Andor is one of the few Disney Star Wars projects that has received any kind of widespread praise in the last year or two. However, when the conclusion of the series came out earlier this year it wound up in the center of a great deal of controversy. A lot of time was spent discussing one five minute sequence in the third episode of the second season. The questions at issue were very interesting to me. The discussion itself struck me as… superficial.

Because the issue at hand is a very bothersome one, let me be upfront with the topic. In the third episode of Andor season 2 Bix, the heroine of the series, is nearly raped by an Imperial officer. This was a significant event in her character arc for the season but it was also very divisive.

Basically all of the controversy revolved around whether rape was a topic suited to Star Wars. Many felt such a nasty thematic element was against the spirit of the story. While there is some merit to that discussion, as a way to understand audience expectations and how to fulfill or subvert them, I feel the story itself was badly served. The reason for that is simple. The audience had a reaction to the story as presented and the Internet’s band of media critics had a reaction to that reaction but the elements of the story itself went unanalyzed.

You see, most of the discussion of that episode of Andor was about whether the audience had the right reaction. Critics didn’t question why audiences had the reaction they did. It is that second question that is most important, in my humble opinion. Attempting to point an audience towards a “correct” reaction is generally a vain waste of time whereas finding the source of the reaction may allow you to work around it.

So, today, we’ll attempt to address Andor season 2, episode 3.

But first, one thing I heard many critics say to dismiss the audience reaction to rape as a plot element was that rape was very tame compared to the war, slavery and planetary extinction of the original Star Wars trilogy. Saying a single attempt at sexual assault was somehow against the spirit of the series supposedly makes no sense in this paradigm. I feel this argument overlooks one critical element.

War, slavery and genocide are all outside the experience of most modern Westerners. On the other hand, rape is sadly still a somewhat common element of modern life. As a result, touching on this particular subject is much more likely to provoke a powerful emotional response than the other topics. Thus it must be handled with a greater level of care than these other topics if you want the audience to hear your message.

And there was a very specific message buried in this part of Andor’s narrative.

Many people have noted that the planet Ghorman, where most of the season’s action takes place is heavily patterned on occupied France during the Second World War. The local language is spoken like French, although the vocabulary is different. The clothing is also vaguely French, after a fashion.

Bix’s attempted assault doesn’t take place on Ghorman but thematically it’s connected to the ideas of occupation and intimidation the Ghorman storyline embodies. So before we directly address Bix we need to discuss another story. It takes place in a place that is like France, but isn’t French, where the people express themselves through song and a terrible empire is starting to make its presence felt.

Captain Louie Renoult is the chief of police in Casablanca, Morocco in 1941. As a French official he answers to the city of Vichy, where a collaborationist government has reached an agreement with Adolph Hitler’s Germany. While Europe is far from Casablanca its troubles are not.

Louie is expected to play host to Major Strausser, a German officer who has come seeking the resistance leader Victor Lazlo. Louie doesn’t like the Major but he’s a charming man and manages to fake good cheer when around the German for quite some time. Matters come to a head when Louie takes Strausser to Rick’s Cafe Americano.

While in Rick’s some of Strausser’s men commandeer the piano and begin singing a rowdy drinking song. The patrons aren’t happy about it but they’re not sure what the right thing to do in response is. Victor Lazlo, who is also visiting Rick’s that night, gets up in front of the house band and demands they play “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. He leads the bar in a rousing rendition of the tune, shouting down the boisterous Germans.

This angers Strausser. He doesn’t have ultimate authority over Casablanca so he turns to Louie and demands the bar be closed. Renault doesn’t want to do it. However we’ve already seen the power Strausser holds over him. Power rooted in the Nazi war machine and the fate of an occupied people, power enough to hold sway over even a police captain in his own city. So Louie relents and he shuts down the bar.

This is a pivotal moment in the movie’s story and a classic scene in movie history but that’s not what makes it significant for us today. Instead, what makes it important is how it illuminates events earlier in the film.

Before Rick’s is shut down the eponymous proprietor is approached by a Bulgarian refugee named Annina. She is fleeing Europe with her husband and they need an exit visa to leave town. All such papers need to be approved by the chief of police and Louie is happy to sign them. For a fee.

The problem is Annina and her husband don’t have the money to pay off Louie. Her husband is trying to win the money at the roulette table but if he cannot win it Louie has offered to make a separate deal with Annina. He will sign the papers in exchange for sex. She isn’t sure he will uphold the deal and Louie sends her to Rick, expecting that Rick will vouch for him.

Instead, Rick has his roulette dealer rig the game so her husband wins.

This little story has a happy ending but the dialog during it makes it clear that this is not the first time Louie has made this deal with a desperate woman, nor will it be the last. Now, to modern eyes and ears that may sound harmless. Prostitution isn’t a positive thing but in today’s permissive culture most will probably think exchanging sex for a life saving opportunity is acceptable. Louie ultimately sides with the good guys and doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore so it’s fine, right?

Well, no. See, this is where the scene with Strausser comes into play, casting its long shadow over the rest of the movie. The threat of violence he represents underlies everything the refugees of Casablanca do. If Louie cannot resist the might of the Wehrmacht how can they? Even if we accept that Louie’s deal with Annina is nothing more than an exchange of sex for services; if the exchange is made under threat it is still deeply immoral. Everything Annina does is under threat from the Nazis. She would not make this deal if she did not fear for her life.

Or, in other words, Louie is a serial rapist.

By leveraging the power of the Nazi regime he can extract endless sexual favors from refugees while flattering himself a philanthropist. It is ugly, scummy and incredibly evil. What makes it so incredibly unsettling is how easy it is to give him a pass for it. Louie is somewhat handsome, very charismatic and generally good natured. He does, in fact, uphold his end of the bargain and sign the papers so his victims can escape the city like they wish. In time he will turn against the Nazis and join Rick in the French Resistance.

But that does not undo his crimes.

With that established, let’s turn back to Annina for a moment, as she is the closest analog to Bix in this example. Consider her dialog with Rick. There are two lines she says of particular note.

“If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the whole world, but she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”

“He never knew, and the girl kept this bad thing locked in her heart?”

Note the way Annina phrases these questions. She doesn’t say what she intends to do, just that she is considering a bad thing. She’s anxious to know if she could be forgiven. She intends to keep the entire matter locked away forever, telling no one. Keep this in mind as a reference.

Let’s get back to the main focus of this post. Bix is the central character of this scene and it’s important to say a few things about her before we talk about the specific events of the scene in question. First of all, Bix is a member of a burgeoning resistance movement. In her role as such she was previously captured and tortured by the Imperial Security Bureau. This has kept her out of action in the second season as she recovers her physical and emotional ability to take part in resistance activities.

The problem with that is that Bix is currently a refugee. She’s not on her home planet and doesn’t have any of the paperwork she needs to escape official scrutiny. She’s not alone in that predicament, of course. Lots of people throughout the galaxy are refugees. However, her life as a resistance fighter makes this issue particularly dangerous for her.

The issue comes to a head when an Imperial officer named Lt. Krole discovers Bix. Krole learns that Bix has no papers and offers to make the issue go away in exchange for sex. She turns him down. Krole forces the issue and Bix hits him with a power tool, fracturing his skull and eventually leading to his death.

However, Krole lives long enough to die in a public place, in front of another Imperial officer. Bix looks this officer in the face and tells him, “He tried to rape me.”

This is the line that provoked such a strong reaction from audiences, prompted the writing of multiple audiences and led to several heated debates among culture critics on livestreams. All of which missed the point save one, which we’ll get to. The question that everyone has overlooked is simple and straightforward.

In this situation, would Bix have said these five words?

No. No she would not have.

I will build my case from the particulars outwards. First of all, Bix is talking to an Imperial officer, a category person who she has learned, through experience, temperament and ideology not to trust. Second, Bix is at her mental and emotional nadir of the entire season. She is still traumatized after being tortured by the ISB. It would be shocking if she revealed this secret to a close friend or lover without significant pressure from said trustworthy person.

Revealing it to an enemy, a stranger, on the street? Not a chance.

One of the greatest difficulties of combating sexual crimes is how reluctant victims are to discuss them. I point you back to Annina’s attitude in Casablanca. She calls it “a thing” she planned to keep “locked in her heart” when discussing pressure from Louie. Police and trauma counselors agree victims are reluctant to admit they’ve been raped. The behavior is deeply, wildly outside the norm for people who have been assaulted.

It is a possible reaction, of course. Everything happens once or twice and particularly resilient or motivated individuals might respond to that kind of trauma in a frank, open and assertive fashion. However Bix’s characterization is already deeply established by this point. She is not any of those things, at least not at this point in her life. In these scenes we are given no reason to expect Bix to act in a way that departs from the normal way – guilt, shame and silence.

Yet she does. Why?

Well, the answer is actually pretty simple. The show is working hard to show us all the excesses of authoritarian governments and one of those excesses is coercing sex from women. I previously mentioned that there was one discussion I heard that I felt tangentially touched on what I think happened in this moment. It’s this summary of the situation by YouTuber Little Platoon, which I’ve timestamped for your convenience:

Platoon points out that this is all to play up Bix’s forthcoming character arc, the hypocrisies of totalitarian rule and how this all plays into the themes Gilroy had for the show. I’ve attempted to locate the article he mentions but Gilroy did a lot of interviews around this time and I couldn’t locate a particular one that seemed to match what Platoon mentioned, so I can’t source that for you. That said, I think what Platoon says here is all true. The scene did have these goals, it was aiming to set out the evils of the situation very bluntly and obviously for the audience.

The problem is, Bix baldly stating the situation goes against her own motives and characterization up to this point as well as the way people generally react to this particular kind of trauma. It is the beginning of a change in Bix, sure, but she behaves almost as a character at the end of her arc. That kind of forthright behavior speaks to an emotional core the character just doesn’t have. Gilroy had Bix say something not because it is in keeping with her character and the situation but because he had a point to make.

That’s bad writing.

Exacerbating things is how it rubbed people the wrong way. I believe that happened for two reasons. First, recall that sexual assault is the greatest travesty most western people have encountered in their life. That makes them more emotional about it. It also makes them most familiar with it and how people react to it, which means they are far more likely to recognize when something is off in how a character reacts to it.

Second, this is the only time Gilroy speaks directly through his characters. Most of the time, he lets them speak for themselves, orchestrating things with a much subtler hand to get the outcomes he wants. The contrast in this moment is very striking.

Audiences aren’t stupid but they rarely fully realize why they’ve reacted the way they have when they are taking in a story. It often falls to critics to do the extra legwork and figure that out. For some reason, in the case of Andor, it didn’t happen anywhere that I’ve seen, so I’ve done my best to perform that analysis here. Of course, I doubt this analysis will spread far. The discourse over Andor is largely done with, at this point.

So I want to offer a little bit of extra value to this discussion, something authors should keep in mind when they approach these very fraught topics.

You have to get them right. The more people have experienced them, the greater that necessity. It is the goal of the storyteller to provoke an emotional response from their audience, to do so without getting caught and, ideally, to put the audience in the same emotional state as their characters. The more emotional baggage the audience can bring to your story the greater the danger they will wind up in an emotional place you did not anticipate.

You must know. Must know. Where you are leading your audience. The rockier the emotions you navigate the greater the chance you will lose them. This doesn’t mean you avoid them. Just that you must navigate these story beats with the greatest care of all. They are certainly not the point to preach your own message.

This is why Casablanca succeeded where Andor tripped up. That film does more than present you with the ugliness of a sexual predator using a totalitarian regime as cover for his crimes. If you’re not very careful, it will trick you into helping Louie excuse them. Where Andor loudly proclaims the things that make people hate the regime, Casablanca whispers that you would collaborate.

Even if Gilroy’s message in episode three could have been presented more skillfully I’m not sure it would be better than Casablanca’s. But that’s not for me to decide. I encourage you to study both examples of this theme and draw your own conclusions.