The Rise of Nobody
Last week, Bix Caleen removed herself from the war and the story. This week, Kleya Marki rose up to take her place. I do not mean that they are interchangeable. Both these characters add to the mythos of the galaxy far, far away, and neither is replaceable. Nor do I mean there can be only one. This is not a Highlander—or Smurfette—situation or a final girl scenario. No, I mean that Kleya became a point of view character. She did not replace Bix, but she filled a space left by Bix’s exit. And Bix wasn’t the only one, either. Kleya is a connecting thread across the whole saga.
Mon Mothma’s big moment happened in last week’s episodes. This week, she is firmly in her Rogue One era. But she is anchored to Luthen through Cassian and through Kleya. In the above screencaps, Mon (last week) and Kleya (this week) stand in the remains of the apartment/safe house in Coruscant. Mon’s never been there before, while Kleya was there when Mon was, too. But they are both standing in the ruins of their lives on Coruscant, and because Bix and Cassian briefly lived there, in the ruins of theirs as well.
Mon’s, Bix’s, and Kleya’s moments of sorrow and reflection watching Coruscant from a window all began with Padmé’s in Revenge of the Sith.
The apartment and window are not the only link Kleya has to Mon.
Kleya is explicitly Luthen’s surrogate. She is his ‘assistant’, she is his ‘daughter’, she inherits his mission. Textually, Cassian and Melshi go to Coruscant to extract Luthen but instead find Kleya, and in the above side-by-side, you can see they are linked through costuming.
Cassian rescues both Mon and Kleya from Coruscant, and he must convince both to go and to trust him. Their reasons for hesitance are different, but his urgency is the same, and it is reflected in the staging and the shots. It also reflects back to Rogue One and the first woman that Cassian had to persuade to escape.
Kleya parallels Jyn in a few different scenes.
Here, Kleya and Luthen are linked to Jyn and Galen. And it is an apt comparison. Both Galen and Luthen worked within the system to help the Rebellion, both skirted the line between war criminal and freedom fighter, and both fought for a future they would have no place in. Both Jyn and Kleya rebel against not only the Empire but also the purity of the Republic that Mon, Bail, and the other politicians represent. They want something better.
Kleya and Luthen are also paralleled with Jyn and Saw. Luthen is closer to a Saw Gerrera than he is to Mon Mothma, though he is his own variety of rebel. And Kleya’s relationship to Luthen is closer to Jyn’s with Saw, as it is not biological, but circumstantial. Saw raises Jyn, but their relationship is complicated by the fact that her father remains alive. Jyn is Saw’s ward, while Kleya is Luthen’s foundling.
And yes, I use that word on purpose. Luthen crafted Kleya into a warrior and weapon just as the Mandalorians taught Din Djarin. Kleya is a spy, not a knight, and her armor is the ability to be invisible in plain sight, but it saves her just the same.
Then there is Leia. Leia has a rebel as an adopted father, too, of course, but she also has Ben Kenobi.
Neither Obi-Wan nor Luthen was prepared for Leia or Kleya. They are not only bright, clever, and fearless—they are resilient and willful. Leia and Kleya learn from Obi-Wan and Luthen, but Obi-Wan and Luthen also learn from Leia and Kleya.
Padmé, too, is a young woman unwilling to remain a passive observer. Parallels between Leia and Padmé are built in, but Andor links Kleya to Padmé directly as well.
Padmé realizes the limitations of the Republic when she meets a slave boy. Kleya realizes the overreach of the Empire when she witnesses a young rebel boy being killed.
This is one of my absolute favorite shots of Padmé in the whole saga. She is So Done with Qui-Gon the entire time they are on Tatooine, and never so much as this moment when she learns that the kid the Jedi put all their hopes on (and put up all of her property for) has never even finished the race he has to win. Her WTAF look is iconic, and here we have Kleya mimicking it.
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And make no mistake, we are meant to make this connection. In this scene, they are on Naboo.
I chose the cap above from Clone Wars because it’s the best match to the screen, but what she’s wearing in it is also important. That episode is the only appearance of the Handmaiden Battle Dress outside of the climax of The Phantom Menace. Notably, it is a disguise, just like Kleya’s medical getup.
And she wears it to execute her mission. Like Padmé, Kleya is not set up to be the hero of the story (the series is named after the hero). But, also like Padmé, she is a stealth protagonist, particularly in these final few episodes of Andor. We know where Cassian ends up, and Mon. Bix and Luthen are gone, Vel and Wil have assimilated into the crowd of rebels, and the imperials are eating themselves. Kleya is the character we end up watching. She’s the mystery and the secret weapon. She’s the one woman army who activates the rest.
And like Padmé, Kleya spends the end of her arc injured and betrayed, wondering how to move forward, and mourning the most important person in her life. But in that final arc, Kleya moves on to parallel yet another Star Wars heroine.
Kleya, like Rey, is introduced as a nobody who sells used goods. We don’t learn where she came from until the end of her arc.
I manifested this into existence. You can go back and see that I have been shipping Kleya and Vel since season one (Vel/Cinta is lovely, but Cinta was clearly coded to be sacrificed from the beginning). But I’m not crazy. Rey and Kleya are both far from anything they know, sopping wet, and trying to understand their place in the larger universe. Ben and Vel have been doing their badass, unfeeling warrior thing for a while, and still don’t know where they fit in either.
Here, Rey and Kleya stare out into the natural beauty of the rebel life they chose and still feel disconnected and alone.
The Imperials assume that a team of rebels broke into the hospital and executed Luthen rather than Kleya on her own. And from a certain point of view™, they’re right. In just three episodes, Kleya parallels all four cinematic Star Wars heroines: Leia, Padmé, Jyn, and Rey.
Kleya is every girl, and Kleya is every rebel. Kleya’s hospital operation and, therefore, Galen’s sabotage would be meaningless if she couldn’t get the message to the people who could use it. And that took every rebel in the series finale of Andor, every rebel in Rogue One, and every rebel in A New Hope. Luke Skywalker did not blow up the Death Star alone.
The Rebels
The Rebellion, like any organization or community, is made up of individuals and differing perspectives. I really liked the brief communication between Saw Gerrera and Mon Mothma in the final episode of Andor because it shows that while Saw was never in line with the Senatorial-led rebels who ultimately organized into the Rebellion as we understand it, they continued to connect, and the senators continued to try to reach him. Saw is an amazing character, and Forest Whitaker gives an amazing performance. It’s important to understand that Saw’s way does not win. But it’s also important to acknowledge that he played a part.
I like these shots because they show how many people become involved in the debate in the week or so in between Andor’s end (right) and Rogue One (left). If you watch only the series or only the film, you would think the rebel leadership doesn’t listen to either Jyn or Cassian. And yes, both must rebel and go rogue in order to do what they think should be done, and both are proven correct.
However, Jyn makes her case to a much bigger audience, which indicates that either 1) the leadership decides to involve more voices, or 2) the leadership decides to call in everybody to prepare for a battle, and/or 3) even if said battle gets shot down, the leadership knows that certain factions will rebel and go rogue and they have to be ready for it. I think it’s 4) all of the above. I think Andor shows that Mon and Bail come to trust Cassian, and they rally everyone to the cause—Yavin has been growing for years, so they were preparing for that—and that growth allows/forces the council to grow, too. To act more like the democracy they meant to be, the kind that is representative of all voices, not just the cautious elite.
The Imperials
Ah, how far the Death Star has come.
I legit love this. They are both staring at their downfall.
The sterile aesthetics of the Empire are very well utilized in Andor. And we get more reflections here. On the right, it’s a literal one, and on the left, it’s a conceptual one. I also love the symmetry of Luthen and Partagaz choosing to take their own lives, and Kleya and Dedra being the reasons.
Dedra deserves prison. However, this parallel is also delicious because it shows that it doesn’t matter what you do—rebel, try to get away, or play along—fascism will crush you all.
The End
Neither Cassian nor the audience learns the fate of his sister, and that is a powerful choice that I approve of. Her loss motivates him.
Bail Organa (love of my life) gets to send Cassian on the mission that starts Rogue One and ultimately ends in the destruction of the Death Star and the beginning of the end of the Empire. He says he wants to die fighting. And because we know who he is, who his daughter is, and how important she is to the story, he is paralleled with Bix.
I’ve seen this ending called cliche, cheap, heteronormative/patriarchal, cutesy, “too much like fanfiction” (that one feels like a personal attack), and boring. I have not seen too many posts in favor of it. For myself, I kind of like it on a storytelling level. It gives Bix more of a reason to leave than “she was in the way of Cassian’s arc,” and I wanted that. It’s a happier ending than this:
The baby represents hope, the way Luke and Leia do at the end of the prequels. So, I’m okay with it in terms of storytelling. However, I am not okay with it in terms of messaging.
I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.
‘You have to give up everything to win’ is a fine message as long as someone, somewhere, someday, wins. That is not what happens in this story. Based on everything else I have encountered in the Star Wars universe, Bix’s kid has a less than 10% chance of being raised by Bix to adulthood. In the galaxy far, far, away, no one is raised by their birth parent. In all the many hours of film and TV produced so far, Jacen Syndulla is the only one, and, as with Bix, Jacen is being raised by a single mother, and his father died unaware she was pregnant.
And the end thus far is Rey burying Anakin’s lightsaber in the sand beside a home abandoned to the sands because the family who lived there was murdered by the Empire.
Until TPTB fix that, I will be unsatisfied with any and every ending in a Star Wars media. And given the thesis of Andor, as verbalized by Luthen in that speech, this one feels particularly egregious.