Wrapping up the first arc of season two, “Harvest” is a gut-punch of an episode.
Content warning: discussion of attempted rape.
At first, I was suspicious of the three episode a week release schedule since it seemed like a way to quickly wrap up a show that could have gone on for months. Why hurry it out? As the structure of the season becomes clearer, the three episode chunks tell complete stories leading up to Rouge One (2016), where season two ends. “Harvest” also shows how they are using the three episodes to build smaller climaxes within the season.
Finally free of last of Maya Pei’s people on Yavin 4, Cassian makes contact with Luthen’s assistant Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) where he finds out Bix, Brasso, and Wilmon are in danger on Mina-Rau. In true Rebel fashion, Cassian breaks protocol to go help his friends, but he arrives too late.
As Bix, Brasso, and Wilmon are preparing to leave, the Imperial agents arrive earlier than scheduled. Wilmon is missing (as he promised his girlfriend he wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye), and Brasso goes looking for him while Bix finishes packing. While Brasso is gone, the Imperial officer who asked Bix to go to dinner with him in the previous episode arrives at their home.
What follows has outraged some Star Wars fans as Tony Gilroy and his crew of storytellers remain dedicated to telling the story of empire, colonization, patriarchy—and sexual violence is part of that legacy. The Imperial officer threatens Bix by acknowledging her status: “I know you’re illegal. We’ve been counting visas.” He explains he recognizes that undocumented “help” is required in order to bring in the necessary harvest, but that the farmers of Mina-Rau are still breaking Imperial law. He then propositions her for sex by saying how “stressful” his job is: “Such a simple choice.” All she has to do is have sex with him, and he will leave them alone.
Bix proceeds to fight him off in a brutal scene. The struggle is bloody and painful, with Bix barely managing to protect herself, eventually causing the officer’s death. When the other officer tells her to come out, she shouts to him: “He tried to rape me.”
The sequence is made all the more jarring by quick cuts between her fight and Mon Mothma getting drunk and dancing at her daughter’s wedding. In Bix’s scenes, there’s no musical score, emphasize the quiet peacefulness of the wheat fields, broken by the violence. This moment cuts to loud galactic pop music and the bright colors of Chandril as Mothma drinks away her sorrows over the loss of her daughter to a predatory marital tradition that she also had to go through as well as realizing her friend, Tay, who helped her support the rebels, will have to be assassinated, as implied by Luthen. In order to cope, she proceeds to get drunk and dance.
This sequence for both women is absolutely crushing in different ways. Both are being threatened by the patriarchy—and in Mothma’s case, watching her daughter enter a predatory relationship—but each are also in different levels of danger, which the editing, sound, sets, even color mixing juxtaposes brilliantly. While Andor is quality storytelling, this sequence also demonstrates how well-made it is.
For all its success as a piece of storytelling, “Harvest” immediately drew the ire of Star Wars fans. As I wrote in the last post, Tony Gilroy and his team are dedicated to presenting the banality and the evil of the Empire because it is a fascist empire. I’ve often thought of Star Wars as a failed piece of critical media because as much as George Lucas claimed he wanted to critique the U.S., he made the Empire too cool. You can’t have fans getting Vader tattoos, wearing Imperial symbols, or marching in Storm Trooper brigades at fan events and claim to have successfully critiqued empire. Andor works hard to reposition the Empire as deeply not cool and also as practicing the human rights violations that we know empires practice, such as sexual violence against women of color.
For those of you who are familiar with my work or other pieces of criticism, I generally do not advocate for work that repeats the oppression of the real world. I’m a big believer that science fiction and fantasy can do different work by imagining worlds that are not oppressive or not simply repeating the same systemic injustices of today. To that end, after “Harvest,” I’ve been sitting with why I think this episode was necessary, including the attempted rape. Part of the reason is the fan reaction this episode generated. As written about by The Hollywood Reporter, an influential fan account on X, @StarWarsFanTheory with over 91,000 followers, wrote: “Vader wouldn't tolerate that shit [rape] nor does the Empire condone it.”
This concept that the Empire and Vader would not tolerate sexual violence is surprising because of the amount of violence that the Empire does condone. Vader tortures Leia with a mind probe in IV, and when he tortures Han Solo in V, it’s implied there is no reason for the torture other than to do it. Additionally the Empire blows up Alderaan without evacuation—as in, destroys an entire people. Then, let’s add that Vader/Anakin mass murders innocent children not once but twice. This conceit that rape would not happen under the Empire when equally vile human rights violations are a traditional part of the storytelling demonstrates the need for Tony Gilroy’s commitment to displaying not only the Empire’s boardroom banality but also how power is wielded against the oppressed. If Andor season one wasn’t enough to strip the Empire of its coolness, then Gilroy is making sure there can be no mistake after this season.
Yet, while what Gilroy is doing is important—forcing viewers to confront the violence of empire in all its forms—I still come back to my question: why does Andor feel so necessary right now when I usually prefer work that doesn’t repeat oppression but imagines alternatives? The conclusion I come to so far is that Gilroy and his team know the political stakes of the story they’re telling. While filming wrapped before the re-election of Trump and just after the beginning of the latest attempt to destroy Palestine, fascism was still on the rise. It was uncanny to watch these three episodes while people, myself included, protest for the release of detained immigrants and against mass deportations in the U.S.
Another way Gilroy and his team overlay our world onto Star Wars is the racial politics. While Star Wars has always been “post-racial” in essence that skin color does not impact the everyday lives of the characters, the racialized casting in the original trilogy paired with the orientalism of the Jedi demonstrates the movies have always had racial overtones. Whether it’s Chewy (Peter Mayhew) being a stand-in for the Black sidekick or the only Black character, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), being a smuggler who betrays the (white) heroes, the racial politics of the world offscreen inform the characters onscreen (let’s not even get started on Jar Jar Binks or the Trade Federation). While Andor has continued the idea of a “post-racial” world in that the characters are not treated differently for their skin color, the creators have also allowed the racial politics off screen to inform the storytelling.
For example, in the first three episodes, Mon Mothma—the rich, white woman—is not experiencing the same type of violence as Bix, an undocumented woman of color. When Mothma is pressured to give sexual attention to Tay or else he threatens to reveal her financial support for the rebels, it is not even a question that she would do such a thing. Instead, Luthen—the white, male high society leader—has Tay killed (or so it is implied in this episode, with the dirty work also being done by a person of color). In another example, the white Imperial officer attempts to rape Bix while his driver, a Black officer, waits outside—a stark contrast to Mothma’s experience with predation.
While I often question the usefulness of this type of repetition of systemic issues, in Andor, the show counterbalances by demonstrating a variety of different tools for resistance. As Robert Evans, a host of the podcast It Could Happen Here, explained on Bluesky: "The point of Andor isn't 'only anarchists are right' or 'only terrorism works' or 'only liberals defeat fascism' it's that birthing a movement that can destroy an imperial regime requires a diversity of tactics and people all willing to throw their lives away for the cause." In careful detail, this show does not only demonstrate the inner workings of empire but also of resistance, whether it’s the leftist infighting of the Maya Pei delaying Cassian to practical depictions of operational security that inspired a whole popsec analysis of Andor.
In the first arc of season two, Andor delivers with quality storytelling as well as striking visuals, use of sound, and set design. Much like season one, the show doesn’t shy away from depicting the dark side, but always in relation to why the characters fight. The danger is real, and these episodes demonstrate that for the most precarious—the undocumented person of color—the consequences are much more serious than the white high society senator, even as all sacrifice and work for the same goal: to win. So far, Andor season two demonstrates not only the tools of the enemy but how to powerfully resist.
POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.
