Episode 3 of Andor ended with Cassian Andor and Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård, blasting their way out of Ferrix, and leaving Syril Karn and his corporate police detachment either dead or in a state of shock wondering what happened. Andor, who has no money or ship of his own, is essentially Luthen’s prisoner, dependent on the older man, not only for his ride out of Ferrix, but for food and shelter until they both figure out his next step. When Luthen suggests to Andor that he join a group of revolutionaries on the planet Aldhani to take part in the robbery of an imperial garrison, it’s more of an order than an opportunity. Andor, who doesn’t have much choice in the matter, agrees.
If you’re a student of the Russian Revolution and all of this sounds familiar, it’s no accident. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Andor’s creator Tony Gilroy explains that he based episodes 4-6 of the show on the opening of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Young Stalin, and the infamous 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, where a heist organized by Lenin and led by Joseph Stalin, carried off 241,000 rubles from a caravan of armored cars making their way through Erivansky Square in what is now the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. The robbery was not a success. Over 40 people, including a number of innocent bystanders, were killed. 241,000 rubles in 1907 was only the equivalent of about 3.4 million dollars today, and very little of it wound up being of much use. The Czar’s secret police had a record of the serial numbers of all the largest bills. What’s more the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party passed a resolution condemning the “participation in or assistance to all militant activity, including expropriations as disorganizing and demoralizing.”
Nevertheless, The Tiflis bank robbery was a defining event for the ruthless, violent group of revolutionaries who would later become known as the Bolsheviks. Luthen, like Lenin, is determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary, and to do that he needs a lot of resourceful young petty criminals like Cassian Andor. On the way to Aldhani we not only learn that Luthen knows pretty much everything about Cassian Andor, but that Andor is no stranger to revolution and guerilla warfare, having served as a cook for an insurgent army during his teenage years, and having quit in disgust over factional squabbles that saw his fellow revolutionaries fighting one another more than they fought the empire. That Luthen is willing to pay Cassian 125,000 imperial credits to join his team on Aldhani is a testament to Cassian’s potential as a future militant. When Luthen asks Cassian to choose an alias, a codename, and Cassian calls himself “Clem” after his stepfather, we see how Bolsheviks are made. Clem, a skilled thief and scavenger, a black man who was hanged in the town square on Ferrix by the empire, has become Clem, a member of the revolutionary vanguard.
Cassian’s salary is an immediate source of tension between Luthen and Vel, the leader of the revolutionary cell on Aldhani, a severe young woman played by Faye Marsay, “the waif” from Game of Thrones. The last thing she wants is a mercenary, whose high salary is guaranteed to cause resentment among the other members of the cell, but Luthen insists that she take him and she follows his orders. As she introduces Andor to his “comrades,” Cinta, a young dark-skinned woman whose entire family was murdered by stormtroopers, Karis Nemik, a young man in his 20s, and the group’s intellectual and revolutionary theorist, Taramyn, a tall, formidable looking black man and an ex-imperial storm trooper, Lieutenant Gorn, an imperial officer and Vel’s man on the inside, and Avrel, a white man in his 40s, an ex-con who immediately begins to antagonize Cassian Andor and foment discontent, we begin to see why Vel is in command. She’s authoritative but open-minded and curious. She breaks up fights by asking each man his opinion on the issues. She skillfully integrates Andor into the team while making sure her people keep an eye on him to make sure he’s trustworthy.
The mission on Aldhani is a classic heist movie played out in the most poetic of all setting, Glen Tilt Park in Perthshire, Scotland. If you can imagine Jean Pierre Melville crossed with Ossian, Oceans 11 in the Scottish Highlands, the Italian job in the middle of the Highland Clearances, you can begin to understand the narrative complexity and originality of Andor. The imperial garrison on Andor is a bit like any frontier garrison in a district being ethnically cleansed for the good of “progress.” If the Kenari people in the early episodes of Andor were indigenous Mexicans, the Dhanis are basically Highland Scots, fair-skinned, red or blonde-haired pre-industrial people the empire has been pushing south out of their native land for decades. Just like the Irish peasantry in 1847, or the Scots Highlanders after the Jacobite Rebellion, the Dhanis are squatting on land too valuable for their “primitive” way of life. For the imperial officers, administrators and bureaucrats at the garrison, Aldhani is considered a bad posting, a backwater they send you when your career isn’t going anywhere.
As we follow Luthen back to the imperial capital on the planet Coruscant, where the formidable revolutionary leader lives as the owner of an art gallery popular with the imperial elite, we immediately understand why nobody at the imperial garrison on Aldhani can appreciate the planet’s staggering natural beauty. Even the ruling class on Coruscant live in dull high rises decked out in sterile IKEA furniture. We also meet two new characters, Mon Mothma, a liberal Senator who’s working behind the scenes with Luthen to raise money for the oppressed, and Deedra Meero, an ambitious imperial intelligence officer who sees the imperial crackdown in the wake of the disaster on Ferrix as a chance to jump-start her career. Imperial society is the picture of corporate evil. The ruling class make banal small talk. Senior management plays mid-level managers off against one another. Mid-level managers bully their underlings. Everybody moves in a tight, clipped way that says “I’ve built a forcefield around myself against beauty and imagination.” Above all, everybody is spying on everybody. Luthen has organized the heist on Aldhani partly because his contact in the Senate, Mon Mothma, is no longer able to move money around in the official banking system. Even her chauffeur is an imperial spy.
Probably the biggest plot hole in Andor is the fact that the empire still uses hard currency, that there’s a Fort Knox full of imperial gold bars to steal on the planet Aldhani. Nobody in the United States in 2024 uses cash. Even back in 1907 in Russia, the Secret Police could render stolen bank notes useless by circulating their serial numbers. There’s no reason to believe that the empire wouldn’t simply deactivate stolen imperial credits and render the physical media as valueless as expired Walmart gift cards. What empire worth its weight in evil lets people use cash. The empire in Andor is still in transition. It’s the 1970s, not the 2010s. The system of repression has not yet been perfected. In the end, the imperial payroll in Andor is a McGuffin, the excuse to show how the revolutionary cell organized by Luther and Vel pull off the perfect heist, not because any of them has any kind of superpower or extraordinary skill, but simply because they train for it, and train for it, and train for it. They put themselves through the paces so many times that even at the end when they’re all ready to kill one another, they still manage to pull it off.
What makes the heist in Andor so original is that in order to make their getaway, Vel, Andor and their comrades exploit The Eye of Aldhani, a rare natural phenomenon, a once every three years meteor shower, which is the center of a traditional religious ceremony for the Dhani. They need to pilot their slow, bulk freighter past the luminous natural phenomenon before the imperial garrison’s tie fighters can blow them out of the sky. Karis Nemik, the team’s intellectual has modified an ancient navigational system that will pilot them through the awesome spectacle of light even as the electrical charges fry the sophisticated computers on the tie fighters. Everything about the heist requires perfect timing, nerves of steel, inside information, and precise mathematical calculation, but in the end, it’s the beauty of the Scottish Highlands that lets the rebels defeat the evil empire. Andor and his space Bolsheviks succeed where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite Rebels failed. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 isn’t particularly well known in the United States, but if you’re a fan of the TV series Outlander you will see the connection immediately. It’s an astonishing moment of TV. Somehow Tony Gilroy has managed to insert Celtic romanticism in the middle of a dirty Bolshevik Revolution organized by squabbling sectarian murderers and thieves. Cassian Andor, the last descendent of an extinct Mesoamerican tribe and Karis Nemik, a young intellectual with salvaged technology from the distant past, outwit an entire imperial garrison and make off with a spaceship full of gold.
Andor has rescued Bolshevism from young Joseph Stalin and given it back to the ancient highland bards.