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The zeal of the convert is a fearsome thing. The classic Biblical example is Saul, persecutor of Christians, taking the road to Damascus and becoming Paul, Christianity’s greatest and most strident proselytizer. Paul famously saw the light. A man named Sgt. Lear saw the darkness.
In this episode of Andor, chronicling the final hours in the life of Luthen Rael, we learn that he was once an Imperial soldier during what seems like its birth and initial establishment of dominance. But the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations wrought by his brothers in arms leaves the sergeant cowering in his ship, chanting “Make it stop! Make it stop!”, sometimes in his native language, “Rosh ne luts” — the first and only time we ever hear him speak it.
Then he finds a member of the population he’s been ordered to wipe out. The woman known as Kleya is just a little girl (played by April V Woods) at this point, filthy and frightened. The man known as Luthen takes pity on her, keeps her hiding place a secret, gives his fellow soldier a lame excuse, and takes off.
Together, they live the life we’ve come to know. Luthen gets into the antiques business, finding that Kleya can be a tougher and more effective negotiator than he is. She feels an innate need to bear witness to Imperial atrocities, stopping to watch the execution of several innocents seized randomly with no due process to pay for a stormtrooper’s assassination days earlier. One of the doomed is a child her age. But Luthen cautions her to bank her hate rather than let it burn her up, so that when the time comes, she can use it as a targeted weapon.
Eventually, that moment comes. Now looking more like the finely coiffed and styled businessman, he treats a similarly fancified Kleya to lunch along the riverbank on a pastoral planet. (If I get this wrong it’ll make me want to cut off the arm where I have a Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo, but I think the planet might be Naboo, homeworld of both Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader’s wife Padmé Amidala. It’s really neither here nor there, though.) He hands her a device that’s clearly a trigger for a bomb, but refuses to let her detonate the explosives.
Once he himself does so, however, he tells her there’s no turning back. Pointedly, he prevents her from drawing suspicion by looking over at their Imperial targets prior to the blast, allowing her to do so only after an innocent eyewitness would do so. With both the executions and the insurgent attack, it’s important for an effective rebel to know when to look and when to avert their eyes.
That’s what I wanted to do when I realized the fate of ISB Supervisor Lonni Yung, Luthen’s man on the inside. In this episode, his final one as well, he passes to Luthen the most important piece of intelligence in the history of the galaxy up until that point: the creation of a super-weapon that explains the Empire’s atrocities across a swath of seemingly disconnected worlds. Lonni acquired this information by sneaking into Dedra Meero’s files, a capability he’s had ever since she returned from Ghorman but never used until now. He knows he’s burned, as good as dead; all he wants from Luthen in exchange for this all-important information — information more important even than Dedra’s coming raid on Luthen’s shop — is safe passage.
Instead, Luthen kills him. It would simply be too hard to smuggle him out safely. The cause is all there is.
But Luthen gets caught anyway. In an incendiary scene, he finally faces off with the Javert to his Valjean, Dedra Meero. (These last few episodes have demonstrated what a masterstroke it was for Tony Gilroy to keep so many of his main characters separate for so long.) It’s been a year since the Ghorman Massacre, and Dedra seems to have poured whatever reservations she felt about the slaughter and grief she felt over the death of her boyfriend Syril Karn into the hunt for “Axis,” her codename for Luthen, the figure at the center of the Rebel web. So much so, in fact, that she’s going around the people who are now actually in charge of this operation.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Dedra, it’s that she enjoys seeing her enemies defeated. She didn’t have to personally step in during Bix’s torturous interrogation during Season 1, but she did, didn’t she? Similarly, she can’t just send her troops into Luthen’s shop to seize him before he can destroy evidence or kill himself. She has to see him face to face, because as she tells him herself, she’s dreamed of this moment many times.
He tells her he’s for freedom, she says he’s for chaos. He tells her she’s frightened, she tells him he’s disgusted. She tells him she’s got him, he tells her “You’re too late. The Rebellion isn’t here anymore. It’s flown away. There’s a whole galaxy out there, waiting to disgust you.” The moment she turns her back, he commits seppuku with a ceremonial knife he grabbed in the course of making conversation before the masks came off.
That it’s the final moment for Luthen makes sense, and is in fact fortunate if you want the Rebels to win. Though Dedra’s medics get him to a hospital in time to save his life, Kleya is close behind. Dressing up as a nurse, she sets off a series of explosions to distract Luthen’s guards, kills the couple that remain, and unplugs Luthen’s life support.
Kleya also gets involved in some comic relief along the way via an adorable old alien lady. I honestly appreciated the breather. But the slowly descending tones of the machine winding down are among the most memorable sound effects in a show full of them, courtesy of sound designer Dave Acord’s stellar work, and that’s going to be hard to shake off.
“Am I your daughter now?” Kleya once asked Luthen. “When it’s useful,” he replied. Indeed, there’s no real father-daughter energy to their relationship. The age difference is what it is, but even as a child Kleya was outdoing her mentor in many ways. Luthen saved her life, but he didn’t hold that over her head. Their relationship was one of mutual respect so fierce it bordered on adversarial.
No doubt she’d love to smuggle him out somehow, to find a way to save his life, to drag his sorry ass back to Yavin, which he’s avoided like the plague. I wonder now if, given his former career, he felt as if he didn’t deserve a life of safety among fellow travelers. His isolation was his penance. Kleya kept him from going insane, but anything else would have been an extravagance he didn’t feel he deserved. The episode ends with a fade to black on Luthen’s body, even as Kleya makes what seems like a clean getaway.
The same, however, cannot be said for Dedra Meero, on whom things may well have faded to black as well. There’s no sense in counting your chickens before they hatch, or counting out your ISB officers before they’re executed, so prudence dictates that we reserve judgement.
But it certainly would be fitting if the capture of Axis, Dedra’s white whale, led her to the same fate as Ahab. Now Luthen is dead, and any hopes of proving he’s Axis have died with them. Dedra went over the heads of half her department to botch a simple arrest to pursue a theory in which only she believed, and has nothing to show for it. Maybe something can be salvaged from Luthen’s half-melted comms equipment, maybe not. But I doubt much can be salvaged from Dedra Meero’s career. I half-expect her to wind up re-assigned to some cubicle farm at a far-away new facility: the Death Star.
So ends the story of Luthen Rael — more than just an all-timer Star Wars character, an all-timer television character. Luthen, via a performance by Stellan Skarsgård’s that showed just enough of the desperate sadness we now know existed beneath the character’s surface all along, could fit right in on any number of other great shows. If he were to show up as a spy or undercover agent on The Americans or The Sopranos or Game of Thrones or Better Call Saul, would you bat an eyelash?
We’re losing someone special here. Let those Ferrix bells toll.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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