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Andor and the Monsters Left Standing [1]
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Date: 2025-05-13
First, an apology. In yesterday’s newsletter I said that the New Yorker wrote the article about doomed students in the age of imitative AI. It was, of course, the New York Magazine and I am, as always, an idiot. The link was correct, but I apologize for the mistake.
Now, onto the nerdery.
Since Andor, which is excellent and thoughtful TV is ending its run tonight, I thought I would talk a bit about something that interests me in the way a specific character is portrayed and discussed.
Christopher Hitchens, I am convinced, would have burned witches except for the happy accident of the century of his birth. Yes, yes, I know that Hitchens was famously an atheist and famously hated religion. But the rest of his personality — the rock solid belief that he and only he was correct, the murderous rage any people different than him, the complete lack of empathy or nuance when dealing with other human beings, is distant relationship to the truth — all mark him as the kind of person that would, in fact, burn witches if given the opportunity. That he was not given such an opportunity speaks more to our society than to any goodness in Hitchens. What has this to do with the character of Luthen in Andor? I think Luthen, too, would have burned witches.
There will be spoilers from this point forward, so beware. And while I will try to explain things, this is best read if you have an understanding of the show itself.
Luthen is the character most responsible, in the shows’ telling, for the first early success of the Rebellion. He is the leader doomed to be forgotten because he alone had the fortitude to be a complete monster in order to defeat the monsters running the Empire (they aren’t monsters, though, mostly. Just normal people, which is largely one of the points of Andor in my opinion). He is a tragic but necessary character. This viewpoint is best encapsulated by a monologue he delivers to one of his people embedded inside the Imperial Security Bureau. I cannot embedded YouTube videos in these newsletters, so I encourage you to go seek it out if you have not seen it. The actor playing Luthen, Stellen Skarsgard (apologies — I cannot the accent mark above the last ‘a’ in his name either) does brilliant work with the material. But the text of the speech is below:
Lonni Jung: And what do you sacrifice?
Luthen Rael: Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
What is… what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So, what do I sacrifice?
Everything.
The most common reading of this monologue is that Luthen knows he is a monster, or has made himself into one, and knows that such a monster is necessary to win the rebellion. Luthen is making a sacrifice so that others can live free. Maybe, but I am not convinced.
First, this monologue is delivered to a man, Lonnie Jung, deeply, deeply embedded in the ISB. We see him sacrifice other rebels to keep the flow of information going and right before this speech Lonnie tried to get out, saying that his wife and infant daughter are now potential sacrifices. The idea that Luthen’s “sunless space” compares to that is laughable, as is the idea that Luthen is making these sacrifices alone. That conceit is the worst kind of arrogant, self-centered drivel. And I think the show believes it to be laughable as well. Yes, there is one sequence where sacrificing people to keep information flowing is portrayed as a correct choice, but the rest of the show seems much more ambivalent about Luthen’s “sacrifice”.
In the first season, Luthen wants to kill Cassian Andor because he is an outsider to the rebellion that they used to get what they want, but now he knows too much. But Luthen doesn’t act the monster in that case — he makes the human decision to bring Andor fully into the rebellion. As a result, Andor survives to ultimately be one of a few people that provide the plans that save the rebellion in the first Star Wars movie. Early in the second season, Luthen kills a friend of Mon Mothma, a senator he considers vital to the rebellion, against her wishes, in order to protect her. But that act against a man who might or might not have betrayed them caused Mothma to mistrust Luthen in a way that almost gets her killed — a loss even by Luthen’s standards. Luthen encourages a rebellion on a planet whose rebels are woefully unprepared for the fight. He could have let them go, or he could have tried to help train them. The result would likely, for in show reasons, have been the same but perhaps the slaughter would have been minimized. That people could escape that slaughter with help is proven in the show by the fact that one of Luthen’s people is able to help his friend escape the planet. Andor himself is saved by his connection to a member of the planet’s rebels, the hotel desk clerk, forged in his earlier mission by treating the person as a person, not a tool.
Perhaps I am reading too much into these moments. And that is all they are: moments as compared to the giant waving flags that the monologue and obvious decisions to let rebels die and a planet burn, in Luthen’s words. Maybe these are just the artifacts of writing a story where the rebellion does eventually win, where democracy is eventually restored. But maybe not. Maybe they are a more subtle reminder, a rebuke, perhaps, to the world as Luthen and his fans see it. Maybe they are a statement that humanity, that treating people as people, not tools, is more important to resistance than the best laid plans of Machiavellian puppet masters; that winning requires decency as much as it requires brutality.
I suspect that Luthen, in real life, would not handle the rebellion victory well. Democracy is a messy thing, and I am certain, given his reluctance to officially join the rebellion at the point in the show when it is a regular military organization, would seethe under a government that did not live up to his ideals or policies. I imagine it would be made even worse by his own sense of sacrifice. He turned his mind into a sunless place for 15% taxes on liquor? He thinks not! The example is silly, but Luthen is the kind of leader who would fall back into his old ways when he decided the compromises were too much for him and justify it with his sacrifice. Frankly, I would be more interested in seeing Luthen’s life after the fall of the Empire than the Star Wars movies we have now. I am pretty sure it would not be pleasant, but it would be illuminating.
Because the problem with becoming a monster to fight a monster is that, when the battle is lost and won, there is still a monster standing there. Perhaps Andor recognizes that dilemma, or perhaps I am reading too much into small moments. But small moments define our lives, as Syril’s arc in the show demonstrates. I sincerely hope that the show is using those moments deliberately and intends to use Luthen to demonstrate the true costs of becoming a monster. It would certainly be more interesting, in my opinion, than falling back onto the trite, Dick Cheney-esque contention that we need to excuse the monsters on our side.
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