Some thoughts on Andor, and that final shot everyone hates so much.
I don’t. I’ve been sitting with this show for a while now. This whole season I’ve been waiting to hate Bix’s arc with the same fervour that some of the more vocal fans do. I’ve been waiting to feel the injustice done to a “strong female character” (a phrase I fucking hate by the way, but that’s an argument for another time). I’ve seen the arguments that she should have stayed with the rebellion, that she was a fighter sidelined for the sake of a man, that she was reduced to a baby-factory straight out of right wing propaganda (Jesus Christ). And I disagree with every fucking one of them.
For me, in season two, Bix is the heart of the show. She is the ethos, the drive, the reason that rebellion matters. Bix becomes, in a way, the most important character Andor has to offer us.
Andor has always been very clear in its ideology. Blatantly so. And one of the ideals it strives to impart to its audience is that we are not meant to live in fear. We are not meant to live under oppression. We are not meant to live looking down. For Andor the heart, the drive, the reason behind rebellion is to create a future where we are free. And where love, and peace, and community, and kindness, and hope are our foundations and are the only matter of our lives.
Andor doesn’t want its characters to be fighters. They are forced to be. Andor doesn’t want its characters to live hiding and scared and clawing for any glimpse of peace and love and hope they can get. They have no other choice. Rebellion is important. It is so so fucking important. But it is only important because of what it fights for.
Bix is not a fighter. In Andor’s first season she is a mechanic selling to Luthen on the side for extra money. She is not struggling against the empire. She is not joining a rebellion. She is getting the fuck by and living her fucking life. And one day her connection to Cassian puts her under the empire’s gaze and she is invasively tortured and horrifically traumatised because of it. And she endures.
Bix is, also, an incredibly important character to me personally. There can often be a narrative surrounding trauma that it should make you the fighter everyone seems to think Bix should be. That you should take your pain and terror and suffering and turn it around and let it make you stronger. Use it to beat back against the person, or group, or institution that traumatised you. That you should pick yourself up, dust yourself off, take that horror, and fight back (girlboss-ify yourself and take those motherfuckers down). And to that I say, no. I don’t want that. I’ve done my fighting. I’ve lost my battles and I’ve come out the other side scarred in ways that still hurt to touch. What I want is to stop. Is to rest. Is to put this pain down and move out the other side of it and live, finally.
For me, watching Bix as an horrifically traumatised woman live stuck in that fight for the first half of the second season was harrowing. To see her spend her time in the Coruscant safehouse grappling with the true cost of what it means to fight the way she needs to in this war, never at peace as the life she lives and the things she must do force her to stay held in her trauma, had me aching in ways I didn’t realise I would. To see her stuck in the dark and the gloom and the cold, and yearning the whole time she is in Coruscant to be able to go out and live without having to look over her shoulder, hurt in ways I struggle to put words to.
And then, to see her get out.
I know there is a lot of contention about seeing Bix have little to do on Yavin. And to that I will say, it’s a big show, there are a lot of characters, and she is on Yavin during a storyline that arguably should not narratively or structurally be focusing on her anyway. I know there is also a lot of contention about writing her leaving Cassian for the sake of the rebellion. That it diminishes her character to a plot beat. And while perhaps the tropes at play feel trite in comparison to the more grounded beats the show is known for hitting, this is still storytelling. All the characters are, functionally, still devices serving a narrative. Bix leaves, and narratively becomes our ethos. Becomes the heart of this story. Becomes the reason we have been watching this all play out for our two-season run. Bix becomes the most important character in the show. Because this is why we must fight. For Bix. For everything she represents in that moment. She becomes the way Cassian’s life should be if it weren’t for this war, and in doing so becomes the way all of their lives should be. Should have always been. And will be one day soon.
She is the reason. For all of it. For every loss, for every death, for every fight. It is her. She is the hope at the heart of the rebellion.
That last scene on Mina-Rau; the gentle light, Bee playing, the table set for a community to eat and laugh and be. People smiling and content and together and peaceful. And Bix, free. Of the trauma, of the loss, of the death, of the fight. Looking up at the open sky with her child. Literally holding in her arms the life that the rebellion has always been fighting for.
That is the hope at the end of our story -- that Bix is the one that gets to live.
And you can pry that fucking ending from my cold dead hands.
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