Andor Season 2 (Disney+) – Review

Star Wars rarely lingers in the quiet spaces. Across decades of lightsaber clashes and galactic dogfights, the franchise has thrived on spectacle. But Disney+ streaming series Andor carved out something different – an espionage drama disguised as science fiction, where the real stakes aren’t Jedi versus Sith, but power versus resistance that never needed a Skywalker cameo to earn its gravitas. 

What made Tony Gilroy’s (The Bourne Legacy) Emmy-winning first season so bracing wasn’t just its tone or ambition, but how it stripped away the myth and laid bare the mechanics of rebellion. Gilroy, ironically an outsider to the galaxy far, far away, somehow delivered the most thematically coherent and emotionally urgent Star Wars series to date. At its best, it honours the mythos of Lucas’ original vision while daring to reframe it for a world that has seen far too much of what the Empire really looks like. 

Now, with Andor Season 2, that simmering discontent reaches a boil, moving closer to the mission that will cost Cassian Andor, one of the main characters from Gilroy’s co-written Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), his life. Fans will be heartened to see familiar faces, such as Andor’s reprogrammed KX droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk, Moana, Creature Commandos) and Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, Captain Marvel, Ready Player One), the Empire stooge that served as one of Rogue One‘s villains.

Rather than offering space opera bombast in a prequel series set before Rogue One, Gilroy once again leans into tension, paranoia, and the present dread of authoritarian control; the story picking up with the reverberations of Season 1’s riot on the planet Ferrix still echoing across the galaxy. Diego Luna (The Book of Life, Narcos: Mexico) returns as a harder, more resolved version of Cassian no longer searching for a cause, but actively shaping one. As the series accelerates toward the events of Rogue One, where the rebels steal the plans to the Empire’s weapon of mass destruction, the Death Star, it trades covert survival for active insurgency, painting a rebellion that’s messy, fractured, and desperately human.

Season 2 moves through four years of story across 12 episodes with a sense of mounting urgency. That time jump structure gives the season a brisk momentum, but the pacing can occasionally feel uneven particularly early on, where exposition piles up in pursuit of something grander and more cerebral than the average Star Wars story. In its eagerness to be the prestige outlier of the franchise, Andor risks outpacing both its audience and its own protagonist. Cassian, for much of the first stretch, feels like a passenger in his own show as the storyline shifts to set up larger pieces on the board.

It’s a slow burn for the first five episodes (around three and a half hours), with long stretches of waiting and maneuvering that may frustrate viewers craving more immediacy. But once the infamous Ghorman Massacre arc ignites in episode 7, the show barrels into gear with a force that’s difficult to overstate. Watching ordinary people on the planet Ghorman pushed past their limits by authoritarian violence, manipulated by state propaganda, or forced into complicity by fear are every bit as nail-biting and politically charged, especially when it mirrors the state of the world today. Scenes unfold with the same tightly coiled dread as the Aldhani heist or the Narkina-5 prison arc in Season 1, and the pressure is sustained, yielding one devastating crescendo after another. 

Meanwhile, Luna’s Cassian doesn’t ascend into rebellion with a battle cry or a triumphant charge. He stumbles there, scarred and cornered, shaped by grief, compromise, and a tightening noose of Imperial oppression. Luna meets this material head-on, delivering a performance that’s stripped-down and ferocious, laced with vulnerability and fury. There’s a haunted stillness to him now, a man whose silence carries as much weight as his actions – a far cry from the disaffected wanderer of Season 1.

Much of that emotional force draws from Cassian’s unspoken bond with his old friend Bix Caleen. Adria Arjona (Hit Man, Good Omens) returns with a sharp, restrained performance that acts as a quiet counterweight to Luna’s slow-burning intensity. The relationship between them defies easy categorisation – not quite romantic, not quite platonic – built on shared wounds and flickers of longing buried beneath survival instinct. Bix is the person who grounds him when the mission threatens to consume whatever scraps of humanity he has left. And it’s not just Cassian saving her. Bix’s endurance, even after enduring the Empire’s cruelty, makes her one of the series’ quietest and most powerful symbols of resistance. And in a galaxy that often defines heroism through lightsabers and legacy, Andor insists that love, resilience, and choice carry just as much power.

While Cassian moves through the shadows, Mon Mothma steps into the spotlight. Genevieve O’Reilly (Ahsoka, Star Wars Rebels) delivers her most commanding performance after 20 years (since 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, where her scenes were ultimately cut) as the senator from the planet Chandrila, now teetering on the edge of full-blown treason. Long confined to the role of quiet strategist and behind-the-scenes financier, Mothma finally steps into open rebellion, and the show doesn’t waste the opportunity to make that moment land. Her address to the Senate calling the Ghorman Massacre an “unprovoked genocide” is a seismic moment for the character and the Star Wars mythos as a whole. Declaring Emperor Palpatine a threat in front of the galaxy’s most powerful audience is both an act of defiance and a death sentence to her political career. The camera holds on her face as she delivers that speech, voice calm, eyes flinty, and it’s not just one of the best moments of Andor Season 2. It’s one of the most vital scenes in Star Wars, bar none.

This powerful emergence of open defiance, embodied by Mon Mothma’s courageous act, underscores the larger themes of the season. Ultimately, Season 2 of Andor refuses the neatness of heroism as mythology and instead tracks rebellion as an accumulation of hard choices, deferred hope, and irreversible sacrifices. As Cassian walks through the Rebel base on Yavin, a quiet storm building under Nicholas Britell’s (Succession, Moonlight) swelling score, you already know where he’s going. You already know what happens next. 

And still, it lands like a gut punch. Because now, we’ve lived with him, not just the soldier he becomes, but the man he was, the people he lost, and the cause that finally gave his life meaning. Andor has deepened everything around it, and every throwaway line in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) about stolen plans carries a new kind of weight. These aren’t just background figures anymore. They’re people with names, fears, and fire in their blood. And when Mothma speaks now, she doesn’t sound like a removed senator but someone who’s lost more than she can say.

Gilroy doesn’t care for fanfare or lightsaber showdowns. There’s no chosen one here, no Jedi prophecy, just regular people taking the risk to fight back, knowing full well they may never see what their efforts build. It’s raw and pointed, but never joyless. It burns with purpose. What Andor leaves behind is a challenge to what Star Wars can be: stripped of nostalgia and spectacle, and all the more powerful because of it.

Andor Season 2 will stream 22 April on Disney+, with three episode batches releasing weekly.

Natalie

Natalie is a big fan of anything related to movies, TV shows, and anime — you name it. When she’s not reading or being a dedicated cinephile, she’s probably playing gacha and tabletop games, or daydreaming of Caleb from Love and Deepspace.