We open Andor‘s second season with, among other things, Mon Mothma in crisis. The moment she had been dreading since her deal with the devil in season one—the wedding of her daughter Leida to scoundrel financier Davo Sculden’s son—has arrived, a reminder of what the cost of funding the rebellion means to her, and the past traumas of Chandrilan culture, made manifest. But at the climax of it all we and Mon Mothma alike find out just how worst it can get for her to commit to this path, and what it will take to truly make Mon a rebel.
It’s not her speech denouncing the Ghorman Massacre—at least, not yet. We know that’s to come. Instead, Mon seals her path in the climax of season two’s three-episode first act with a simple, beautiful, terrible act… a dance.
The final third of Andor season two’s third episode, “Harvest,” comes as Mon has a frosty conversation with wedding guest and longtime rebellious associate Luthen Rael. Over the course of the three-day traditional wedding ceremony that Mon has anxiously labored through, her old friend and confidant Tay Kolma has become increasingly and, to Mon and Luthen alike, disturbingly, unreliable. Facing stresses that have ruined his marriage and threaten to bankrupt him, it becomes clear over the course of the ceremony with each encounter Kolma has with Mon that he is cozying up to Sculden, and with that partnership, gaining leverage in the potential of revealing the back-end dealings of Mon’s “charitable foundations” set up to cover her rebel financing. Mon wants to do what Mon does best: talk, negotiate, appease Tay with whatever price he asks for. Luthen wants his own perennial alternative: Tay Kolma needs to die.
“We’d be vulnerable forever. You need to be protected,” Luthen growls at Mon amidst the bustle of the wedding’s final celebrations.
“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” Mon snaps back.
“How nice of you,” comes Luthen’s reply as he walks away… and suddenly, the refined quiet of the haughty, overwrought Chandrilan ceremonies is shattered by discordant, rhythmic noise.
A DJ droid comes bursting into the room, and the energy turns on a dime. The music is not what you’d expect from everything we’ve seen of the Chandrilan wedding rites across these three episodes, we’ve just seen Luthen putting on airs to gift Leida and Stekan an ancient Chandrilan cultural statue thought lost to time. It blares synthy trills and thrumming beats, a sister piece to Nicholas Britell’s similarly hypnotic track “Niamos!” from season one. The crowd goes wild, spinning in circles, arms swinging, cheering and whooping.
The sequence becomes cut throughout the rest of the final act of the episode, as we rotate between the events on Chandrila and Mina-Rau. Bix’s attempted rape at the hands of an Imperial officer, Stormtroopers closing in on Brasso, Cassian’s return with experimental TIE in hand, as he attempts to rescue them, even Vel seeing Cinta from afar as it becomes clear she’s there to assassinate Tay on Luthen’s behalf—the outcome already decided well before his chat with Mon. All these moments intertwined are everything about what it takes to be part of the resistance to the Empire’s fascist grasp: the terrors that system’s abuse of power allows, the strength to defy it, the heroism of turning the odds, and the bloody-handed willingness to do what it takes to keep the movement alive. This is the rebellion that Mon Mothma has backed, this is what she and her money has helped make.
And every time we return to her, that music drowning it all out, the crowds swirling around her, enclosing on her, the more Mon loses herself to the moment and the truth of what she has built. It’s an incredible tonal discordance to the events that weave through it, but in Mon’s gradual slip into an almost-trance, we parallel her embrace of what she now is too truly part of. A drink becomes two, an awkwardness as she first enters the dance circle—alone in a sea of many—gives way to flow, to confidence, and as we cut away from Cassian, Bix, and Wilmon one last time, fleeing away from Mina-Rau after losing Brasso, it becomes this hypnotic elation. Mon is one with the crowd, at its very center, as the camera whips and and makes disorienting spins around her, and all of a sudden it’s her arms likewise whipping around in the air above her more intensely than anyone else.
The episode ends on the cost of rebellion: Brasso’s dead body as Cassian’s purloined TIE pulls away from Mina-Rau, its grieving crew silent with tear slicked faces. Cinta taking Tay Kolma to his doom as Vel collapses away from the bustle of the party, reckoning with her chance encounter. But the music keeps playing. Mon Mothma keeps dancing.
In this sweeping moment of ecstatic delirium, she embraces what she has become. It’s not how anyone might have imagined that Andor might galvanize its fascinating political figurehead as we race towards the Rebel Alliance’s formal birth, but the contrast of the claustrophobic, almost hedonistic quality of Mon’s dancing with the tragedies unfolding around her is a fittingly symbolic moment for the show’s resistance. Now it’s up for us to see what Mon Mothma is really capable of when the beat stops playing.
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