Spoilers follow for Andor Season 2, Episodes 1-3, “Harvest.”
“Many Bothans died to bring us this information…”
When actress Caroline Blakiston uttered the above famous Star Wars line as Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi, it was undoubtedly a cool moment, a glimpse into the previously unseen hierarchy of the Rebel Alliance… albeit one that lasted about “26 and a half seconds,” as the actress once joked. Indeed, that brief scene was pretty much all we got of Mon Mothma, onscreen anyway, for many, many years.
And yet here we are as Andor Season 2 debuts, and Genevieve O’Reilly’s take on Mon Mothma has, combined with the writing from series creator Tony Gilroy and his team, transformed her into one of the greatest Star Wars characters ever. And that’s saying a lot when one considers the pantheon of many, many cool characters in George Lucas’ universe.
While O’Reilly’s reserved but tortured Mothma was already a highlight of Andor’s first season, the culmination of her Episodes 1-3 story this season truly drives home how amazing and different this show is in terms of Star Wars projects, and why O’Reilly and her character have proven so vital to its success.
I’m talking, of course, about the final moments of the third episode, as Mothma dances the night away at her daughter’s cursed wedding. Is the senator from Chandrila dancing to block out the increasing horrors around her, to numb herself to the pain and hardship that her own actions have caused (how many Chandrilan Squig shooters did she pound in that scene?), or is she simply unravelling in that moment, with nothing left to do but dance?
“It was an extraordinary day filming that,” O’Reilly recently told IGN’s Michael Peyton at Star Wars Celebration. “It was my second to last day on the whole of Andor … shooting that. It felt like a very beautiful crescendo, a big piece of the end of three episodes at the wedding. But Scott Collura Tony [Gilroy] and I have been talking about this week [of the wedding]. Perhaps from the outside it looks like this beautiful Renaissance painting moment, but actually it’s a woman trying to exorcize the chaos that’s in her brain. Tony said the other day about it, she’s dancing to keep herself from screaming. So everything in Andor, there are layers, there is depth, there are questions.”
Early in Episode 1, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) meets a young Imperial tech officer who is helping him steal a TIE Fighter. He gives her a pep talk regarding her decision to work with the Rebels: “You made this decision long ago,” he tells her. “The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them.”
But does he really mean those words? Or is he just giving the newbie Rebel hope to cling to (Rebellions are built on hope, don’t you know)? It seems likely that the woman will be at the very least arrested after Andor’s escape with the ship, if not executed as she fears. But as with so many moments in Andor, the cause is greater than those who are fighting it. And that goes for Mon Mothma too.
So when Andor says “You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them” at the start of this first chapter of Season 2, we can then look at the end of the chapter with Mothma spinning endlessly in a vortex of guilt, anxiety, and despair. She is doing everything she can to stop the Empire, and she definitely doesn’t feel right in that moment, having allowed her daughter to be married off into a shady family of well-to-do criminals while also standing by as Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael more or less tells her that he’s going to have her childhood friend Tay Kolma (Ben Miles) killed now that he’s outlived his usefulness. What else can she do but dance?
Her eleventh-hour attempt to dissuade her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) from going through with the marriage is of course also haunting Mothma, falling on deaf ears as it does. The tragedy is that the senator once stood where Leida does now and made the same mistake her daughter is about to make, becoming ensnared in a loveless marriage that’s more about money, power, and optics than anything else. Mothma’s own mother, drunk as she was that day, must’ve seen what Mothma sees now, but that sight didn’t help either to affect any change. “Nothing on the other side of that door matters,” she tells Leida. Of course, we know Mothma’s not just talking about the wedding. But it’s too late for Leida – she’s already lost.
The climactic dance sequence is intercut with Andor rescuing his friends back on the planet Mina-Rau, though he finds he’s too late to save Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) (who seemed like sort of the best guy you’d ever want to be friends with). Meanwhile, Tay is flying off into the distance, ignorant of his impending doom, and Mothma’s cousin Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) ponders the lover she’s seemed to have lost to the cause. And on the Chandrilan dance floor, even Mothma’s deadbeat husband Perrin Fertha (Alastair Mackenzie), who has seemingly always been in the dark about his wife’s Rebel activities and support, notices that something is off with his wife and she spins and spins heedlessly.
Of course, unlike many of the characters on Andor whose ultimate fate is currently unknown to us, Mon Mothma will in fact survive the events of the show and eventually stand on the bridge of the starship Home One to speak those immortal words in Return of the Jedi. But for now on, whenever we watch that scene, it will come with a much heavier and tragic backstory not just about Bothans, but about Mon Mothma herself.
For more on Andor Season 2, check out the cast racing to five major moments from the premiere. And discover why the planet Ghorman is so critical to the Rebel Alliance.
