Chaos, Distrust and Urgency: Cassian Finally Meets Mon Mothma and K-2SO in New Andor Season 2 Concept Art
It's actually crazy that the two most important characters of Andor only meet seconds before the finale – but that's what makes Tony Gilroy's Star Wars so brilliant. And K-2SO is there, too. Kind of.
The third arc of the second season of Andor is shaped by the Ghorman massacre and the subsequent speech that shakes up the Star Wars universe: Mon Mothma addresses the genocide of countless innocent people in the Senate and accuses Palpatine himself of it. The war crimes of the Empire are no longer taking place on forgotten outlying planets, but have reached the center of the galaxy.
“I believe we are in crisis”, the Chandrilan Senator states before continuing:
The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
Her words grow stronger with every sentence:
This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
This is an incredibly powerful piece of Star Wars storytelling that not only echoes through the galaxy far, far away, but turns Andor into a timeless, devastating mirror of our own history. Mon Mothma's speech is an eloquent, precise and fearless act of resistance. With every subsequent word, it builds to a trembling climax.
But it's not just the script that's brilliant here: Genevieve O'Reilly's impressive acting, the meticulous editing, the swelling music, the haunting camera work and the all-consuming staging – Tony Gilroy's creative team is firing on all cylinders. He definitely knew this would be the defining turning point of season 2.
What makes this so good is the interplay of all moving parts. The speech emerges from an extraordinary momentum, which is only possible thanks to the dramatically dense build-up of previous episodes. Everything counts. Mon Mothma has one chance to deliver with maximum impact before everything collapses.
And then, indeed, everything collapses – and she’s on the run. Mon Mothma must have known that as soon as she stepped into the spotlight, a gun would be put to her head. Finding such clear words in a menacing and hectic situation like this is one of the most remarkable and captivating things of the entire sequence.
But enough of that. You’re probably here for the concept art.
Thanks to a newly released behind-the-scenes video, we get a first look at concept art from episodes 7, 8, and 9, introducing us to two of Cassian's key allies, starting with Mon Mothma before her big speech. It’s a very interesting piece because we look at her from a great distance – merely a small glimpse into the gigantic Senate.
While Mon uses her facial expressions and gestures very deliberately and selectively in her speech, the concept art deliberately withholds her face. Instead, we see her back from afar. Her pod has not yet left the station. It is the calm before the storm and at the same time it becomes clear, she has to go straight through it.
Everything is centred on the passage into the Senate. Mon Mothma can't hide like Saw Gerrera on a remote planet, nor can she disguise herself like Luthen scheming among the elite of Coruscant. She has left her safe space and steps out into the lion’s den without knowing Cassian will come to her aid as a getaway driver.
But can she trust him at all? That's the genius of this sequence: even though we know for a fact that they will work together later in Rogue One, Mon Mothma has every reason to distrust Cassian at this point, but the momentum of the series doesn't stop and there's no time to make balanced decisions. Another leap into uncertainty.
The first encounter with K-2SO is similarly chaotic, as he introduces himself as a faceless killing machine in the midst of the Ghorman Massacre and is crashed quite unceremoniously into the wall in front of Cassian's eyes. Below, you can have a look at three pieces of concept art of the crash in season 2, episode 8.
Gilroy's reunions of familiar characters do not unfold in nice, clean scenes, but arise out of the heat of the moment, while a thousand other things are actually happening. It's not about two characters who finally meet for the first time for the sake of it, but about two characters who respond hastily within the chaos of what’s happening.
This also means that the 2017 one-shot comic by Duane Swierczynski (writer) and Fernando Blanco (illustrator), which previously depicted the first meeting of Cassian and K-2SO in the Star Wars canon, has now been retconned. The event is reimagined in Andor, based on concept art by Chester Carr, Giorgio Grecu and Scott McInnes, who are listed as the main concept artists in the credits of the new episodes.
Image credits: Lucasfilm