partaggaz. Again, part of his ideology is the ISB is healthcare providers for the empire. I mean, the virus seems like a plausible explanation, but I'm not sure it'd work here.

Our experience over the last five or so years seems somewhat contrary to that. But there's multiple approaches to the ISB’s investigation and we cut to Dedra in a cell where we're getting some real silence of the lambs type vibes in the interrogation, or at least that's how it was coming to me. Her colleague comes to her asking for advice, uh, quid pro quo almost, and saying that “a quick solve may help her situation”, but realizing that otherwise she could well truly be cooked.

Her last line there, “it's probably too late” is layered with meaning. Is it the rebels or for her? We have the rebels and the Imperials in a race to get to Kleya, and the intensity is incredibly high. Just well done Filmmaking to everybody involved here. The rebels get there first by just a bit, but an open communication channel.

The smallest of coincidences that a transmission is taking place while the imperials are actually talking and looking at it, leads for them to. Track them down and send an armored team, and we end with the ISB enforcers, not in full storm trooper armor, but close to it, ready to kick down the door. We've rarely seen a cliffhanger in this show, but here we're moving directly into episode 12.

And episode 12 is titled, “This Will be on the Test” or perhaps “Jedha Kyber Urso”. KIeya needs some convincing and she doesn't see Yavin as a safe option, and both Cassian and Melshi make the case for it being the safe harbor of the moment. The comms channels that have brought the ISB so close are cut with K-2SO assaulting the shuttle and Cassian's blaster to the transmitter.

But for the ISB, this is close enough. And with that, we get into a fight scene in the hallway, and I'm wondering if I've actually stumbled into a different Disney show, like a Daredevil episode or something. Cassian and Meshi are holding their own buying time as K-2SO makes his way towards their floor.

We saw how destructive the enforcer droids were in the episode eight, where they were unleashed on the crowd by Kaido, and here we see it again too. Viewing the hallway from behind and over. K-2SOs shoulder to give the point of view of as he absolutely wrecks the combat squad. And in the midst of it, the inspector whose body armor does little protect him when he's used as a human shield for the droid, A literal meat shield.

K-2SO is frightening here. An icon of the real world fears we have of the development of humanoid robots that we've seen and discussed before. You can check it out in episode 29, here at the podcast, his arrival makes short work of the remaining ISB troopers with the sergeant firing away point blank at his approach echoing back to Cassian in the same position during the Ghorman massacre.

The apartment hallway doesn't have room for a power loader to make the save for him, however. Cassian and Melshi and K-2SO are able to escape with Kleya who is injured in the fight. This is aided by the Imperial's own search efforts for Kleya. With everyone tracking down the false virus leads and unable to respond in time, we returned to Yavin.

And much like in the previous episode, the rebel base looks nearly complete with as many sparks flying is in a heavy metal music video from the 1980s. The quote unquote alliance is still fragile though as we see Saw Gerrera arguing with Mothma and Organa accusing her of sending spies his way, confusing the imperial spies with internal factions.

Saw Gerrera gets in a dig just before he closes the comms channel. “If you could only fight as well as you lie.” End quote, symbolizing the mistrust that is high in the alliance. The most difficult part of maintaining this where discovery could mean death, and Cassian's return is not welcome, treated as a potential hostile and brought in under guard by both X-wings in the air and the general and troops on the ground.

I was delighted to see one of the Mon Calamari, one of Admiral Akbar's species in the flight control room, and at the Table Council. It made this feel a little bit more like Star Wars too. Cassian brings the three data points that are the title of the show: Jedha, Kyber and Urso and Andor the show at this point is a masterclass in rhetoric.

If I was still teaching a class on that, I think I might use this boardroom scene as an example. Cassian makes a strong case on Luthen's behalf, but the rhetorical situation is swayed by the general mistrust of Luthen by all involved. Organa lists some of Luthen's faults. Quote, “his paranoia, his secrecy, his inability to collaborate the web of doubts that he created.

It makes everything unbelievable.” End quote. And when you're trying to believe in the construction of a moon sized battle station called the Death Star that needs the mining of an entire planet to function well. Yeah, it's a little hard to believe. 

I think it highlights how much Andor, again the show, and the rebellion as a whole, is built on these speech acts like the securitization of Ghorman that we saw in weeks two and three, as well as Nemik’s voiceover that soon comes in here. Nemik’s words - repeated from the tape that he made in season one, episode five - play over a montage of a number of characters that we've seen throughout the two seasons, helping bridge Andor the series to where it needs to be at the start of Rogue One.

We hear Nemik’s words as a diegetic voiceover, listened to by Major Partagaz of the ISB, realizing that the viral spread that he was talking about last episode was not that of Kleya, but of this speech out of control of a system that desperately needs it. Partagaz faces an imperial fate with the blaster kept in his desk for emergencies, and a little later we see Dedra in an imperial prison, much like Cassian last season with us, knowing what awaits her. 

Much like the closing scenes that we'd see in the final episode of a season of The Wire, we step through all the ensemble characters and see where they're at and where they're going. Vel and KIeya discussed the personal and emotional costs of the rebellion. The toll that their course of actions and the decisions that they've made have taken upon them. 

Vel with some regret, speaks with Cassian and advises him to not wait too long in regards to reconnecting with Bix, and we know how bittersweet that that will be. 

Cassian is soon suiting up to go on a mission based on the intel that Luthen brought in, and we close out Andor with the scene of Bix in the field of the harvest planet with a newborn swaddled in her arms.

I'd like to wrap up with some final comments on Andor both as television and for Star Wars more generally. First off was Andor too short, was the Two seasons enough? It's hard to say, but I feel like the answer is no. We've been with these characters for eight movies now, effectively treating each of the major arcs of season one and season two as one movie in its entirety.

And notably by doing so, each block gets close to my favorite runtime of just under two hours. And it feels right. It didn't outstay. Its welcome. The need to focus to tell the whole story in season two led to the show really getting down to the key points. And I feel that that economy of storytelling really helped.

I feel that if Andor had received that rumored five season arc that they requested, they wouldn't have managed to maintain the intensity, something that they held to quite well. On a longer timeline, we'd get various shaggy dog stories thrown in, which might have been cool in the moment. You know, a three episode arc where, Andor is trapped by Jabba or something.

But ultimately these arcs would've detracted from the overall narrative arc of the show. The temptation or management pressure to throw in a Jedi or something, to show Darth Vader in the background, or have the emperor actually appear on screen, the temptation would've been too much and the overall story would've been less due to that addition. 

Andor also, quote unquote, “cracked the code” for streaming, with regards to the schedule. The three episodes per week, four weeks schedule allowed for each week to feel suitably epic, and didn't necessarily tie down viewers to feeling obligated to binge the show or avoid all social media less. They risk spoilers while still allowing the show to maintain some momentum and not get bogged down by six or eight or 12 weeks of releases, and give time for the good word of mouth to propagate. The diffusion of information takes time, after all, 

Andor isn't without its faults, of course. I don't want to spend a lot of time on these and cast a negative pall over the series as a whole, merely mention them so that it's noted or maybe something to be looked at again in the future. Some of these criticisms of mine are ones that we've highlighted over the last few podcast episodes.

The media realism that we spoke about during the run ups to the Gjorman Massacre, and the subsequent fallout is one of those where real world, 21st century and media culture gets deployed to a galaxy long ago and far away. Our mediated lives are particular to our time and place, and they're very much rooted in our history and the technology that we use.

There's no reason for it to exist in that way within the universe of Star Wars. So too with some of the other analogs to the 21st century, the office politics and the hospital, these elements exist as a conceit to the audience to allow us to follow along without having to explain too much more or obfuscating things beyond recognition for the sake of “science fiction realism”, and the role, or lack thereof, the non-human characters in this show and the universe at large needs to be examined.

Part of this is that the story being told,  that very human story, but the alien races that are so iconic to Star Wars are often they took on an ancillary role as a mouthpiece for the emperor's wishes. They could have been integrated into the story so much more, but perhaps it's that very fact that Andor is a human story or human presenting one at least. And that was the focus of the show set on Coruscant and Ferrix and Ghorman and Yavin rather than the broader galaxy. And that was the story that the showrunners wanted to tell.  

Maybe the alien races, those who have already rebelled, and those who were Captain Kaido and others honed their imperial playbook for riot suppression, and that's why the aliens are hardly there.  This kind of makes sense. You test out your pogrom on an outgroup before bringing it in internally, and the real-world analogs sadly, continue. 

Was Andor “cyberpunk Star Wars”. Yeah, I think as close as we'll see, cyberpunk draws on other tropes and traditions, both within sci-fi and without. As much as Star Wars drew on sources for its own inspiration, and it's no surprise that there's some crossover, but the trade craft and the missions and the roles the characters filled made this a wonderful blending of the two intentionally, or not in a way we're unlikely to see again.

And finally that question that we had at the start of this episode: is Andor Star Wars? Well, most definitely, though Star Wars on the home front showing that what is taking place across the galaxy has impacts on a personal level, despite the lack of any mention of Jedi lightsabers or nearly any mention of the Force it still felt embedded within the universe, making it make sense and feel real, where the stakes mattered.

Did it make me dust off my old Star Wars RPG and look into grabbing some action figures or maybe a Star Wars model or two? Maybe. I'm not saying it didn't do that. It definitely sparked some joy and it made it exciting to watch some new Star Wars material for the first time in a long time. 

The final takeaway for me are in the speeches, those of Mon Mothma and Luthen and Partagaz and Nemik, of changing the narrative away from “May the force be with you” and replacing it with “the rebellion begins with hope”, and “I have friends everywhere”; catch words and catchphrases more relevant to the here and now and needed here in the 21st century.

This wraps up our Andor coverage here on the Implausipod, save for one more episode sometime in the future. Thanks for joining us over the last month. It's been a lot of fun watching something with you in real time. That one more episode will be Season Three of Andor: Rogue One, of course, which I haven't seen since its release. And I intentionally didn't go back to rewatch during or before the Andor viewing. I want to be surprised. 

When we get to that. I'd like to touch on some of the ongoing meta commentary we've been seeing around Andor the last few weeks; content I've intentionally been nescient of. We'll look at that sometime soon.

Coming up, before that though, we have a few episodes on recent happenings in cyberspace, returning to some academic material on the internet, and in the month of June, we'll be starting our look at the WYCU, the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, something we've mentioned over on the blog and in the newsletter. And we'll have more on that soon too.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr implausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod.com as well. I'm responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

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Once again, thank you for joining us. Until next time, take care and have fun.