Series / Andor

All for the Rebellion.

"Cassian Andor. It don't matter what you tell me or tell yourself. You'll ultimately die fighting these bastards. Wouldn't you rather give it all at once, to something real?"

— Luthen Rael

Star Wars: Andor, marketed as simply Andor, is a Disney+ Spy Thriller / Space Opera series created by Tony Gilroy and set in the Star Wars universe.

Set five years before the events of Rogue One, the series follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) during the formative years of the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire. Initially an independent rogue ekeing out a living on the desert planet Ferrix, Cassian has a fateful encounter with the mysterious handler Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) that sets him on the path towards becoming a crucial member of the nascent Rebel Alliance.

The cast also includes Genevieve O'Reilly reprising her role as Mon Mothma, as well as Adria Arjona, Fiona Shaw, Anton Lesser, Alex Ferns, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller and Andy Serkis in supporting roles.

The first season premiered on Disney+ with three episodes on September 21, 2022 and consists of 12 episodes. A second season of another 12 episodes, which will also conclude the series, is in development with an estimated 2024 arrival.

Followed by Ahsoka in production order.

Previews: Teaser, Trailer 1, Trailer 2.

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Andor contains examples of:

Tropes A-F

• Abusive Precursors: Alluded to. The Kuati signet kyber crystal that Luthen gives to Cassian is said to celebrate the uprising against the "Rakatan invaders" - an ancient species that invented hyperspace travel and conquered the galaxy in the Star Wars Legends continuity, first seen in Knights of the Old Republic. While the exact details haven't been confirmed, the mention of there being an "uprising" and them being "invaders" implies that they share the same backstory here as they do in Legends.
• Action Girl: Vel and Cinta (a Battle Couple too it turns out) both prove themselves quite capable as commandos during the Aldhani raid, first sneaking into the base from the water, then scaling up to join their male comrades. The raid shows them as, if anything, more aggressive in threatening Imperials or shooting as well.
• Agony of the Feet: Prisoners on Narkina 5 are forced to go barefoot while guards wear thick insulated shoes. The entire floor is conductive and can be used to electrocute prisoners who get out of line.
• The Alcatraz: The factory prison complex on Narkina 5 that Cassian is sent to. Prisoners are worked to the bone and pitted against each other to stay on top of the productivity food chain, and conductive floors are used to keep the population in line. It's set on a floating complex in the middle of a large lake or inland sea, with several others like this also nearby.
• Almighty Janitor: Even though almost everyone hates, fears, or loathes him (see The Friend Nobody Likes), Luthen is so good at his job and so dedicated to it that no one actually tries to stop him. The only person who doesn't tell him, to his face, that he's a piece of shit they can't trust is Cassian, because Cassian is on his way to becoming that man himself and willing to die because he hates what he's become.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The crew of the ship shown crashing on Kenari in Cassian's flashbacks appear human but with bright yellow skin. It's not clear if they're one of the many species of Rubber-Forehead Alien that exist in Star Wars or if it's a symptom of the chemical leak also mentioned to have occurred aboard.
• Anti-Hero: Luthen Rael is a spymaster in the Rebel Alliance who is so ruthless and willing to commit such unspeakable acts in the name of fighting the Empire that even he openly admits he's just as bad as them and uses their own methods against them. He considers his morality and soul to be a small price to pay for the freedom of the galaxy.
  Luthen: I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know i’ll never see.
• Anyone Can Die: Aside from Cassian himself, there are a handful of characters we are introduced to who are Saved by Canon: Mon Mothma, Saw Guerrera, and Melshi. Aside from them, this show is perfectly willing to let characters that seem like they might become major or recurring characters die within a few episodes of being introduced. The early rebel cells in particular have a very high mortality rate, likely as a deconstruction of the fact that being part of the early stages of guerilla warfare against a technologically advanced fascist government doesn't tend to be conducive to a long lifespan. (Especially when many of the cells of said rebellion are desperately low on cash and supplies and can't properly coordinate with each other.)
• Apathetic Citizens: Exhausted by years of civil war and longing for an extended period of peace and order, most of the populace is content to quietly endure or ignore the Empire's oppressive policies and the mistreatment of their communities. Part of the initial aim of the rebellion is to provoke the Empire into ramping up their tyranny, in the hopes of shocking people out of this numb acceptance of the status quo.
• Arc Words: "Climb."
• Armor Is Useless: The apparent pointlessness of stormtrooper armor is a given fact in the Star Wars universe. Here, in the last episode of season 1, unprotected civilian rioters take on fully equipped stormtroopers — one of whom is taken down with a headbutt.
• Arranged Marriage: Mon Mothma and her husband Perrin were married off to each other to seal a political alliance between their families, something that's legal and apparently common amongst Chandrilan nobility. It goes some way to explaining why their relationship is so dysfunctional. Later on, Mothma is forced to choose between protecting her daughter from going through the same thing or gaining a powerful ally for the nascent Rebellion, one who will only help if Mothma agrees to unite their families politically through the same sort of marriage.
• Art Imitates Art: The series has several shots which allude to Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Some specific examples include child Andor overlooking the open mine on his home planet◊, Luthen Rael walking towards the town on Ferrix◊ and Syril Karn looking at the aftermath of an explosion on Ferrix.
• Ascended Extra: Mon Mothma was a One-Scene Wonder in Return of the Jedi, played by Caroline Blakiston intended as the highest leader of the Alliance. Genevieve O'Reilly played her in several Deleted Scenes in Revenge of the Sith and became a Deleted Role, but O'Reilly returned to play the character in minor parts through Star Wars Rebels and Rogue One (Kath Soucie played the character in similar bit parts in Star Wars: The Clone Wars). With all of that history, this show is the first to feature her as a main character, with much of the B-story of the show being solely about her political and financial machinations that contributes to the burgeoning rebellion.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: The plants of Narkina 5 are stark white without a speck of dirt, highlighting the efficiency and order. Even the prisoners' sleeping and eating areas are cleaned daily. When one of the prisoners commits suicide, it's implied that his body will be quickly removed and the place cleaned up without a second thought.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Chief Inspector Hyne doesn't have a high opinion of one of the cops that Cassian kills in "Kassa", even expressing surprise that he wasn't murdered sooner. This no doubt influences his decision to cover up the incident, which Karn unfortunately takes issue with.
  • In "Reckoning", the Pre-Mor goon who dies after trying to pilot the sabotaged transport pod happens to be the same trigger-happy corporate cop that killed Timm. He's also the only confirmed fatality, given that Blevin suggests several of the men who went down actually survived the incident.
  • In "The Eye", Skeen turns out to have been a common thug with no actual loyalty to Vel, and made up his entire story about his brother's orchard. He proposes to Cassian that they split the credits they stole from the heist on Aldhani and go their separate ways - to which he gets shot dead in response.
• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: The Corpo security officers have a reputation of being like this. Cassian kills two of them when they take issue with him getting attention from a woman in a bar and then gets lippy with them, trying to shake him down for credits in an alleyway. The attempted investigation and arrest of Cassian then goes horribly wrong, resulting in multiple deaths and a good amount of property damage. The Imperial Security Bureau apparently also has a large number of reports about Corpo security screwing up, and takes the failure to arrest Cassian as the final straw, removing the corporation's sector's neutral status and placing it entirely under Imperial jurisdiction. One of Dedra's subordinates even complains that the Corpo report on the incident misspells the planet's name.
• Barefoot Captives: The prisoners on Narkina 5 are ordered to remove their shoes aboard the prison transport, and they remain barefoot in the plant. The guards electrocute them via the conductive floor to keep them in line.
• Batman Gambit: Luthen Rael's escape from the Imperial cruiser, where he exploits standard imperial procedure and response to allow him to make a clean getaway. He fights against a Level 2 tractor beam to force them to increase to Level 5 and draw him in, whereupon he launches physical debris which is pulled in at Level 5 speed to heavily damage the tractor beam dish, thus releasing him from its grip and allowing him to deal with the air wing they send after him.
• Battle Couple: Vel works well with Cinta in the field and during the heist, despite their mutual commitments to the Rebellion putting a strain on their relationship.
• Bavarian Fire Drill:
  • Cassian explains to Luthen Rael that all he has to do to steal from the Empire is to wear a uniform, carry a toolbox and just walk in, because they're so overconfident they can’t fathom some thieving commoner like himself actually getting into their secure areas.
  • When the rebels on Aldhani do the payroll heist, a basic disguise as soldiers and average drill performance is enough to get into the vault (with some help from the other team jamming comms) because none of the soldiers know each other's garrisons well enough to tell if anyone doesn't belong. Even after they kidnap Commandant Beehaz to get into the vault, shouting at the soldiers inside to line up for inspection is enough to panic them into forming up and become very easy to hold at gunpoint and disarm.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Syril Karn wants to solve the murders of two guards to prove himself with the corporate security force that he feels has gotten lax in their duties. By the end of the third episode, he's lost men in a violent, out-of-control shootout with his suspect Cassian, and realizes he's in way over his head with a mess he can't excuse away. The next episode has him and all the surviving corpos, including the boss who told him to let it go in the first place, getting fired for gross incompetence as a result.
• Beneath the Mask: Multiple characters maintain carefully-presented facades
  • Cassian is introduced as something of a charmer. His first scene is in a brothel sweet-talking one of the workers to divulge information about his missing sister. When that doesn't work, he drops his mask to reveal a much more genuine desperation.
  • Mon Mothma presents herself to the Senate as "an irritation" and do-gooder, who concerns herself with useless charitable causes and Empire overreach. This is to hide the fact that she's actually funding rebel insurgency across the galaxy. As she says to Tay Kolma, "It's a lie. The Mon Mothma people think they know, it's a lie, it's a projection. A front."
  • Vel hides both her politics and her sexuality from Perrin and Leida while on Coruscant. She comes from a rich family and maintains her front as a spoilt, rich girl traversing the galaxy to hide that she was pulling off a huge heist.
  • Luthen fronts as a jovial, fashionable antiques dealer for the rich and powerful on Coruscant, but his business hides his actual work as a spymaster co-ordinating rebel activity. We actually meet his mask second; in Episode 4, we see him put on the wig, suit, rings and practise his smile and body language. However, we see that he's struggling with the moral difficulties, that being a ruthless spymaster is hard for him. His assistant criticizes him for getting too close to the situation and he's made a serious mistake letting an unknown quantity like Cassian see his face.
  • Kleya, Luthen's second-in-command, is the assistant and shopgirl for Luthen in front of clients, but behind the scenes is just as experienced, ruthless, and pragmatic as Luthen - if not more so.
• Bittersweet Ending: Season One. Cassian's friends from Ferrix escape the planet safely and the Rebellion is slowly picking up steam across the galaxy, in part because of him. But a lot of good people have died throughout the course of the season just for that, the Empire's crackdowns are causing untold misery and death throughout the galaxy, and Cassian realizes he can't stay with his friends because the Imperial hunt for him will endanger them, leaving him no choice but to become Luthen's personal agent.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The fledgling Rebellion is much less morally scrupulous than the organization they would end up becoming, with many of its agents being ruthless terrorists who often care more about hurting the Empire in the name of their own grudges against it than helping people. Luthen Rael is a paranoid and cutthroat coordinator for the Rebellion who has no problem killing anybody from Imperial forces to hapless cops to his own agents if he deems them liabilities and turns out to be actively trying to provoke the Empire into committing atrocities so more people will wake up to the danger the Empire poses and join the cause. Vel's rebel cell is made up of a dysfunctional Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who may or may not be trustworthy and have no problems with threatening the lives of the wife and adolescent son of an Imperial Commandant. They're the good guys because the totalitarian and dictatorial Empire is so, so much worse, and even then many other Rebels like Mon Mothma find themselves disturbed by the unscrupulousness of people like Luthen or Saw and his Partisans.
• Book Ends: In their first scene together, Luthen Rael tells Cassian he's going to die fighting the Empire, and gives him the choice of making that death matter. In the final episode, Cassian confronts Luthen, who's come to kill him, and gives him the choice of making that death matter.
• Break the Cutie: B2EMO, the Andors' cute and kindly droid, ends up spending the series watching his family fall apart piece by piece, as Cassian becomes a fugitive, Maarva dies of old age, and family friend Bix gets arrested and tortured by the Empire, leaving Brasso the only one left. The whole experience clearly leaves the poor droid traumatized.
• Brown Note: Years ago, the Empire wanted to set up a refueling center on the planet Dizon Frey, which was inhabited by a unique species called the Dizonites. When the Dizonites took an especial opposition to the Imperial occupation, Imperial high command gave permission to the regional governors to suppress the uprising by any means necessary… including slaughtering all of the Dizonites. As they were all butchered by the Imperials, they gave out a unique screech that sounded like a "choral, agonized pleading". When Imperial officers were monitoring the recordings remotely, they were all later found huddled underneath their ship's bridge. Due to its value as a torture device, the Empire modified it a little and made sure to have the section with the children be the one they now use in torture.
• But Not Too Gay: Vel and Cinta are a lesbian couple (the first explicit LGBT+ characters onsceen in Star Wars media). However, in contrast to straight people around, their relationship shows far less intimacy. Andor is seen in a room after spending the night with a woman (who's under the covers). Bix pretty clearly wants her boyfriend to have sex with her (though she doesn't say anything) and is shown waking up the morning after it's implied the pair did so. Cinta and Vel, meanwhile, don't even kiss. Granted, this is downplayed since the physical intimacy isn't that strong in the other cases, but still notable.
• By-the-Book Cop: Syril Karn and Linus Mosk are both genuinely dedicated to the job of law enforcement in contrast to their complacent coworkers. While they're both technically private security, they work for a MegaCorp so powerful they're basically police.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The livestock on planet Aldhani include dray, which resemble sheep with dark coats and multiple pairs of horns—in other words, they're dead ringers for the real-life Hebridean sheep breed.
• Call-Forward:
  • Luthen Rael tells Cassian that eventually, the latter will die battling the Galactic Empire. It's just a question of whether he wants his death against them to matter.
  • Kenari, Cassian’s true home, reported to having a mining disaster is what the Empire would later say to cover up the destruction of Jedha via the Death Star.
  • At the start of the series, Mon Mothma is championing the cause of the natives of Ghorman, a planet suffering deeply under Imperial occupation. That would be the same Ghorman that will later be the site of the Ghorman Massacre, in which Grand Moff Tarkin murdered thousands of peaceful protestors by landing his Star Destroyer right on top of them in what would come to be considered one of the Empire's worst atrocities and prompt Mothma to out herself as a leader in the Rebel Alliance to condemn Palpatine.
  • Captain Elk's line after his crew is surprised by Luthen's modified starship — "I can see that.WHERE'S MY AIR WING?!" — is very reminiscent of Krennic's "DEPLOY THE GARRISON!" line from Rogue One.
  • Cassian tells Kino that the Empire is not listening in the prison - they're too complacent. In Rogue One, when they broadcast the plans, one of his very last lines is to ask Jyn if she thinks anyone is listening. They are.
  • Episode 11 ends with a poignant shot of Cassian staring out over the ocean of Niamos after he's just been informed that Maarva has died, eerily echoing how Cassian himself will meet his maker gazing out at the sunset on the shores of Scarif.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Cassian's hopes of retiring to a quiet, out-of-the-way beach community and putting the Rebellion behind him for good are crushed when the Aldhani heist causes Imperial crackdowns throughout the galaxy, including one in which he gets arrested by a power-tripping shoretrooper.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • The kyber crystal Luthen gives to Cassian is said to be one that "celebrates the uprising against the Rakatan invaders". Eagle-eyed fans will recognize them as the space-faring Abusive Precursors first introduced in Knights of the Old Republic, who first ruled over the galaxy as the Rakata Infinite Empire and were the creators of hyperspace travel. Previously, the guidebook for The Force Awakens recanonized their home planet, Rakata Prime/Lehon, but this is the first mention of the species proper in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
  • Leida Mothma, Mon Mothma's Daughter from the Legends comic book Entrenched makes her Canon Debut in Episode 5.
  • Belsavis, a prison colony planet in Legends that made a prominent appearance in Star Wars: The Old Republic, is name-dropped in Episode 8.
  • Andor's background cover story is that he is from Fest. Fest first showed up as the planet where one level of Dark Forces took place.
• Central Theme:
  • Fascism. Over the course of 12 episodes, we see how Cassian is transformed from a petty criminal who is driven by concern for his family into a dedicated rebel willing to do whatever it takes to bring down the Empire. There's no grand moment, no single event, just the constant grind of the banality of evil, of uncaring bureaucrats enacting cruelty because that's their job. Over the course of months, he's subjected to the unceasing dehumanization and devaluing of an empire that only values power for its own sake, and becomes the man willing to commit atrocities to end it that we met in Rogue One.
  • Hope. Rael says he is fighting for a sunrise he will never see, and Cassian's final fate is that he will have a crucial part in ending the Empire, but he will never see the New Republic for himself.
• Chekhov's Gun: In Announcement, Maarva has a fall when attempting to pry open the old Rix floodgates to check if the tunnels under the hotel where the ISB were stationed at were still open, "so that Rebellion could sneak in and take them by surprise". In the season finale, it's this exact passage that Cassian uses to sneak into the hotel to rescue Bix.
• Close-Knit Community: The close community of Ferrix is quickly established by showing how the workers keep their gloves on a wall outside of their workplace with no worries about them being stolen or sabotaged by members of the community. As the series progresses this is built up further, with outsiders very much being on the outside when they're there despite tensions between locals, and with locals all being interconnected, well informed, and well disposed to stand against outsiders.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Poor Bix is subjected to a particularly nightmarish form of this by the ISB in hopes of tracking down Cassian and Luthen, being made to listen to a modified recording of the screams of dying children from a massacre that was carried out by the Empire.
• Combat Pragmatist: Luthen's Crazy-Prepared and hyper-pragmatic approach to life extends to how he behaves on the rare occasions he ends up on the battlefield personally, as shown by his actions in the shootout on Ferrix (most memorably, preemptively rigging a doorway with explosives then setting them off as the enemy is breaching) and the eclectic weaponry his ship is decked out with (such as a set of cannons that fire metal shrapnel to be used if he's ever caught in a tractor beam; the beam pulls the tiny shrapnel right into the beam array at high speed, mangling it).
• Continuity Nod:
  • Cassian's forged profile claims he is from Fest, which was claimed to be his homeworld before this series came out and revealed that his true homeworld is Kenari.
  • Luthen struggles and nearly fails to convince Saw to work with another Rebel cell on a job because they're former Separatists, which Saw hates with a passion. The reason for his hatred isn't fully explained here, but longtime fans will remember that Saw Gerrera's first appearance was as a Republic-aligned resistance fighter battling a CIS military occupation of his homeworld, Onderon. Said occupation ended shortly after a battle in which Saw's beloved sister Steela Gerrera was killed by the Separatist forces; he's still nursing a major grudge. In the end, Saw does agree to work with the Separatists, only for Luthen to inform him that the plan is off, much to Saw's confusion, since the ISB caught wind of the plan and hopes to use it to catch even more rebels.
• Cool Starship:
  • The chief candidate is Luthen Rael's Fondor Haulcraft, a cargo runner he's modified with a handful of unique technologies to suit his work of subterfuge.
  • The Cantwell-class arrestor/patrol cruiser Luthen squares off with in ''Daughter of Ferrix'' is another notable example, being based on an original concept for the Star Destroyer by concept artist Colin Cantwell.
• Cop Killer: Andor's situation on Ferrix was already going downhill, but things only get really bad after he kills two corrupt Pre-Mor cops trying to shake him down. The first was an accident, but the second was to cover his tracks, knowing Pre-Mor would come down hard on cop-killers. And they do, if only because Deputy Inspector Syril Karn wanted to throw his weight around (against the wishes of the Chief Inspector, who'd already deduced the ignominious death of two corrupt cops wasn't an issue worth pursuing).
• Cultural Rebel: Mon Mothma's daughter Leida is a much more traditionalist Chandrilan than her mother, who notes with some bitter amusement that the ancient customs of Chandrila are more popular among Chandrilan immigrants to other planets and their descendants than they are on Chandrila itself. Mothma even acknowledges that her otherwise worthless husband is surprisingly tolerant and progressive on gender roles and isn't the one pushing for an arranged marriage for their daughter — Leida wants such a marriage.
• Cutting Corners: A recurring theme is that the Empire is not putting in the work required to maintain its power. Nemik's manifesto lampshades the fact that maintaining tyranny is hard. The Empire is using repression and violence as shortcuts because they do not want to put in the work required to properly govern. A garrison commander delegates most of the work to his second-in-command because he is too busy trying to impress a VIP. The judicial system is too busy cracking down to even bother with the semblance of a fair trial. A prison is seriously undermanned and compensates by executing prisoners who start to riot. Imperial officials try to establish their authority by hanging people without a trial. This allows them to temporarily cover up problems but leaves the general public with no real options beyond rebelling.
• Cyberpunk: The Starter Villains are not working for the Empire but Pre-Mor, a Megacorporation. The protagonists are not Jedi but criminals, covert operatives and working stiffs. The villains are not Sith Lords or Force-using tyrants meddling with the Dark Side, but careerists trying to do their job despite indifference and bureaucratic infighting. And the main character is introduced slogging through the rain.
• Darker and Edgier: Granted, the Star Wars franchise is all about a generations-spanning galactic struggle between Light and Dark forces, but this series is grimmer compared to everything else in the live-action range save for Revenge of the Sith. Of note is its depiction of the nascent Rebellion. Lacking both funding and widespread support, it's willing to take civilian hostages and bait brutal crackdowns in order to garner either, and even attempt to assassinate its own mercenaries for security reasons, as the Empire is too powerful and too ruthless for anything less than ruthlessness in turn — in short, the sort of actions the later Rebellion would be able to condemn Saw Gerrera's extremist Partisans for. Meanwhile, the Empire is directly shown using torture, mass executions, and public hangings and characters die painfully of mundane causes like strokes and heart attacks.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The show initially comes off as a straight deconstruction of Star Wars, but ultimately reconstructs it.
  • Fighting The Empire is shown to be far more dangerous than in most Star Wars media, because when underdog rebels fight against The Empire, they are not guaranteed to survive, let alone win. Most of the crew assembled for the heist on Aldhani end up dying, and most of the prisoners in the breakout on Narkina 5 die in the escape. However, the show emphasizes that the Evil Will Fail, as the Galactic Empire's tyranny and desire for control will cause more and more enemies to rise up against it until it can no longer handle them all.
  • The Empire overall gets this treatment. Many deconstructions of their portrayal in Star Wars focus on the idea that despite their evil, there are still some "good people" in their ranks who think they're doing the right thing. Andor plays with this by spending a good deal of time developing and humanizing several of the villains serving the Empire, taking effort to show the audience that they too have sympathetic motivations, insecurities, and goals... only to remind the audience that, relatable and sympathetic as they may be, these are still people choosing to support an openly tyrannical regime that regularly commits atrocities. Many of them are given What You Are in the Dark moments where their words and actions prove that, deep down, they're just as amoral as the system they support.
• Debut Queue: Cassian, Bix, and Syril make their debut in the first episode, Luthen and Maarva are introduced in the second, while Mon Mothma, Vel, Kleya, Cinta and Dedra all make their first appearances in Episode 4.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: It's revealed in the seventh episode that Mon Mothma's marriage with her husband Perrin is an arranged, political one done when they were both sixteen. When Mothma mentions this in a dinner party, one of the guests thinks it's romantic.
• Detrimental Determination: Syril Karn's Fatal Flaw. The man is simply incapable of taking "no" for an answer or stopping something once he's started it, which leads to him relentlessly pursuing Cassian despite being told by his every single superior to let the case go, even as he continuously gets people killed and destroys his own life with the pursuit. He then turns this into a creepy, romantic, Stalker with a Crush fixation on Dedra, and even ends up on Ferrix for the finale despite having no plan or ability to act, just wanting to be there to ... something?
• Disaster Dominoes: The first three episodes are a gradual series of ones that reach a boiling point. Cassian goes to a seedy bar to find information about his sister. Two of the patrons are thugs who try to shake him down - he has to fight them off, but then one dies accidentally - leading him to have to kill the other. Then it turns out they were corporate cops. This, combined with an overeager officer who becomes hellbent on hunting down the killer and a coworker whose jealousy of Cassian's relationship with a friend reaches a boiling point, leads to a complete disaster as the cops bring a veritable army down on his hometown which results in many deaths, Cassian having to leave the planet, and tragedy all around. This also leads to him fully attracting the attention of Luthen, who recruits him for the Aldhani heist, which causes the Imperial crackdown that gets Cassian sent to prison and then leads to the prison break on Narkina 5 and the riot on Ferrix.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Cassian's adoptive father Clem was lynched by the Empire for basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time; he tried to stop some rabble rousers from provoking a squad of clone stormtroopers and was subsequently arrested just for standing next to them when their provocations succeeded.
  • In the present, Cassian himself ends up getting arrested by a shoretrooper and sentenced to six years in prison just for walking around; ostensibly because the trooper found him suspicious and had reason to think he was in on a crime that had just been committed, but probably really just because the trooper was on a power trip. Then it turns out the "six year" sentence is a lie - the Empire intends to use him as slave labor until the end of his natural lifespan.
• Do Not Go Gentle: A repeated theme, often used as a Call-Forward to Cassian's death in Rogue One.
  • When Luthen first recruits Cassian, he challenges him to take on the Empire head-on instead of his previous stealing and sabotaging.
    Luthen: No matter what you'll tell me, or tell yourself, you know you'll ultimately die fighting these bastards. So what I'm asking you is this: Wouldn't you rather give it all at once, to something real, than carve off useless pieces until there's nothing left?
  • In "One Way Out", Cassian says he'd "rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want" during his attempt to rally Kino to his prison break. Kino later repeats this during his Rousing Speech.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Kino and Lt. Gorn are both introduced as this, but both are subversions.
  • Gorn runs the Aldhani garrison like a hardass, by the book officer expecting everything around the unimportant, backwater base to look and be run perfectly. The evening before the Eye of Aldhani, a spectacular celestial event that is generally considered the only good part about being stationed at Aldhani, Gorn is ordering his men to paint the ceiling and clean up the station before a VIP visit, nevermind that it might cause most of the garrison to miss their chance to see the Eye. It's part of his tactic of Briar Patching, as Gorn is purposefully riding his men so hard and endangering their one perk of serving in that location that it makes the NCOs step up and ask to be allowed time off before the Eye. Had by the book officer Gorn given that permission for no particular reason, it might have seemed strange for him to leave the garrison understaffed and vulnerable. But making the men request it and Gorn decide to graciously grant it makes everything seem much more natural and gives the heist perfect conditions to take place.
  • Kino seems to have an iron grip on the 5-2D inmates, keeping them in line so there's no crackdowns on them from the guards, and is singularly focused on getting everyone to keep their heads down so he can get out without incident. After Ulaf has a stroke, however, it's revealed that he genuinely cares for the men and wants everyone to get out in one piece. When it's revealed that no one is getting out, he immediately gets on board with Cassian's prison break plan and uses his leadership skills to free everyone.
• Dramatic Irony: In their efforts to catch Luthen (codename Axis), the ISB are busy hunting Andor, the only weak link in Luthen's network. Little do they know their Empire's pointless cruelty has already swept him into a forced labor camp under a false identity, not even bothering to probe at that fake ID because the cruelty of it is the purpose, not catching criminals. The efficacy sought by those loyal to the Empire's claimed ideals is undermined by its true purpose.
• Driven to Suicide: A despairing prisoner in Narkina-5 commits suicide by deliberately stepping onto a lethally-electrified floor rather than be put through anymore of the Empire's slave labor. Judging from the other prisoners’ reactions, he is not the first to do so.
• Dystopia Is Hard: As Nemik's manifesto states, "tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle." A recurring theme through the show is that the effort the Empire needs to maintain an iron grip on the populace requires extraordinary effort and resources. This results in a vast, bloated, network that is often at odds with each other. The Imperial prison Narkina 5 relies on electrified floors to keep prisoners in line, but provides very few guards, who get easily overpowered, the ISB are a back-stabbing, infighting den of bureaucratic vipers whose effort at weeding out rebel activity clash with their career goals. In Morlana, the ISB has outsourced its security and lawkeeping to Law Enforcement, Inc., which is filled with unmotivated, incompetent, or corrupt cops. When Luthen is stopped by an Imperial patrolship, the guards need to wait in a queue to check his (faked) carrier ID due to the vast network of surveillance, buying him precious time to load up his secret weapons and decimate them.
• Elemental Motifs: Water is a recurring motif in events that further Cassian's radicalization into a committed Rebel. Before the cop killing that kicks everything else off, he's introduced walking through a downpour. The Aldhani heist where he participates in his first operation for the Rebellion takes place at a dam. Niamos, where he's arrested for no reason due to the Imperial crackdown, seems to be one big beach resort, and Narkina 5 where he's transported is a Sea Sinkhole that he escapes by swimming. Finally, when he reads Nemik's manifesto, symbolically embracing his anti-Imperial ideals, it's raining once again. The empire is a giant edifice, rock solid in its purpose of reducing everything under tyranny. The rebellion is the ocean, impossible to contain and reducing the empire to sand.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil:
  • Unlike the original trilogy, which tends to depict Imperial officers as white men, there are female officers and officers of color in positions of power though they are still a minority. However, all this shows is that the Empire discriminates according to different criteria, as there are noticeably no aliens due to the Empire's Fantastic Racism, and their garrison on Aldhani has nothing but contempt for the human natives.
  • One alien in Imperial army-style armor is seen standing guard at Andor's trial at the end of episode 7, although the lack of aliens in any higher ranks than "court security guard" still falls in line with the Empire's xenophobia.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Cassian is first shown entering a brothel and carelessly identifying himself as being from Kenari - a far cry from the cold and calculated professional later seen in Rogue One.
  • Syril Karn is shown standing in front his apathetic superior, having made adjustments to his uniform and standing stiffly with his arms behind his back, thus demonstrating his straight-lacedness and by the book tendencies.
  • Dedra Meero is first seen attending a meeting at the ISB, and when Major Partagaz questions the ISB members of the organization's purpose, she recites the definition directly from the text - which turns out to be the answer Partagaz wasn't looking for. This demonstrates Dedra's similar straight-lacedness to Karn, and like with him, it proves to be a flaw for her rather than a benefit.
  • Mon Mothma is first seen visiting Luthan Rael's antiques shop on Coruscant, playing along as a loyal Imperial Senator - a facade which drops the moment she and him are out of sight from her new driver, at which point she reveals that she is constantly under surveillance by the Empire, establishing her as a figure of importance against the Empire who nevertheless has to remain careful about her dealings with the early Rebellion.
• Establishing Series Moment: In the first scene, after inquiring about his sister in the red-light district Cassian is followed by two Corrupt Cops for an unnecessary shakedown. He lures them close before quickly subduing them, but accidentally kills one because of the way he fell. His partner is wrought with grief and Cassian is also shaken up, as he now has to kill the other one to have a chance to run. This quickly demonstrates a raw tone showing characters who are smart and skilled but not unshakable, where bad luck has a bigger impact than bad decisions. This is followed up by the security chief recognizing following up on their deaths to be more trouble than its worth while Inspector Karn ignores orders to try and track down Cassian, showing the diversity of character motivations.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In "Reckoning", when one of the corporate police who detained Bix panics and winds up shooting an unarmed Timm, his commander sends him away to prepare the shuttle and makes a point of relieving him of his rifle to ensure he doesn't wind up shooting anyone else accidentally. In the same episode, Karn is stunned into immobility after Luthen blows up the decoy car, killing several of his men.
  • In "The Eye", despite the fact that Cassian's Not in This for Your Revolution as far as the Aldhani job goes, he's still disgusted when Skeen reveals he's a bullshitter and blasts him when the latter offers to split the job's money with him and run.
  • Despite his own extremism and personally hating Anto Kreegyr for being a former Separatist, Saw Gerrera is absolutely horrified and disgusted when he learns that Luthen is deliberately sending Kreegyr and his men to their deaths simply to avoid risking a single mole in the ISB getting compromised. It takes Luthen literally holding a gun to his head to get Saw to very reluctantly agree to go along with this, and even then Luthen is clearly uncertain whether or not Saw will decide to go against him and warn Kreegyr.
  • In "Reckoning", Sergeant Mosk is portrayed as an unapologetic Black Shirt who is determined to enforce the Empire's authority and stamp out "fomenting". After seeing Stormtroopers massacre dozens of unarmed civilians during the Ferrix riot in "Rix Road", he's clearly horrified, and is seen chugging his entire hip flask shortly afterwards.
• Evil Is Petty: We're shown two very different parts of the Empire in the series. On the one hand we have the true believers, like Dedra, Partagaz, and Syril, who are all quite good at their jobs. On the other, we have the bored bureaucrats and power-tripping troopers who carry out the true will of the empire: pointless, impersonal cruelty.
• Experienced Protagonist: While the first season shows how Cassian became a committed Rebel, it's clear that he's lived a colorful life long before his recruitment by Luthen. In fact, Luthen recruits him precisely because the life Cassian's led has taught him all the skills necessary to be a Rebel operative.
• Fake Charity: A heroic example. Mon Mothma conceals the funds she's diverted towards the growing Rebellion by moving them through a charity she herself founded, although it's not a perfect solution.
• False Flag Operation: Of a sort. As Luthen reveals — with disturbing casualness — in episode seven, he didn't particularly care if the Aldhani heist really succeeded or the team survived; the real purpose of the heist was to agitate and provoke the Empire into cracking down, so they would inflict atrocities and repression on people throughout the galaxy, naturally creating more potential recruits for the Rebellion and additional uprisings that would further weaken the Empire.
• Fantastic Noir: The series has a great deal of noir influences, with an emphasis on crime, rebellion, and moral ambiguity in the underbelly of the galaxy and general aesthetic and cinematography choices that evoke the feel of a gritty spy or neo-noir detective movie from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: The Empire has displaced thousands of Aldhani natives from the planet's highlands, driving them south to more industrialized locations. It strongly parallels the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, during which tenants were forcibly evicted and relocated from the Scottish highlands, where the Aldhani-set episodes were shot.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Chandrillan fashion takes a lot of cues from traditional Japanese clothing, with some Korean influence as well. This is very evident in the outfits worn by Perrin, Leida, and Tay Kolma, but less so with Mon Mothma, who is a Cultural Rebel.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: The Empire is an evil institution, but also an intensely bloated, corrupt, and incompetent one more concerned with short-term profit that keeps the higher-ups comfortable than any sort of sensible governing. This is reflected in everything from their bureaucracy (a tangled, byzantine mess where all the employees and officers are more concerned with jockeying for promotions than doing their jobs right) to their military (which has no real solutions to any problems beyond attacking). In his writings, Karis notes that tyrannical regimes are against the natural order and must constantly struggle to reassert themselves.
• Fat Bastard:
  • In "Reckoning", when Cassian meets up with Luthen, Cassian refers to the Imperials as "so proud of themselves" and "so fat and satisfied."
  • Sergeant Mosk is also quite hefty and serves a corrupt corporation that is aligned with the Empire.
  • Jayhold, the Imperial Commandant in "The Eye" is introduced struggling to close his belt and blames his wife Roboda, for not storing it properly so it wouldn't shrink in the planet's climate. His wife fires back that he must've put on some weight, and he then shows a bit of his true colors by threatening to strike his twelve-year-old son, Leonart, for not wanting to wear his blouse (basically a cape). When the heist gets underway, the Rebels force him to assist in loading the credits into the craft they're going to steal, and he winds up collapsing from overexertion.
• Faux Affably Evil: The calm and polite Dr. Gorst often comes across as more akin to a dentist than a Torture Technician. When introduced to Bix, he gives her a cheerful smile as if he were in a social situation, and when describing his torture technique, he seems to think Bix will find it as intellectually fascinating as he does. However, this does nothing to change the fact that he's a sadist who seems to really enjoy his job.
• Felony Misdemeanour: The trumped-up charges ("Anti-Imperial speech", "Fleeing from the scene of anti-imperial activity", etc.) that Cassian is accused of in "Announcement" are still hardly heinous crimes by any standards, but carry a sentence of six years in Hellhole Prison. This obviously backfires badly on the Empire, given that there's a good chance Cassian would have continued to lay low if left undisturbed. Ordinarily however they would only carry six months.
• Food as Bribe: The workers are fed a flavorless sludge from hoses in their cells that they are nonetheless permitted to eat as much of as they'd like, so they're fed for work. The best workers are rewarded with flavor.
• Forensic Accounting:
  • Luthen Rael's current actions are driven by the fact that the Imperial Security Bureau has gotten really good in discovering and tracing suspicious money transfers and he needs a new source of funding for his rebel cells.
  • The driving force of Mon Mothma's plot thread throughout the first season is an approaching Imperial audit of her family finances, and how to cover up her having moved large amounts of money to the rebellion.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Anyone who knows the Aurebesh (the Star Wars alphabet) by heart, or at least has a translation table ready, can decipher the characters shown in the series. While most of them are rather innocuous, Andor's criminal report in Episode 7 is particularly interesting. It says "Crime: Suspected Force sensitivity, assaulting an Imperial officer".
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Luthen Rael is an indispensable part of the early Rebel Alliance, being one of their chief spymasters. He's also hated by pretty much everyone else in the Alliance, and with good reason; his abrasive personality, Control Freak tendencies, and downright sociopathic methods of fighting the Empire all make him a pretty hard person to like.

Tropes G-L

• The Gadfly: Mon Mothma explains to her banker friend that she's very deliberately cultivated this image — she wants the Empire and her colleagues in the Senate to view her as an ineffectual gadfly, a minor annoyance who raises a bit of a fuss over the Empire's outrages and asks some tough questions before ultimately achieving nothing of value. This makes it easier for her to hide her true role: funder of the rebellion.
• Gas Leak Cover Up: Kenari is said to have been rendered uninhabitable by a mining disaster. Given the lengths taken to hide Cassian's Kenari origins, the nature of his departure from the planet, and the obvious nod to the "mining disaster" used in Rogue One to cover up the Death Star's superlaser firing, it seems likely something more sinister occurred on the planet.^note Also, the incident was said to be a Imperial mining disaster, but when Cassian was taken from the planet the Republic was yet to fall but the mines were already abandoned, making it clear that something doesn't check out. In fact, the dead yellow people were Separatist troops, meaning it happened during the Clone Wars, which coincides with Cassian's age at the time. Maarva ane Clem are quick to take the boy and run from Republic troops. There's some hinky shit going on there.
• The Ghost:
  • Omnipresent as the driving goal of the ISB's senior command is pleasing the Emperor, who is never seen on screen.
  • Anto Kreegyr, a former Separatist who once fought against the Old Republic in the Clone Wars and is now in command of a resistance cell against the Empire, is often mentioned but never shows up in person. The closest thing he gets to an appearance is his picture being shown shortly before he and his cell are wiped out in an ISB trap.
  • Syril Karn's uncle Harlow is frequently referenced by himself and his mother, but is never actually seen or interacted with.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • Syril Karn executes a textbook investigation into the deaths of two corporate policeman and identifies the killer despite incredible odds. He soon has multiple squads surrounding the cop killer and about to make an arrest. Soon after, he is wishing that he buried the case as his superior ordered him to.
  • The heist for the Imperial payroll goes pear-shaped when a hapless officer stumbles in right as the rebels are getting the loot loaded and about to flee followed immediately by the base commandant they had kidnapped having an unfortunately timed heart attack from the stress, starting a firefight and panicked escape that leaves more than half the team dead.
• Good Is Not Soft: This is the primary reason Luthen recruits Cassian. The Rebellion needs people who will generally do the right thing but will also not hesitate to make hard, nasty decisions if the situation warrants it. Luthen's rebels are willing to shoot unarmed people in the back if necessary and even to take a woman and child hostage.
  • Note also that Luthen's goal for the second half of the series is to kill Cassian. He recruited him because he was useful and now wants to kill him because he's inconvenient. Only Cassian's genuine request to join the rebellion as a dedicated assett change's Luthen's mind.
• Grayscale of Evil: The ISB are introduced wearing white uniforms in a white room with gray accents, sitting at a round black table.
• Great Escape: Cassian immediately starts planning one after being thrown into Narkina 5. It comes to a head in Episode 10, with Cassian and Kino leading a massive breakout that sees all five thousand prisoners escaping the facility.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: A realistic version. The guards in Narkina 5 are cruel but also an incompetent, underfunded, and poorly-trained skeleton crew; they're lazy, unprofessional, do only the bare minimum their jobs require, and are above all else totally reliant upon the electric floors to keep prisoners in line. The prison appears to lack all the secondary redundancies that prisons have for when a security breach occurs. And once a mass prison riot/breakout attempt begins, one they can't just zap away with the floors, they make a token effort at trying to stop before giving up and literally hiding in the service closets as the prisoners all escape.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Sometimes hope means fighting for a sunrise you will never see.
• Heel–Face Turn: Kino starts out as the Drill Sergeant Nasty of the prisoners in Cassian's level in Narkina 5, enforcing the rules and riding the other prisoners hard in hopes of getting out soon. Then he finds out that "release" is a lie and prisoners are just being sent off to other prisons. He immediately begins helping Cassian plan an escape. Note that Kino isn't cruel, but is hard because he knows this is the best way to keep his men in line, prevent the guards from having any excuses to crack down on them, and in general make the lives of the prisoners he has charge over more bearable.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • After the heist is all over and Cassian parts with what remains of the Aldhani rebels, Vel's very next mission from Luthen turns out to be hunting down Cassian and murdering him because he's outlived his usefulness to "the cause" and knows a little too much for Luthen's tastes.
  • The prisoners on level two of Narkina 5 manage to piece together that nobody is ever actually released, just cycled into another level until they die. The instant the guards figure out that the prisoners know this, they fry the entire floor to try and keep the prisoners from other levels finding out. Ironically, this very incident leads to the rest of the prisoners finding out anyway.
• Hellhole Prison: The Imperial prison that Cassian ends up in on the moon Narkina 5 is an interesting example. It's clean and hygienic (seriously, there's not a speck of dirt anywhere in the place), prisoners have relatively limited interactions with the guards after going through the intake process, each prisoner's cell is thoroughly cleaned every day and prisoners even get as much (flavorless, to be sure) food as they want. All of that said, while the day-to-day reality of life in Narkina 5 isn't nearly as bad as it is in other Imperial prisons, the prison ends up being a fundamentally soul-crushing place where the prisoners are kept in line with brutal electric torture and threats of death while being used as slave labor by the Empire to build parts for the Death Star. One prisoner kills himself by deliberately stepping onto the electrified floor, and the reactions of the other inmates suggest this is far from a rare occurrence. Oh, and you never get to leave. All imprisonments are indefinite — when a prisoner's sentence ends, they're simply shifted to different level or facility to maintain the illusion they'll be allowed to leave. When the prisoners on level two figure this out, the entire floor is instantly killed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Kino knows the only way out of Narkina 5 is to swim. He can't swim. He helps the other prisoners all escape anyways, knowing he won't be joining them.
• Hope Spot:
  • Villainous version. The Corpo squad attack a speeder and bring it down, thinking they've stopped Andor and Luthen. Karn and his men even share looks of relief before suddenly Andor and Luthen take off on a speeder bike and Luthen blows up the decoy speeder and the surrounding Corpos along with it.
  • In "The Eye", Nemik survives the heist itself, but a heavy rack of credits goes flying during takeoff and hits him, crushing his torso and paralyzing his legs. He gets a stimulant injection which keeps him awake and aware just long enough for him to operate his nav device and guide them to safety. Vel thinks he's doomed, but Skeen talks her into getting him medical attention, stating that he's the reason this mission even happened, but Nemik is unable to be saved and dies on the operating table.
  • After the heist is over, Cassian heads back to Ferrix, makes sure his mom, B2EMO, and Bix are okay, then uses his cut of the money to retire to a nice beach resort town on Niamos. He's there for less then a week before he ends up on the wrong end of a power-tripping shoretrooper who arrests him for "being involved" in a random crime just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, resulting in him getting a six year prison sentence.
• Hotter and Sexier: Downplayed. Though there's nothing explicit, the show has implied sex both before and after the act, whereas other Star Wars media has rarely shown anything beyond kissing or other light affection. Bix is implied to have sex with Timm, Vel's established as lovers with Cinta (they "share a blanket"), and Cassian's shown in a hotel room with a woman who's under the covers. There's also an establishment explicitly identified as a brothel, but given the circumstances (tense-looking hostesses having to navigate the attentions of Imperial-aligned goons, while Cassian searches for his lost sister) it's pretty grim.
• I Did What I Had to Do: The series, like it's tie-in Rogue One, goes to great lengths to show that the Rebellion's leaders are forced to willfully engage in some despicable tactics, such as murder, sabotage, and extortion, among other things, in order to achieve their goals against the Empire. Luthen, in particular, epitomizes this mindset, knowing full well that he's morally damned for the choices he's been forced to make in service to the Rebellion, as he pointedly makes clear in his response to the ISB mole Lonni Jung when asked what he sacrifices for the cause:
  Luthen: Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I've given up all chance at inner peace, I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote fifteen years ago for which there is only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight has set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is - what is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future, I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!
• I Know You Know I Know: Luthen's long game with the Empire. He has a mole in the ISB that gives him tactical advantage in coordinating rebel attacks, but protecting that source of information means he often has to act in a way to undermine his cause, to make sure the ISB doesn't suspect any of its directors of being a mole. This includes letting Kreegyr fly right into a trap, so that the ISB will feel invincible.
• Ignored Epiphany: Syril Karn ignores his superior's orders to cover up and ignore Cassian's murder of the two useless asswipe Pre-Mor guards in favor of trying to bring Cassian to justice, and proceeds to only succeed in getting many of his men killed, causing Pre-Mor's independence from the tyrannical Empire to be stripped away, and getting fired for staggering incompetence. He then is forced to move back in with his mom and get a Soul-Crushing Desk Job to make ends meet. What does he do next? Start trying to worm his way into the ISB investigation of what went down on Ferrix in order to help bring Cassian in.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Averted, and to terrifying effect. Stormtroopers (and their predecessors, Clonetroopers) are used sparingly in this series, but when they do, they're a demonstration of the extent and power of Empire's ruthless military force.
  • The first time we see Clonetroopers open fire, it's in a flashback to the earliest days of Imperial occupation where a teenaged Andor is watching his father, Clem, talk some teenagers out of agitating the troopers. Clem is found guilty of insurrection just for standing there, and gets executed by firing squad immediately afterwards.
  • The second time is right after the Powder Keg Crowd at Maarva's funeral erupts into a riot, galvanized by her speech to fight the Empire. The garrison commander orders the stormtroopers to fire at will into the crowd, leaving many dead.
• Impossible Mission Collapse: Lampshaded. The Aldhani heist is an "impossible" mission that requires extreme planning and depends on near perfect timing to succeed. Cassian is brought in to provide a tiny bit a of a safety margin in case things do no go exactly to plan. Vel is told to cancel the mission if anything goes wrong or if anything even feels wrong. As the team is nearing the point-of-no-return, Vel is still assessing the situation looking for anything out of the ordinary that might cause her to pull the plug in the last moment.
• Inherent in the System: Rather than depicting the Galactic Empire as existing thanks to the evil of a few individuals, it is presented as a system supported by people. Even if the people in the Empire's organizations are not as evil as the typical Star Wars villain, as long as they support the Empire, its villainy will continue. Trying to change the system internally is shown to be an exercise in futility. Even though the Senate has not been dissolved yet, Mon Mothma's efforts to bring about change through it meet no success.
• Inn of No Return: In a way. Narkina 5 shows prisoners how many days they have left before their release, but that is a lie. Prisoners are either released and simply moved to another section of the prison the following day, or they die, either via euthanasia or having their section murdered by electrocution. When level two got wind that a prisoner who was "released" from level four was placed among them, and they started to ask questions about it, they were all "fried".
• Irony:
  • After Cassian fulfilled his part at Aldhani and parted ways, Luthen wants him killed as a loose end who could expose Luthen if captured and questioned, or in case Cassian decided to either just play informer to the Imperials or attempt to extort blackmail. Instead, even though Cassian gets arrested and dumped into prison on completely unrelated and fabricated charges, he refused to use Aldhani to weasel out of his situation and gain anything from the Imperials, keeping his mouth shut.
  • The Empire goes to great lengths to try to find Andor, not realizing that he's already in one of their prisons under an assumed name.
  • After both failing to convince Saw to work with Kreegyr, Luthen learns from his ISB mole that Kreegyr is being lured into a trap, so Luthen decides to switch tactics and throw Kreegyr's crew under the bus to secure the mole… at which point, Saw gets in touch with Luthen saying he changed his mind and will work with Kreegyr. Suddenly Luthen is put in the position of trying to talk Saw out of joining Kreegyr's raid.
  • The season one finale reveals that the parts Cassian was helping make while imprisoned in Narkina 5 were for the Death Star, meaning Cassian will later be killed by the very death machine he was forced to help create.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Imperial Security Bureau officers are very territorial; it is not unusual for them to refuse to cooperate with ISB officers from other divisions/jurisdictions.
• Karmic Death:
  • A pair of corporate police officers decide to shake Cassian down for money because a lady at the bar they were in paid attention to him instead of them and because he got lippy with them. It doesn't end well for either of them.
  • The Corpo guard who panicked and shot an unarmed Timm is sent to fly one of the corporate landers to provide air cover for a fight getting out of hand. Cassian's friend Brasso had sabotaged the lander with a heavy engine block, which works as an anchor snagging the lander to a nearby construction tower, blowing up the lander and killing the guard.
  • Timm gets shot by the same officers he brought to Ferrix by snitching on Cassian.
  • Similarly, Nurchi, who snitches on Cassian to the ISB gets killed by an exploding cache of Imperial ammo during the Rix Road riot.
• Landfill Beyond the Stars: Ferrix is this, with town's economy revolving around salvaging and selling parts of ships and a heavily working-class community.
• Later-Installment Weirdness:
  • Unlike The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the first episode of the show does little to nothing to bring familiar Star Wars tropes, imagery and names to the viewer outside of naming The Empire and is a slow burn with next to no action, setting it further apart as a truly different genre experience.
  • This is also the first live-action Star Wars show that doesn't feature the planet Tatooine at all in its first season.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: Pre-Mor's security serve as the local police, having the power to arrest suspects and search properties. Two who harass Cassian for a shakedown then get killed by him spur the plot after their vengeful colleagues search for him.
• Liberty Over Prosperity: Ferrix's main economy comes from scrapyarding and selling ships, and the workers take money from everyone - including the Empire. The community is working-class but comfortable and everyone is happy keeping their heads down. When the garrison is set up to trap Cassian, people are dissatisfied but complacent, even when the Imperial troopers start kidnapping and torturing citizens. Maarva's funeral and posthumous speech acts as the Spark of the Rebellion for the gathered townsfolk to finally rise up in a full-out riot, something that carries obvious and heavy risk of retaliation.
• Life Will Kill You: Maarva Andor ends up dying of old age while Cassian is escaping Narkina 5.
• Light Is Not Good: Members of the Imperial Security Bureau always wear white uniforms, while their job is to repress resistance against the Empire.
• Loved I Not Honor More: Vel and Cinta love one another… but to Cinta, the Rebellion comes first.

Tropes M-R

• Manifesto-Making Malcontent: In the downtime of the Aldhani rebels, Nemik is writing a Rebel manifesto to spell out their political beliefs, the evil of the Empire, and how best to fight them. After he dies, it's given to Cassian.
• Mean Boss: Major Partagaz, Dedra Meero's supervisor at the ISB, is an interesting example. He doesn't yell or scream or shoot his employees in the head when they displease him — he simply drives them relentlessly hard, points out flaws in their work or reasoning without mercy and insults them with a quiet and cutting contempt, all in front of their colleagues. What's interesting is that this isn't just pointless cruelty — he seems to sincerely believe that encouraging cutthroat competition among the staff and cultivating open disagreement results in a productive clash of ideas and better outcomes for the Bureau. On the flip side, he is seen privately being encouraging to Meero on several occasions (and may be doing the same with others offscreen), and stands up for her in front of his own superiors, emphasizing that the meanness he shows his underlings is just about trying to get the best performance possible out of them.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • Luthen asks Cassian to come with him, challenging him by asking him if he'd rather fight these bastards for real instead of just running away and barely getting by. Nine episodes later, during Maarva's funeral speech, she expresses the same sentiment. "If I could do it again, I would wake up early and be fighting these bastards from the start!"
  • During the episode "One Way Out", as he's trying to convince Kino to help with the escape, Andor declares that he'd rather die trying to take down the Empire than give them what they want. At the end of the episode, Kino says the same in his speech. "We will never have a better chance than this, and I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want."
• MegaCorp: Pre-Mor is a corporation so powerful that its security guards are basically policemen in its territory.
• Mercy Kill: The best thing you can hope for on Narkina 5, as proven when Ulaf suffers a massive stroke and instead of giving him proper medical care, the Empire just has the prison doctor (who is himself a prisoner) inject poison into his veins to euthanize him.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot
  • A double homicide of two Morlana One Corporate Authority guards while a mysterious old man recruits said criminal who performed the deed → a group of evildoers who want to do away with the Empire and revive the Republic is eventually formed.
  • A petty crook loyal to nobody except his mother steals an Imperial navigation device to sell on the black market → the Imperial Security Bureau realizes there is a genuine Rebellion gearing up for a full-scale conflict with the Empire.
• Mistaken for Cheating:
  • When Mon Mothma starts having difficulty moving money from her accounts, she enlists the help of Tay Kolma, a banker she knew from grade school with anti-Empire sympathies. Their clandestine conversations mean that her husband (whom she is unhappily married to) suspects she's having an affair, to the point of calling him "her ex-boyfriend".
  • Bix's boyfriend Timm also turns into something of a Green-Eyed Monster when he sees Cassian hanging around the shop and looking for Bix, thinking that she's is cheating on him — while Cassian's actually trying to offload stolen imperial tech to a buyer (Luthen) that Bix can contact. It motivates him to tip off Pre-Mor and bring them to Ferrix.
• Mistaken for Gay: Inverted with lesbian Battle Couple Cinta and Vel, who are both mistaken for straight.
  • In Episode 5, before their status as a couple is officially revealed, Cassian tries to flirt with Cinta and praises her for dressing his wound. Vel shows up moments later, extremely unamused.
  • When Vel visits Mon Mothma on Coruscant, Perrin asks her if she'll be looking for a husband now that she's going home for a visit, and laments that the only men left available at her age are likely widowers. Mon Mothma is seen smirking at his presumption.
• The Mole: ISB agent Lonni Jung is secretly a mole for the Rebel Alliance. Unfortunately for him, he's gotten stuck with the borderline-sociopathic Luthen as his handler, and is now straining under the weight of the atrocities Luthen is making him party to in the name of fighting the Empire from the inside… and if Lonni refuses to help anymore, Luthen all but says he'll kill the man's family.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Two corrupt corporate policeman spot a shady character and decide to shake him down for some cash. Unfortunately for them, they are robbing Andor who knows how to fight and is in no mood to be taken advantage of.
  • Also applies to the Imperial cruiser which hassles Luthen's Fondor Haulcraft, not realising that it's been modified to within an inch of its life specifically for the purpose of evading capture.
• Mundanger: Cassian gets sent to a nightmarish Imperial slave labor prison that nobody ever gets out of not for taking part in a daring rebel heist, or his background as a criminal, but simply because he happened to be passing by while some minor police action was going on and a power tripping fascist cop decided he didn't like the way Cassian looked or answered his questions. Cue a bunch of trumped up false charges that the trooper invented solely to stick Cassian with a long prison sentence. At his "trial" Cassian isn't even allowed to defend himself and trying to protest will just make his sentence longer, and as for the chance of some sort of appeal? The judge instructs him to "tell it to the Emperor". It nicely illustrates how everyone in the Empire (or any totalitarian government) is no more than a second and a little bad luck away from a life-ending disaster.
• Murder by Inaction: When the heist goes sideways, Skeen kills Taramyn by claiming he'll provide covering fire then not doing so, letting Taramyn run straight into a killbox where he takes a bolt to the back. Whether he did so deliberately or not is unsaid, but given how he reveals his true colors after the heist, the implication seems very much that he was hoping to have "one less share" of the heist money.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: When Saw and Luthen debate whether to let Anto Kreegyr walk into an ISB ambush, Saw exclaims "It's thirty men!", with Luthen adding "Plus Kreegyr."
• My God, What Have I Done?: Nearly every major character in the first three episodes gets hit with this trope:
  • Cassian's expression after he kills the two corporate guards who were only shaking him down to humiliate him after the run-in at the brothel.
  • Timm, when he realizes that betraying Cassian to the Morlana One corporate police has broken Bix's relationship with him.
  • Bix, when she's handcuffed and beaten when trying to warn Cassian about Timm's betrayal, and then forced to watch Timm die because he tried to rescue her from the corporate police.
  • Karn, staring at the wreckage of the booby-trapped speeder that killed a number of his men while Cassian escapes, realizing that he screwed up big time after being told not to pursue the matter.
  • Brasso is seen downing a drink in a bar after the chaos is over, seemingly regretful of his decision to sabotage the Pre-Mor shuttle, killing its pilot when he tried to take off.
  • In the season finale, Luthen hears Maarva's funeral speech and how it inspires people to rebel through hope more successfully then he ever did through his amoral scheming and stoking of hatred, then barely escapes from the massive, deadly riot on Ferrix that he helped cause, forcing him to actually see firsthand the human cost of his methods. As he stumbles away from the city, he looks back and sees smoke rising from the streets with a look of despair and you just know he's had a major epiphany about his "Pay Evil unto Evil" attitude and where it's going to lead.
• My Nayme Is: Continuing a Star Wars tradition, the show introduces names like Syril (Cyril), Timm (Tim), Dedra (Debra/Deirdre), Xaul (Saul), Ulaf (Olaf), Lonni (Lonnie), Kleya (Cleo), Vel (Velma).
• Mythology Gag:
  • The "Tac-Pod" shuttles used by the Pre-Mor corporate police strongly resemble (miniature versions of) the LAAT/i gunships used by the Grand Army of the Republic during the Clone Wars.
  • One of the artifacts in Luthen's antiquities gallery is a set of armour with a helmet identical to the helmet of the Sith Stalker outfit from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
  • Cassian's favored weapon is a Bryar blaster pistol, just like that of another mercenary turned Rebel, Kyle Katarn.
  • In episode eleven, Luthen escapes an Imperial patrol ship that has him in their tractor beam the same way Luke Skywalker escapes a similar situation in The Thrawn Trilogy; using the tractor beam's own pull against it by releasing shrapnel into its area of effect, causing the tractor array to get shredded to pieces by pulling the chunks of metal into itself, then flying away when the array's destruction causes the beam to drop. Their methods are a little different (Luke opportunistically used another ship that was self-destructing, Luthen uses a weapon built into his ship specifically for the purpose) but the intent and result are the same.
• Narrative Filigree: Just to give an idea of how vast the galaxy is and how many people and things are in play, there are references to people, groups, even entire planets and political causes that don't appear and are never explained, their importance or meaning just has to be inferred. It's possible to recognize some of them if you're familiar enough with Star Wars lore and properties, but quite a few (such as some of the different rebel groups and anti-Imperial causes mentioned by Saw Gerrera), are brand new and exist to remind the viewer of exactly how much is going on in the universe outside of the struggles of the main and major characters.
• Neutral No Longer: The recurring theme over the first season is how normalised the Empire's rule has become, and how people can longer notice the slow and suffocating grip of its power. Over the course of the season, people who were vaguely anti-Empire end up fully radicalising into rebellion.
  • In episode seven, Maarva tells Cassian that she spent thirteen years unable to walk to the public square at the end of Rix Road, because that's where the occupying stormtroopers shot and hanged her husband. Then she became inspired by news of the Aldhani heist to finally stand up to the Empire, and the next several episodes we hear of her small acts of civil disobedience that would eventually lead up to her Rousing Speech that would rally the people of Ferrix.
  • Kino Loy, the day shift manager in Narkina 5, starts out as a powerful but antagonistic leader who just wants to keep his head down and get out alive. Cassian spends one episode unsuccessfully trying to get him to divulge information about the prison that will aid his jailbreak. Then, Ulaf has a stroke and the doctor that treats him tells Kino and Cassian and no one is getting out of the prison alive - they will simply be transferred elsewhere. This pushes him fully onboard to Cassian's jailbreak plan, eventually giving the Rousing Speech that will free all 5000 of Narkina 5's prisoners.
  • The residents of Ferrix, having grown used to Imperial occupation, has spent years happy to take the Empire's money as long as they had eachother and were left alone. After Cassian flees, the ISB sets up an Imperial garrison and starts torturing citizens at will. Maarva's posthumous speech at her funeral rallies them into a full riot against the Empire.
  • After having spent most of season 1 pingponging back and forth on his views of the Rebellion, in the finale Cassian is finally swayed by Nemik's manifesto, his imprisonment on Narkina 5, and Maarva's speech, and offers his services to the Rebellion without any hesitation.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Oddly enough, the quiet, relatively kind efficiency and devotion of the Imps like Partagaz, Dedra, and Syril actually play into the nascent rebellion's hands. Without their efforts behind the scenes, the random cruelty of the Empire would be less effective and thus wouldn't be able to drive so many people into rebellion. Half of Cassian's radicalization comes from the random cruelty of uncaring bureaucrats and ACAB troopers, but the other half comes from the dedicated hunt conducted by the ISB under Partagaz and Yularen oppressing Ferrix... with the aid of Stupid Evil underlings.
• Nice to the Waiter: Played with, with Dedra and Mon Mothma constrasting each other:
  • Dedra is a fairly Benevolent Boss to her assistant Heert, and tells him to take an early night while she stays late. This doesn't negate the fact that she's still a sadistic, torture-happy fascist, leading the charge in oppressing the people on Ferrix.
  • Mon Mothma's first scene is her coming back from the Senate and snapping at a maid for accidentally interrupting an argument with her husband. On the other hand, she remembers her driver's name when Perrin refuses to and overall acts as the voice of conscience to Luthen's more morally extreme ways.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Clem was murdered by the Empire as a direct result of trying to stop a group of idiot teenagers from getting themselves killed by provoking a Clone trooper squad, which is implied to feed into Cassian's cynical views on rebellions at the start of the show.
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: On the brutal Narkina 5 the prison laborers are given tasteless nutritional glop from a tube to keep them going. The top-performing groups get flavor with their food.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Downplayed compared to its contemporaries in the Star Wars EU. While Cinta and Vel's homosexual relationship raises no eyebrows from the people aware of it, in keeping with the idea that LGBTQ+ people are accepted in wider galactic society, Perrin's blasé questioning about whether Vel has "finally found a husband" and her reluctance to correct him imply that their native Chandrilan culture is less accepting of her orientation.
• Not in This for Your Revolution:
  • Cassian, ironically, starts off as someone fairly hostile to the Empire, but still dismissive of the rebel groups. When Luthen recruits him to pull off the Aldhani heist, he ends up telling the crew that was really only in it for the money. As it's a Foregone Conclusion that he becomes an important part of the Rebellion later on, episode 12 sees him join Luthen's side for good.
  • Skeen is also revealed to be this. Despite the story he tells about how he lost his brother to the Imperial occupation, he had been planning to betray the rest of his team so he could take the money and leave.
• One-Man Army: Unlike other Star Wars media, the show being quite grounded tends to avert this as taking on massive groups of enemies without at least one other person with a weapon watching your back is suicidal. Yet Luthen breaks the mold in “Daughters of Ferrix”, wrecking an Arrestor-class cruiser and pursuing Tie-Fighters all by himself in his heavily-modified Fondor Haulcraft.
• Paper Tiger: For all her smugness, bullying, and willingness to order violence against civilians and enemies, when Deedra ends up actually in the field herself during the riot it swiftly becomes apparent that she's never actually been in a fight and is in fact a complete coward; her "contribution" to the battle is waving her blaster around ineptly while shaking crazily (apparently having a panic attack), then getting knocked down by a small rock to the head and nearly beaten to death by the same townsfolk she had been abusing, forcing Karn of all people to intercede and pull her to safety.
• Penal Colony: Cassian is sent to Narkina 5, a moon which holds many prisons built on artificial islands where prisoners are forced to labor in factories. Another destination mentioned when he's sent off is Belsavis, likely another example (as it was in the old EU).
• Plot-Triggering Death: In the first episode, Cassian kills two corrupt corporate policemen. This forces him to try to get off-planet in a hurry and brings him to the attention of Luthen Rael.
• Police Brutality:
  • Demonstrated by the Preox-Morlana forces who try to capture Cassian on Ferrix. They beat up Bix by slamming her into a wall repeatedly after she tries to escape, and are very Trigger-Happy, to the point of killing an unarmed civilian (Timm) who confronted a group of four of them, especially given that their mission wasn't to execute their target, which would surely merit the use of nonlethal weapons in normal circumstances.
  • The Imperial enforcers are no better, with Cassian getting grabbed by the neck and slammed into a nearby wall when he's arrested for being sort of near a place where supposed anti-Imperial activities had occurred.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Most of the Imperial officers on Aldhani have nothing but contempt for the natives of the planet, forcing them off their ancestral lands and only allowing them to do their sacred religious ceremonies on Imperial terms, all the while making nasty comments under their breaths about them. Lieutenant Gorn, who was in love with one of said natives, is more than a tad put-off and it's implied the Empire's casual racism towards aliens and "primitive" human cultures was the big motivator for him becoming The Mole.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • The franchise up until this point has been clean with only the occasional uses of "Damn", "Hell", and/or "Ass", but to fit in with the series' Darker and Edgier tone, this is the first piece of official Star Wars media to use strong profanity in its dialogue, with the third episode containing an utterance of the word "Shit" which definitely fulfills this trope to a degree.
  • In the twelfth episode, Maarva calls the Empire "bastards" in a very vicious way during her posthumous speech at her funeral. Interviews with the cast and crew.
  • Maarva's speech also ends with what was supposed to be the first usage of "Fuck" in the franchise as well when Maarva utters "Fuck the Empire!", but it was overdubbed to "Fight the Empire!". However, you can still make out what she was originally meant to say if you look closely at her mouth movements.
• Preserve Your Gays: For a show that's happy to kill off supporting characters, the lesbian Battle Couple Vel and Cinta both survive until the finale. Aside from Cassian, they are the only other two of the Aldhani rebels who walk out alive, and both also survive the massive riot on Ferrix in the season 1 finale.
• Prisoner's Work: Cassian and the other prisoners on Narkina 5 are put to work assembling some kind of part. The Stinger of the final episode reveals that they're components of the Death Star's laser.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • When she meets with Luthen, Mon Mothma talks about enemies being everywhere and watching her - the bank staff have all been replaced with people she doesn't know, she was given a new driver against her wishes, and spies appear at the Senate every day. Owing to who's ruling the galaxy and their fearsome forces deployed to prowl around for any form of rebellion, she's right about being watched. The driver is revealed to really be an ISB spy and he regularly eavesdrops on her conversations.
  • The Empire is quite right in being paranoid about Mon Mothma and her activities.
  • When Luthen Rael meets with Andor for a business deal he places explosives on the main entrance of the building just in case. He knows that Andor is wanted by the corporate police but does not know that the police are tracking Andor through his commlink.
  • Maarva is very careful about keeping Cassian's true homeworld being Kenari a secret — a concern which proves to be well-founded, as it results in Pre-Mor tracking him down on Ferrix.
  • Luthen Rael makes sure that only Vel knows his real identity and that the other members of her cell have no idea that she reports to a higher authority. He is worried that bringing Cassian in was a mistake because now there is a second person who might be used to trace the heist to Luthen. Turns out Skeen was planning on double crossing the team. If caught, Skeen would have most likely told the Imperials all he knew. The need for utmost secrecy was warranted.
  • After learning of the depths Luthen will sink to in order to fight the Empire, as well as that he has spies inside both the ISB and Kreegyr's cell, Saw Gerrera immediately puts two and two together and realizes that this means A.) Luthen probably has a man inside Saw's Partisans as well and B.) Luthen is just as willing to sacrifice Saw for the "greater good" as he is anyone else, becoming intensely paranoid about him. Given what we have seen of Luthen, this newfound paranoia and wariness is absolutely justified.
• Ragtag Band of Misfits: Deconstructed. The Aldhani rebels — with the exception of Lieutenant Gorn — are pretty much a glorified band of delinquents that bicker and in-fight constantly, aren't prepared at all for the realities of the mission they're undertaking (Cassian is stunned speechless when the leaders of the team admit to him they don't know how to launch the shuttle needed to escape), and unprofessional and needlessly combative in general. It quickly becomes apparent why Luthen was planning on shutting them down before picking up Cassian as "redundancy", as their small numbers and poorly supplied, undisciplined nature make what should be a risky but simple mission into a near-impossible one with a huge margin for error. And sure enough while the parts they trained for go off well enough, the instant something they didn't plan for happens, everything instantly goes to shit and the mission turns into a bloodbath that kills over half the team and just barely succeeds.
• Railing Kill: A prison guard on Narkina 5 is shot multiple times while running in a gunfight and sails over the railing behind him.
• Reality Has No Subtitles:
  • The language the kids are speaking on Kenari is not subtitled. The context of the scenes gives a general idea of what is being said. It's an interesting choice, since usually this trope is used when the viewpoint character doesn't speak the language, and perhaps indicates that Cassian now feels separated from the child he used to be and the culture he used to be part of.
  • The Aldhani language gets subtitles in only two scenes, one of them to show Lieutenant Gorn is giving the Imperial officers a Tactful Translation.
• Reconstruction: The impact the Empire has on the citizens of the galaxy has often been demonstrated as simple armed responses to the smallest infraction, and opposing the Empire is similarly demonstrated as simply killing stormtroopers. The show goes to great lengths to demonstrate some of the more nuanced cultural oppression between religious factions dwindling in numbers to local police hoping to stay on the Empire's good side by being equally brutal. The show focuses more on smaller acts of disturbances and the first major attack is stealing a sector's payroll. Notably, not a single stormtrooper is seen in the first six episodes. When they do show up it is a sign of worse things coming.
• Reestablishing Character Moment: In Rogue One, Cassian Andor was an experienced spy and Rebel agent, who quickly kills an informant who proves to be a liability. In the prequel series, Cassian's first scene is him bungling through an attempt to get information which nets him almost nothing, attracts the attention of corrupt guards who aren't even looking for him, and then he accidentally kills one of them and has to kill the other to cover his tracks. While he clearly has the seeds of his later character, he also clearly has a long way to go.
• The Remnant: It's mentioned a few times that there are still Separatists active in the galaxy, years after the end of the Clone Wars and the dissolution of the Confederacy, though they've dwindled to being just one of a myriad of rebel ideologies. Luthen tries and fails to get Saw Gerrera to consider working with one such cell, but Saw of course has a bitter history with Separatists on top of being a Principles Zealot.
• La Résistance: As a precursor to the militarized guerrilla force that the Rebel Alliance would become, the rebel cells depicted in the show are isolated and less organised.
• Restrained Resistance, Reckless Rebellion: Luthen's work is actually to invoke the second part: to get some big, dramatic, damaging attacks against the Empire going, so that the Empire will bring the boot down even harder — convincing more people that the Empire must be resisted, and they have to band together and strike back. It's an interesting ploy, and he does have a point, but his gung-ho (and general use of patsies to do the dangerous work for him) shocks and horrifies the relatively Restrained Mon Mothma.
• Retcon: A few details of Cassian's backstory have been altered away from the bits and pieces we've received in the various Star Wars Visual Guides.
  • Cassian's previously stated homeworld of Fest is deftly retconned to simply be a falsification and cover story started by his adoptive mother. Fest is an ice world, and Cassian's new homeworld of Kenari is a more verdant planet that suffered some unspecified accident that left him and several other children orphaned and trying to survive alone in the jungle.
  • In Rogue One, Cassian had told Jyn Erso, "I've been in this fight since I was six years old." The context of their talk implies that he's been with the Rebellion since that age. Here, what is shown of Cassian's childhood in Troubled Backstory Flashback show him older than six and not with any type of Rebel group, but clarifies that he originated from a Separatist world, Kenari, occupied and exploited by the Republic before the Empire and Rebellion were created, and was likely orphaned at six and so then was with the pack of orphaned children all hiding and fighting just to survive against the Republic for some years, until Cassian was found and adopted by Maarva. During the events in the series is when he actually starts becoming involved with the Rebellion.
  • The Visual Guides state that Cassian was born in 26 BBY, making him 26 when he dies in Rogue One, 21 at the start of Andor, and six when the Clone Wars end and the Empire rises to power. The official guide for "Reckoning" pushes his birthdate back by five years by stating that Cassian was nine when he was adopted, and that this took place prior to the founding of the Confederation of Independent Systems, better known as the Separatists, which occurred either in 22 BBY or 24 BBY, making his birthdate no later than 31 BBY, and his age at the start of Andor 26.
• Revenge Before Reason: Saw Gerrera and his Partisans are uncaring towards the plights of some of their fellow Rebel Alliance cells and refuse to aid them in times of need because many of them were Separatists in the Clone Wars, and Saw hates Separatists virulently as result of the CIS occupation of his homeworld during that conflict.
• Reverse Psychology: Lieutenant Gorn plays the part of a tough-but-fair commanding officer, scolding his men for failing to complete maintenance to the hangar bay and threatening extra duty, but relenting when two of his NCOs insist that morale will suffer if the men aren't allowed to take a night off to see the spectacular meteor shower known as The Eye. However, the Rebel cell needs the hangar to be as empty as possible when they pull off The Caper, so he's getting exactly what he wanted by appearing to cut his men a break.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The newborn Rebellion is undermanned, underfunded, and morally ambiguous at the best of times. Luthen - instead of having loyal teams ready to follow his command without question - has to make do with hiring some Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who happened to hate the Empire to do his dirty work, Cassian himself included, and sees them all as expendable, to the point of putting a hit out on Cassian the instant the Aldhani heist is over because he knows too much. The mission at Aldhani, instead of being about stealing any useful intel that could help the rebels, is simply a high-profile robbery because the rebels needed funding that much, and the Aldhani rebels are disturbingly okay with taking an innocent woman and child hostage and threatening to murder them to get the job done. And on top of it all, getting money was just the secondary, optional objective to Luthen; the real purpose of the heist was to deliberately provoke the Empire into doubling down on implementing tighter security and harsher punishments on planets throughout the galaxy: Luthen plans that the increased apparentness of the Empire's tyranny will convince more and more people to join the rebels' cause… and if that means more Imperial atrocities and suffering for innocent people, then so be it.
• Rewatch Bonus: Several casual conversations and small details become significantly more revealing upon rewatch.
  • In Aldhani Partagaz praises Dedra Meero's track record for detainments in her sector, and that she exceeded her quota far above other divisions. With the revelation that Narkina 5 is a prison labour camp and likely only one of many, this becomes a lot more chilling while also giving us a glimpse of the huge scale of what the Empire is doing off-screen.
  • In Narkina 5, Bix tells Brasso that Maarva fell while trying to open the Rix flood gates that lead to tunnels under the hotel, where the garrison is stationed. In the finale, Cassian uses those tunnels to sneak into the hotel and rescue Bix.
  • In the same episode, one guard arrives late for his shift, "because he had to pull a guy off [level] four". In the next episode, we find out that there was a prisoner transferring out from level 4.
  • In Nobody's Listening, Ulaf starts having mobility and memory issues, which turn out to be a massive stroke. Upon rewatch, you can see the exact scene he has the stroke - when he says he has trouble with his hands.
• The Rich Have White Stuff: Every surface seen in Mon Mothma's home is white, with minimal and unobtrusive yet luxurious gold, crystal, and wood decor, as a reminder of her wealth and status. She later claims that this is required; as a senator, the rules for her home decor are very strict, as it is actually owned by the state and reflects back on the imperial government.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand:
  • The many departments of the Galactic Empire are fraught with Jurisdiction Friction and internecine squabbles; Dedra Meero's investigation into nascent Rebel cells is hampered by the fact that it conflicts with Lt. Blevin's sector, and the ISB butts heads with both corporate security and their own Imperial Navy. ^note Although it's not discussed outright in the series, EU material reveals that this is encouraged by the Emperor so that none of his subordinates will ever become powerful enough to usurp him— a direct allegory to the Third Reich, where the same behavior was cultivated by Adolf Hitler.
  • Even the rebels themselves aren't immune to this. The two prominent rebel leaders shown so far, Luthen Rael and Mon Mothma, have different ideas on how to undermine the Empire and gain support for the fledging Rebellion. Whereas Mon prefers to take a more cautious approach, Luthen isn't above getting his hands dirty and tries to break the status quo and bring about quick, and likely violent, changes to the galaxy. Specifically, Mon Mothma was furious when she learns that Luthen organized the mission at Aldhani which resulted in the Empire cracking down on the galactic population to keep its planets in line and make life harder for everyone, something that Luthen wants to happen so it means more and more people will flock to the rebels' cause.
  • Saw Gerrera is as divisive and maverick as other Rebels will find him down the line, clashing with Luthen when the latter meets with him and tries to get him to cooperate more; Saw even adamantly claims he works alone and insults other Rebel cells as aimless, where he thinks he's alone in clarity of purpose. However, this ends up working to his benefit when the particular cell Luthen tried to link him up with gets caught out by the Empire.
• Rule of Seven: The prison on Narkina 5 has seven levels with seven rooms per level. Each room has seven tables with seven workers per table.
• Rule of Symbolism: Luthen's down payment for Andor joining the rebel cause is a kyber pendant made to celebrate an ancient uprising against the Rakatan Infinite Empire. The Rakatans were essentially the first "Galactic Empire" with a society based around conquering and enslaving less developed races. They were also ruled over by powerful Dark Side users, much like how the current Galactic Empire is secretly ruled by the Sith. So in many ways the Galactic Empire could be considered an ideological successor to the Rakatans due to its exploitive nature and ties to the Dark Side of the Force. So it's fitting that Luthen would try to persuade Andor to join the fight with an object celebrating the overthrow of the galaxy's original tyrannical empire.

Tropes S-Z

• Saved by Canon: We know from the outset that Cassian, Mon Mothma, Saw Gerrera, and Ruescott Melshi survive whatever they go through in this series because it's set before Rogue One, where they all appear.
• Schrödinger's Canon:
  • Early antagonists are corporate security forces, supplementing direct Imperial control over certain systems. In Legends, the Corporate Sector Authority was a notable, if minor, Imperial-era faction. Like corporate security is implied to be as a rule here, CSA was spectacularly inept. Unlike the corporate security here, the CSA forces were well-funded enough to still be threatening despite that.
  • Cassian uses a Bryar pistol, just like Kyle Katarn.
  • Luthen gives Cassian a Kuati signet kyber crystal, which he says commemmorates a revolution against Rakatan invaders. In Legends, the Rakatans invented hyperspace travel and founded the Infinite Empire, leaving indelible marks on worlds like Tattooine and Kashyyk, even if they're all but forgotten by the time of the Skywalker Saga.
  • Meero gets a dressing-down about more is expected from her, which is probably unfair, but could be a foundation for a superior career, and that some of her coworkers "hew to the traditional viewpoint of this office and its staffing," all implying that Meero is being given a hard time simply because she's a woman. Admiral Daala faced similar prejudice she had to work to overcome.
  • As the Shore Troopers are sorting prisoners, several are assigned to Belsavis. Belsavis is a prison planet that played an important role in the stories of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
  • Luthen's tractor beam countermeasures are a variation on the Covert Shroud gambit, featured memorably in The Thrawn Trilogy and The Hand of Thrawn, and kind of combined with Luke's first tractor beam escape ploy in the Trilogy. In the first attempt, Luke preps some proton torpedoes, then backfires his accelleration compensator to bring the X-Wing to a dead stop, throwing off the tractor beam just long enough to dart away and launching the torps, the beam picks up the torpedoes instead and they detonate against the tractor beam projector. In the Covert Shroud gambit, a bunch of small objects (ideally trac-reflective particles, but even a hold of threshed wheat will do in a pinch) are dumped in the tractor beam's path, locking it up long enough to escape. Luthen's countermeasures combine the two: launch a huge amount of debris into the tractor beam, but instead of snarling the targeting computer the beam pulls them into the projector, destroying it.
• Sea Sinkhole: The Narkina 5 prison complexes are a technological version, with an obvious rim constructed around the pit that the ocean drains into. They're constructed this way so the falling water can be exploited for hydroelectricity, as the prisons' electrified floors presumably require considerable power.
• Serious Business: The Time Grappler is really, really into his job ringing out the time up in the bell tower on Ferrix.
• Shame If Something Happened: Luthen crosses the line from Pragmatic Hero to outright Token Evil Teammate when it's revealed that he's forcing his mole in the ISB to follow his increasingly unscrupulous orders by threatening to murder the man's innocent family if he doesn't comply, including his newborn infant daughter.
• Sherlock Scan: Twice:
  • The Chief Inspector takes a look at the crime scene report and the records of the two dead corporate cops and immediately figures what happened. He also concludes that it would be in everyone's best interest if the case was buried.
  • Cassian later demonstrates that he is capable of minor versions of this. When he meets the Aldhani rebels, he starts sizing them up, including taking note of what their dominant (or even favored) hands are. Later, upon his entrance to Narkina 5, he immediately starts clocking weaknesses and possible escape measures.
• Shirtless Scene:
  • In "The Axe Forgets", Cassian has a brief chat with a shirtless Skeen, revealing his prison tattoos. Cassian, who has also been in prison, recognizes what most of them mean, and it serves as a moment of connection between the two, especially at a point when the other Rebels don't really seem to trust Cassian.
  • "Announcement" features a brief, literally steamy scene of Cassian running the shower to hide the sound of him digging through his lockbox from his latest girlfriend, shirtless and wearing just his trousers. It shows him relaxed and having a brief moment of levity before his life goes to hell again, literally minutes later.
  • A Fan Disservice version occurs in "Narkina 5", when a despondent Cassian plus the 49 other men in his block in prison are standing naked in a giant decontamination chamber that strongly resembles a futuristic version of a gas chamber at a Nazi concentration camp. It's not a Caged Heat Fanservice event, it's a few dozen regular men, each with a Thousand-Yard Stare.
• Shout-Out:
  • The portrayal of the Empire in Andor takes lots of pointers from Brazil and its portrayal of Central Services, being shown as dull, bureaucratic, and too rigid for its own good. Characters like Dedra Meero or Syril Karn, who would be more at home within the Imperial Navy or on the Death Star, are instead forced to abide by the frustrating bureaucracy of the ISB and Pre-Mor despite them realizing early on that the Rebellion is growing at a larger rate — something that the ISB is remaining oblivious towards.
  • Narkina 5's oppressive white colors, prison jumpsuits, shock rods, guards, forced labor, and the way the electrified floors induce muscle spasms all reference George Lucas's feature film debut, THX 1138.
  • Luthen’s role as a gritty and badass adventuring archaeologist who moonlights as a laidback academic, as noted by The Escapist Darren Mooney strongly echoes a certain other Lucasfilm character.
  • Some commentators, such as SlashFilm, note that the series' plot resembles Les Misérables IN SPACE! Cassian is Jean Valjean, Syril is Inspector Javert, the Rebel Alliance are the barricade boys, and Maarva's funeral triggers an uprising like General Lamarque's funeral did in 1832 Paris.
  • The finale, which has the protagonist Cassian get his love interest Bix safely onboard an aircraft whilst escaping a fascist faction before leaving her, is extremely similar to the iconic ending of Casablanca with Rick doing the same for Ilsa.
• Show, Don't Tell: Wonderfully averted with Nemik's manifesto, played over Maarva's funeral, demonstrating that Tropes Are Tools and every rule can be broken. Part of what inspires Cassian to devote himself to the Rebellion is that manifesto, which spells out the Central Theme of the show: fascism is bad and self-defeating precisely because it will create the rebellion that will destroy it; rise up and fight the Empire.
• Shrine to the Fallen: On Ferrix, once you die, it's cultural tradition to cremate the body and bake the ashes into a brick, which is then put in a wall. This is what's done with Maarva Andor's body after she dies.
• Simultaneous Arcs: Andor being set in 5 BBY places it concurrently with the first season of Star Wars Rebels, which is significant in that both are about the fledgling rebellion rising up against the Empire for the first time despite rather different tones.
• Soapbox Sadie: Nemik, youngest of the Aldhani rebels, is also a wannabe firebrand revolutionary with an idealistic, fanciful view of the Rebellion which manifests as constant speechifying about the evils of the Empire and writing manifestos. Unlike most examples, he's actually taking part in affecting meaningful action against the system; he's just overeager.
• Source Music:
  • The teaser trailer features a man pounding two hammers on a big anvil-like chunk of metal atop a tower that resonates through Ferrix, and these beats set a rhythm for the trailer's music.
  • The Ferrixian alarm system introduced in "Reckoning", where townsfolk bang on chunks of scrap metal, is, according to composer Nicholas Britell, actually a highly complex piece of diegetic percussion music.
  • "Rix Road" features a funeral march played by a marching band populated with Ferrixian townsfolk. The mood of the piece starts out appropriately somber, then gradually ramps up in tempo and mood with the scene.
• Spark of the Rebellion: The series tells the story of the very, very early formation of the Rebellion in the Star Wars universe, so of course you have multiple moments of this.
  • In the wake of the Aldhani heist, where Cassian and several other Rebels-to-be raid an imperial garrison and make off with an absurd amount of credits, the Empire begins to tighten its chokehold on the galaxy, which Luthen was counting on because the harder the Empire cracks down, the closer the people get to finding their final straw.
  • During the heist, Cassian meets Nemik, a true believer in the cause of the rebellion, who was writing a manifesto in the hopes of inspiring others to see the world through his eyes, which he entrusts to Cassian as he's dying. We hear the full manifesto in the season's final episode, and it's clear that Nemik's speech (along with the example below) is a reason that Cassian will join the Rebellion proper.
  • In episode 7, Maarva confesses to Cassian that the Aldhani heist was this for her. After years of walking the long way around the public square where the Empire hanged her husband and Cassian's father, Maarva was galvanized by the heist team to walk through the square with her head high, unafraid of the occupation for the first time. She explains it's why she's choosing to stay in Ferrix to fight on, later on leading to her posthumous speech that would start the riot against Imperial occupation.
  • In the latter half of the season, Cassian ends up in a six year prison sentence on Narkina 5 for loitering, forced into hard slave labor on an imperial construction project. Eventually, he and his shift manager Kino learn that their sentence doesn't matter - it expires and the Empire just shunts them off to a different prison to be worked to death. This causes Cassian and several of his allies to lead a riot and overthrow the guards, which eventually leads to the escape of all five thousand prisoners, one of which is Melshi, who will become a Rebel sergeant who accompanies Cassian on the mission to Scarif during Rogue One.
  • Finally, the final episode of the first season has things all come to a head. The Imperials are exerting their presence on a funeral procession for Maarva, already making the people of Ferix just barely hold back their contempt for them. When Maarva's final will and testament turns towards inspiring Rebel sentiment, one of the Imperial officers kicks B2EMO, who most of the city treats as a pet, to stop the hologram from playing and it quickly devolves into an open riot, which escalates into a bloody war zone when one of the rioters throws a bomb into the Imperial's garrison and causes a violent chain reaction. Between Nemik's manifesto, Maarva's final words and his experiences on Narkina 5, Cassian finally becomes a true believer in the cause of the Rebellion.
• State Sec: The Imperial Security Bureau is the body charged with gathering intelligence against Rebel forces and protecting the Empire from them by implementing very harsh measures. Its personnel have military-style white uniforms and serve alongside the regular armed forces.
• Stepford Smiler: Both Luthen Rael and Mon Mothma maintain excellent masks as mostly-innocuous Idle Rich, while harbouring radically anti-Empire ideals and founding the Rebellion
  • When Mon Mothma talks to Tay Kolma about her troubles moving money, she maintains a winning smile throughout to display to her guests, while obviously frustrated about her position trapped in the Senate. As she talks about her perceived persona as a bleeding-heart politician who is irritating but ultiimately useless, she constantly reminds an uneasy Tay to keep smiling.
  • Luthen's cover on Coruscant is a rich, fashionable, and jovial antiquities dealer. In episode 4, he is seen putting on his wig, suit, multiple rings, and practicing his gestures and smile in the mirror.
• The Stinger: The season one finale has one revealing what the prisoners on Narkina 5 were building; parts for the Death Star's laser beam.
• Stupid Evil: One of the themes, outlined in Nemik's manifesto, is that fascism is self-defeating. The meaningless cruelty it engages is undermines its efforts at control. The efficiency and professionalism of Partagaz, Dedra, and Syril is ruined by the anonymous tyranny of its bureaucracy and policing. Stupidly sending a prisoner back to the prison he was supposed to be released from inspires a prison break. Not caring who they were arresting means the ISB can't capture Andor and then Luthen because Andor has already been sent to slave labor. Trying to interfere with a funeral inspires a rebellion. The grinding cruelty transforms Andor from a small-time crook who was only trying to take care of his family into the crusading rebel who would help destroy the Empire.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • A protagonist taking out a couple of mooks that hassled them is common enough in fiction to have its own trope. But when Cassian does this to the two corrupt Pre-Mor goons in the first episode, it sets the authorities on his tail and provides the main conflict for the first three episodes, ends up getting a lot more people killed, and results in Cassian barely managing to flee Ferrix with his life. Ironically enough, the mooks' actual boss was more than content to keep the status quo, but By-the-Book Cop/Overzealous Underling Syril Karn had other ideas.
  • Contrary to the normal treatment fiction gives poison darts, in Cassian's flashback to his childhood it is not an instant death sentence. It takes time for poison to effect the system, and the Republic pilot is fine at first, and continues to be a danger to the Kenari children as he keeps trying to shoot at them and fight back. Time needs to pass, and he needs the dosage from at least a dozen darts before he goes down.
  • We also get one of these in "Rix Road". Instead of the defiant citizens of Ferrix sending the Imperials packing, we get a demonstration of what happens when (mostly) unarmed civilians go up against a military force — dozens are massacred by Stormtroopers, with the vast majority of Imperial casualties being due to Wilmon's pipe bomb and its chain-reaction. If anything, things are going to get worse for the planet's people before they get better, with a further Imperial crackdown likely.
  • Few characters get dignified deaths, nor heroic deaths in battle. Many die of mundane causes like heart attacks, strokes, unsecured cargo, or hitting one’s head upon being pushed to the ground.
• Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist:
  • Syril Karn might work for a corporation with ties to the Empire but ultimately, he's just a By-the-Book Cop investigating a double homicide.
  • ISB supervisor Dedra Meero was written to invoke this: an underdog the viewer roots for despite being opposed to the heroes because she's very competent but overlooked and dismissed by her more complacent peers... up until she stops being the underdog and takes charge, at which point the viewer begins wishing she wasn't quite so competent.
• Teenage Wasteland: What Cassian's adolescence on Kenari consisted of, as he and a number of other youths lived by themselves in the jungles of Kenari.
• Title Drop: Every episode name is taken from dialogue within the episode. Some of it is quite obvious, with the first episode "Kassa" refers to Cassian's name on Kenari. Others like "Nobody's Listening" is in reference to Cassian insisting to Kino that the guards are so outnumbered they can't afford to be tracking every conversation within the prison.
• Took a Level in Badass: Villainous example. When Syril and the Pre-Mor goons first move to arrest Cassian, it's clear he is completely out of his depth and has no idea what to do when the plan goes awry and things start blowing up. However, when the riot breaks out on Ferrix in "Rix Road", Syril alone is able to keep a cool head in the midst of the chaos around him, rescue Dedra Meero, and guide her to safety, in stark contrast to his helplessness when they were chasing Cassian, and the Imperials' incompetence and cowardice regarding the hostile crowd.
• Torture Technician: Dr. Gorst, a ghoulish Imperial scientist who specializes in finding new interrogation methods. His current favorite is making prisoners listen to the dying screams of children murdered in an Imperial purge. He's disturbingly personable, giving his victim a friendly wave when introduced and cheerfully recounting the story of how those screams were discovered, recorded, and mixed to maximize trauma.
• Truth in Television:
  • The activities of the early Rebellion are not unlike early real revolutions from history. The rebels quietly accumulate political allies, money laundering channels, anonymous financial backers, and stolen military equipment. The identities of the rebels are also quite realistic: the core of the early Rebellion are dissatisfied political elites like Mon Mothma, veteran revolutionaries like Saw Gerrera, disaffected junior officers like Lieutenant Gorn, and "undesirables" with no prospects like Cassian Andor.
  • Art and antiques dealerships in the real world are very good covers for moving around large sums of money for illegal purposes for several reasons. Because the monetary value of the goods being bought and sold is highly subjective and can reach ridiculous heights, it is extremely difficult for anyone to examine the bookkeeping and try to figure out what is or is not a suspiciously large amount of money being moved around. The international nature of the trade means dealers have a professional reason to be transferring money from and to accounts in places where the authorities would not be willing to cooperate with an outside investigation, and even dealing in large amounts of cash is not all that unusual.
  • On the macabre side, Dr. Gorst explaining to Bix the torture she is about to experience. Explaining to a torture victim beforehand what is going to be done to them in gruesome detail and what effects it will have is a longstanding technique for increasing the mental agony of the victim.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Starting with episode 4, the show generally bounces between Cassian Andor getting caught up in the early Rebellion and Mon Mothma's attempts to finance these rebel factions. There's very little direct overlap between the two plot threads, Cassian and Mon don't meet in the first season, and is instead loosely connected via Luthen and Val bouncing between them.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee:
  • Subverted. We get two episodes of the characters planning and training for the Aldhani heist. When the heist actually starts the parts that the team trained for go flawlessly. Things only start going wrong when they get to the parts that they could not prepare for and knew that they would have to improvise.
  • Played straight during the prison break from Narkina 5. In Episode 9, we see Cassian and Birnok slowly sawing at a water pipe in the bathroom, one break at a time, and carefully observing the structure of the electrified floors but are never shown the full plan. At the beginning of Episode 10, when Kino finally joins in on the prison break, the last thing we hear of them planning is him telling the day shift "Let's start figuring this thing out". While they lose several people along the way, the prison break works - not only that, breaking out not only themselves but everyone in the entire facility.
• Use Your Head:
  • When a couple of corporate security goons are shaking Cassian down, he gets one of them to walk right behind him, and then bashes the corpo in the nose with the back of his head. Played somewhat realistically, since Cassian sways a little after the hit.
  • In the last episode of the first season, one civilian rioter uses a headbutt on a stormtrooper. As ever, stormtrooper Armor Is Useless.
• Vast Bureaucracy: After he's fired from Preox-Morlana, Syril's overbearing mother manages to, through his uncle, find him a Soul-Crushing Desk Job in a Kafkaesque nightmare of an office on Coruscant that's part of the Empire's Bureau of Standards.
• Villainous Valour: Held at gunpoint by the robbery crew, the Imperial Engineer immediately draws his pistol and demands that they let the child hostage go.
• War Is Hell: The early stages of the rebellion are a cold, brutal, unglamorous world. Poorly armed saboteurs and terrorists are sacrificed without thought by their handlers for small gains.
• We Are Everywhere: Nemik's manifesto describes a heroic version of this as the early rebellion. As this show takes place several years before the Rebel Alliance exists as an organised military force, Nemik describes all forms of insurrection from regular citizens as its own rebellion and states that they all count towards the larger fight against the Empire. While the Rebel Alliance as a guerrilla military hasn't yet formed, the idea of resistance exists and is occurring everywhere. This is the central theme of the first season, where we see Cassian driven to join the Rebellion after he keeps experiencing random cruelty from the Empire.
  "Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the Galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward."
• We ARE Struggling Together: The nascent Rebel alliance is deeply factionalized, with lots and lots of different groups and individuals — some of whom were enemies during the Clone Wars — butting heads over how best to fight the Empire and what comes after. Luthen finds himself struggling to get Saw Gerrera and his Partisans to cooperate with another Rebel cell because they're Separatist holdouts, and Saw hates the Separatists for their occupation of his homeworld Onderon during the war, in which his sister died.
• We Have Become Complacent:
  • A recurring theme in this show deals with the Empire, after fighting off early attempts to rebel against the peace Palpatine helped the Galaxy achieve at the end of the Clone Wars, believing they are done, but when Cassian murders two Morlana One Corporate Authority guards in self-defense, Syril Karn becomes concerned about Andor and by Episodes 2 and 3, he enlists the help of Sergeant Linus Mosk and 12 Corpos to help bring Andor to justice. Unfortunately they themselves are not nearly as tough and competent as they think they are, and they bungle the mission horribly while Cassian makes a clean getaway.
  • Contrasting to the above, ordinary people under the Empire have grown accustomed to their occupation, with many choosing to keep their heads down to simply survive - while many harbour anti-Imperial sentiments, most aren't willing to actually fight because of the risk that poses to their lives. The people on Ferrix have been willing to take the Empire's money as long as they were left alone, and Kino Loy on Narkina 5 wants to keep his head down and get out instead of entertaining a prison break. Ferrix finds the Imperial oppression growing and growing until Maarva's Rallying Speech in the finale calls out their complacency and becomes a local The Spark Of The Rebellion, Kino becomes galvanized to aid Cassian's prison breakout after he find out no one is actually being released.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future:
  • In a setting where droids and AI are commonplace, Syril Karn still ends up working a Soul-Crushing Desk Job in a nightmarishly large office.
  • The Narkina 5 penal facility doubles as a factory, where Cassian and the other inmates are forced to hand-assemble some sort of device that the Empire evidently needs large numbers of. They're later confirmed to be parts for the Death Star. Justified by the fact that, as Cassian himself observes, convicts are cheaper and easier to replace than droids. This is averted however in the post-credits scene of the Season 1 finale, in which droids are seen doing assembly work in space, suggesting the Empire saves droids for especially difficult and clandestine work such as the Death Star.
• Wham Line: Kino has a short but impactful one during the prison escape on Narkina 5.
  "I can't swim."
• Wham Shot: In a post-credits scene at the end of the first season finale, we finally discover what Cassian and his fellow prisoners on Narkina 5 were building all that time... parts of the Death Star’s superlaser.
• What a Piece of Junk: Played with. Luthen's Fondor Haulcraft is in pretty good shape, but it is a commonplace, mass-produced light cargo hauler... That's been modified into something that is barely comparable to the source model, as the unlucky Captain Elk finds out.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The series begins with Andor searching for his long-lost sister and their originating from Kenari being significant. Over the course of Season 1, his sister and Kenari cease to play any further part in Andor's story arc or are even mentioned at all. Justified as several other characters think Andor is chasing ghosts and from what we see, it is highly unlikely he would ever find his sister, especially since the closest thing he had to a lead turned out to be a dead end in the first episode.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: B2EMO is the most human a droid has ever been treated in Star Wars films and shows so far. Maarva, Cassian and Brasso all talk to him like a person, and when B2EMO displays emotions, they never dismiss them. Brasso is especially accommodating of his displays of grief after Maarva's death. And in the final episode an imperial operative knocking over B2EMO is the act that ignites a tense situation into a violent riot.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: One of the core reasons life under the Empire is so terrible is that said Empire seems to have no real solution to any of its massive infrastructural and societal issues other then inflicting brutal atrocities on its own citizenry to try and "make an example" of troublemakers and cow everyone else into line through fear. They seem either totally oblivious or totally dismissive of the fact that this simply causes more problems, both from making the system a broken, inefficient, and corrupt mess where nothing gets done well and from provoking more uprisings as people get pushed so far by the constant abuse that their anger and survival instinct far outstrips their fear.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Though Cassian insists he's Not in This for Your Revolution, Nemik sees the rebel spark within him and gifts Cassian his manifesto as he succumbs to his injuries.
• You Can't Go Home Again: At the end of season one, after rescuing Bix and sending her and the rest of his Found Family off to safety during the massive riot, Cassian realizes that neither he nor them can ever return to Ferrix now until the Empire is overthrown. Since he can't run from the Rebellion any longer, he confronts Luthen on his ship and tells him to either kill him or make him a Rebel. Luthen chooses the latter.

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"If I could do it again, I'd wake up early and be fighting these bastards from the start. FIGHT the Empire!"