Andor: Season 2: Episode 10: Make It Stop
What is it ? : Another year passes, so it is now 1 BBY (although Andor lists it as BBY 1, as it has listed all the dates throughout the series).
An alarm goes off in Luthens office, it is summoning him to an emergency meeting. Kleya helps him prepare, arming him and warning him to not meet unless it looks perfect, but he tells her they have long since left behind perfect.
In a Coruscant Plaza he meets with his ISB contact Lonni Jung. Jung warns Luthen that Dedra has identified him, and is going to raid the shop, which will out him as one of Luthens agents, so he wants Luthen to follow through with his promise to get Lonni and his wife and kids out. Luthen presses him for what he knows, and he tells Luthen that he has access to Dedra's files for a year, and she has identified that the Empires energy project is actually cover for a secret weapon. That Kyber Crystals are being mined on Jedha, that Ghorman was all part of this project and that a weapons engineer named Galen Erso is involved.
Luthen returns to Kleya, telling her these details and telling her to get to safety, that he will return to the office to destroy all the evidence.
He does so, and pours acid on their systems, but hears the shop door chime, he attends the door to find Dedra Meero waiting there for him. She says that for years she has walked past and always wanted to enter, but never did. She asks about the antiquities, and Luthen tells her that only two are of uncertain provenance, showing her a knife that is supposedly Nautolan.
She tells him that she has something, and brings out a battered Starpath unit, she tells him it was stolen from Steergard, telling him that she knows he's Axis, and he's everything that disgusts her, chaos and rebellion against the Empire. He tells her that she is too late, the Rebellion has moved on, before turning around to reveal he has stabbed himself with the knife. She summons help, and Luthen is rushed to a hospital.
From a distance, Kleya witnesses this, and goes to the safehouse that Andor and Bix once used to prepare.
ISB Agent Heert arrives for a briefing with Partagaz, apologising for being late, and is informed that Dedra's raid was done without authorisation, and has gone badly wrong. Heert tells Partagaz the reason he was late for the briefing is because Lonni Jung has been found dead on a bench. Partagaz puts Heert in charge of trying to recover something from Dedra's raid.
Dedra speaks to a doctor questioning her as to when Luthen can be interrogated, but the Doctor isn't even sure he'll recover, she orders the floor secured when Heert arrives and puts her under arrest.
Kleya sneaks into the hospital, cracking open a locker and disguising herself as a nurse. As she moves through the building, she remembers being a child hiding from a slaughter going on in battle, she could see a younger Luthen in military uniform, hiding from the slaughter and pleading for it to stop. He finds her, but doesn't allow his people to find her.
After discovering that even nurses are denied access to the floor where Luthen is secured, she pulls a blaster and begins fighting her way through to him. While remembering them establishing their relationship, which was to be as father and daughter while it was convenient and useful, that he would be Luthen and she would be Kleya, and he tries to sell an artefact, but in a warzone it isn't worth much. So young Kleya pretends that it has emotional value to her, allowing her to bargain the price up.
Later they are in a village where the Empire grabs some civilians to put to death, and Luthen makes her watch, telling her to keep the emotion until she can use it, telling her that to beat the Empire they must lose and lose and lose until they can win.
Fighting her way through to the chamber, she remembers their first act of rebellion, sitting in a beautiful cafe (perhaps on Naboo), Luthen gets her to decide to press a detonator which blows up a bridge while an Imperial force is crossing it. He tells her to look away until the explosion gets their attention, and then they leave.
In the hospital room she disconnects Luthen from life support, and tearfully places a kiss on his forehead as he dies, leaving the room just before Imperial troops begin to arrive.
High Points : So we didn't think Luthen was going to make it out of the series alive, and he doesn't. But we get an entirely Luthen / Kleya based episode, which fills out glimpses of the character we've seen this season which seemed to contradict the way we saw him portrayed last season. When he was introduced, Luthen is a super confident and capable character, but this season we've seen cracks in that facade, moments where he isn't confident and expects the worst, and that he relies on others.
And this is very well explained in this episode, the super spy version of Luthen is yet another role he plays alongside the charismatic shopkeeper version. Luthen himself, we don't get to know much about, he's a man who cares enough for others to plead for the violence to end, and cares enough to play the role he needs to, to destroy his enemy. We see the truth of his speech in season 1, a man who has created another personality using his enemies tactics to win a war.
Absolutely fantastic, and every credit I can offer to Stellan Skarsgård. I'd offer similar commentary on Kleya, but that's somewhat based on the next episode, so I'll leave it to then, but we see that she also is super capable, and very much made half of the "Luthen" persona which has shaped the formation of the Rebellion.
Low Points : Not much to criticise here, it looks gorgeous, is amazingly well acted, scripted, and edge of the seat watching. There's some elements which do seem to just happen because they need to for the story to progress, but these are so minor I'll not bother with them at all.
So what do you really think ? : I loved this episode, while initially concerned that we were going to see too much of Luthen and Kleya's background, by only showing us 4 scenes, it left it vague enough to let us form the characters for ourselves.
But there's leaving things vague and leaving confusion. Luthen and Kleya meeting seems to predate the Empire, the actress (whose age is remarkably hard to discover) is in her 30's apparently, and seems to be less than 10 when she meets Luthen, they can't be reacting against the Empire performing a slaughter. But perhaps they're separatists, or reacting to the corruption of the Republic during the final days of the Clone Wars. But I suppose it doesn't matter who they were, just who they became.
Final Words : So 2 episodes to go, and Kleya on Coruscant being hunted, I'm guessing a rescue mission is needed as the very few members of the Axis cell of Rebels come to her aid, especially as she now remains the only source of information about the Death Star.
Score : 9.25/10
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