“Andor” builds up the horrors of the Galactic Empire like no other part of “Star Wars,” focusing on the atrocities they commit — but not the obvious ones, like blowing up planets. Instead, the show is all about the quieter atrocities, the smaller instances of villainy that slowly made people used to the oppression of the Empire. It’s like Alex Lawther’s Nemik once said, “The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the Imperial Thought Machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.” We don’t need to see stormtroopers annihilating an entire people or Wookiees being enslaved en masse when things like increasing prison sentences for no reason already show the way the Empire oppresses people day-to-day.
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Season 2, however, seems to be building up to more explicit atrocities. The first episode of the season already introduced us to the most evil office meeting in recent TV history with Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic calmly and rationally planning the extermination of an entire planet’s populace right before lunch. That is the Ghorman plotline this season, without a doubt the darkest, timeliest, most poignant plotline in “Star Wars,” and one that fans of “Star Wars Rebels” are familiar with.
In the second batch of “Andor” season 2 episodes, we learn about the Ghorman massacre — and it’s not what you’d expect. Turns out, “Andor” is making Ghorman a pivotal piece of the history of the “Star Wars” galaxy, and to do so, Tony Gilroy and his team are making a huge event from the abandoned Expanded Universe into the ongoing canon.
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