[This story contains spoilers from the first three episodes of Andor season two.]
Disney+’s acclaimed Andor has stretched the creative boundaries of Star Wars in countless ways, bringing a grown-up sensibility to a galaxy far, far away.
Yet even by Andor standards, a scene from the second season is leaving fans shocked: An Imperial officer tries to violently rape a Rebel fugitive, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), who is hiding out in a farming settlement while Imperial troops are rounding up “undocumented” citizens (read some sample reactions below).
The sequence plays out over the course of the show’s third episode (the first three episodes were released all at once on Tuesday) with the officer’s flirtation with Bix turning growing increasingly persistent and eventually cumulating with a brutal life-and-death struggle. Bix eventually gets the upper hand and the officer is killed. But Andor boldly leaves zero ambiguity as to what viewers just witnessed as Bix screams, “He tried to rape me!”
Star Wars is a franchise that has never — in film form — shown even consensual sex. During its first season, Andor pushed the envelope with scenes that suggested sex was about to take place, or just had (much like old Hollywood films during the Hays Code censorship era).
When asked about the Bix scene, Andor creator Tony Gilroy explained to The Hollywood Reporter that when telling a story about a war, shying away from sexual assault didn’t feel truthful.
“I get one shot to tell everything I know — or can discover, or that I’ve learned — about revolution, about battles, with as many incidents and as many colors as I can get in there, without having [the story] tip over,” says Gilroy. “I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape. I mean armies and power throughout history [have committed rape]. So to not touch on it, in some way … It just was organic and it felt right, coming about as a power trip for this guy. I was really trying to make a path for Bix that would ultimately lead to clarity — but a difficult path to get back to clarity.”
Asked about Disney’s reaction to the scene, Gilroy says he didn’t get any studio pushback.
“No one ever ever said anything about it, ever,” Gilroy said. “But I mean, we have limits on what we can do. We are very aware of what we can do sexually and violence wise. Those limits are made very clear.”
Bix has had a particularly brutal journey on the show so far, having already been captured and tortured by the Imperial Security Bureau during season one, an experience which has left her traumatized.
Fan reactions have been divided. One major Star Wars fan account wrote, “I don’t want to see rape in Star Wars … You can portray power dynamics and making the audience hate the empire in other ways without taking it to such a disgusting place. Vader wouldn’t tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it. It has no place in Star Wars. Period.” Another pop culture fan account wrote, “I don’t mind having mature Star Wars but I’m not ok with it going so far as depicting an attempted rape. Or saying the word ‘rape.’ I’m actually quite disgusted with the Andor series right now.”
While another fan account was one of many that praised the move: “Andor dared to go to the darkest places Star Wars could offer. An Imperial Officer abusing his untouchable status to rape an undocumented migrant, while his troops are rounding up other undocumented citizens. This is the real world seeping into Star Wars storytelling; this is the world WE live in, reflected in the galaxy far, far away, this is Star Wars at its most political, its most potent, its most frightening. I must commend the writing team’s bravery to not shy away from such topics. To depict fascist regimes as they are, speak the word ‘rape’ directly into the camera, show just how despicable fascists really are. Andor is as brilliant as it is terrifying.”
And yet another fan account pointed out several previous suggestions of sexual servitude in Star Wars — often with scantily clad female characters (Princess Leia on a leash in her famous slave slave bikini in Return of the Jedi being a key example). “Seen some discourse already regarding what happens with Bix in Andor , that kind of thing has happened in Star Wars before except this time they called it what it was,” they wrote. “Adria Arjona played it brilliantly and it was heartbreaking.”
The episode also featured a rather stunning sequence with Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) furiously dancing at her daughter’s wedding, even as she knew a man was about to be murdered to protect her secret ties to the Rebel Alliance. The sequence was full of frantic energy and showed a rather different side to the stately senator.
“It’s my contention that Mon has the hardest road of any character in the whole show,” Gilroy says. “Other people suffer all kinds of sacrifices and all the physical threats. She has to do everything under glass, being examined all the time. She’s continually watched. I really wanted to up the stakes there. She’s tacitly involved in what will be an assassination and then has go back into the party, which is this joyous event for everybody else, in that kind of chaotic mental state and with that kind of guilt. She’s dancing instead of screaming. And what’s fascinating there is that there’s nobody else in that room except you — the audience — who understands what’s happening to her.”
Gilroy also discussed with The Hollywood Reporter another key scene from the first episode, which has a real-life Nazi inspiration.
Andor is Disney+’s acclaimed Star Wars drama series which currently has the highest rating of any Star Wars TV show or movie on Rotten Tomatoes. The show follows the adventures of Rebel Alliance leader Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and leads up to the events in the film Rogue One. The 12-episode second season will be released in three episode blocks over the next four weeks.