Andor Season 2’s Finale Just Made Luthen a [Spoilers]

Stellan Skargard’s Luthen Rael makes a devastating alternative in Andor’s Season 2 finale, one which leaves insurgent informant Lonni Jung (Robert Emms) useless. The choice, whereas heartbreaking, is rooted within the harsh logic of revolt: too many unfastened ends might destroy all the pieces.

Andor Season 2, Episode 10, “Make It Cease,” delivers a chilling but becoming sendoff to one in all its most compelling insurgent spies, Lonni Jung. In doing so, it sharpens the present’s portrait of Luthen. Whereas sure, this motion depicts him as a killer, it extra so demonstrates him as a insurgent visionary prepared to sacrifice all the pieces and everybody for the trigger. Lonni’s destiny is sealed the second he uncovers the existence of the Empire’s superweapon, the Dying Star, hidden inside ISB intelligence. Lonni reveals to Luthen that he has had entry to Dedro Meero’s (Denise Gough) code cert for the previous yr, which is how he realized in regards to the secret Dying Star.

It is info too useful to disregard however far too harmful for somebody like Lonni to be allowed to stroll away with, even when he thinks he wasn’t adopted. “In the event that they knew what I discovered, they wouldn’t have let me out of the constructing,” he tells Luthen in what reads, on reflection, like a tragic self-eulogy.

Killing Lonni is just not an act of cruelty for cruelty’s sake; it is strategic, even inevitable. Followers have seen Luthen construct his revolt on layers of secrecy and managed threat, and Lonni is now all of the sudden a large legal responsibility. If captured, he may very well be tortured or interrogated, and the existence of the Dying Star (and Luthen’s whole underground operation) may very well be uncovered. Luthen’s chilly calculation is not heartless, however it’s cruel.

The second additionally displays Luthen’s personal fleeting sense of security. Proper after the kill, he douses the key communications system in his antiquities store in liquid steel, making ready for an endgame he is aware of he will not survive. When Dedra lastly confronts him, unmasking him as Axis, Luthen would not run. He prepares to go down with the ship. His suicide try, thwarted by Dedra’s cry for a medical workforce, underscores the extremity of his perception: that he and others like Lonni should die so the revolt can reside. A theme launched in 2016’s Rogue One and continued to a good higher extent in Andor.

What makes Lonni’s loss of life much more painful for audiences is the non-public value. When he reveals the reality to Luthen, he resists in an try and safe protected journey for himself and his household, a spouse and daughter. The scene, which cuts away from the homicide itself, leaves solely Lonni’s lifeless physique slumped on a Coruscant bench, the chilly structure mirroring the emotional stiffness of the second. There isn’t any satisfaction in it, not even for Luthen. However within the logic of the revolt, the less who know the reality, the stronger the lie that protects it.

In some ways, each choice made by the Andor artistic workforce within the sequence finale is a domino impact resulting in Rogue One and, in the end, Star Wars: A New Hope. The finale notably units up a direct connection to Rogue One by way of the return of Daniel Mays’ character, Tivik. Tivik’s request to talk solely with Cassian sends Andor to the Ring of Kafrene, the precise mission that opens Rogue One, the place Tivik offers intel in regards to the Empire’s “planet killer.” 

This ultimate arc bridges the 2 tales seamlessly, much like the Season 2, Episode 9 connection that Mon Mothma makes to Star Wars: Rebels. Despite the fact that characters like Luthen and Lonni are left up to now, with their tales instructed through the occasions of Andor, their sacrifices for the revolt are felt all through the galaxy in a few years of Star Wars canon to come back.