From the beginning of season 2 of Andor, I was angry on behalf of Bix Caleen. Adria Arjona’s character on the show spent a lot of the season getting what fans of reality competition shows lovingly call “the loser edit,” where every time the series checked in with her, it found her at a new low — suffering a fresh humiliation, or struggling with the PTSD from the last batch of suffering.
Her slow downward arc, and its clear effect on series protagonist Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), seemed to lead toward an exhausting, familiar story cliché — especially since this entire series is a prequel to the Star Wars movie Rogue One, and unlike many of the show’s characters, Bix is noticeably absent from Rogue One. For more than half the season, Bix felt like she on her way to getting fridged. And I just want to take a breath and personally thank series creator Tony Gilroy for pulling out of that narrative dive instead of taking the obvious crash-landing.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Bix’s season 2 storyline, including how it ends.]
Image: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
Andor season 1 put Bix in the hands of Imperial interrogator (and ironic cupcake-enjoyer) Doctor Gorst (Joshua James), and season 2 arc focused on how she navigated the aftermath of torture. When we pick back up with Bix, she has screaming nightmares about Doctor Gorst, or debilitating insomnia as she avoids sleeping. She lives in terror of the Empire finding her again. She nearly gets raped by an Imperial officer. She takes dangerous drugs to repress her trauma. She haunts the Coruscant safehouse she and Cassian share like an increasingly wan ghost. Cassian sincerely wants to help, but she can’t let him in, so his worries for her keep compromising or complicating his work with the rebellion against the Empire.
Once Cassian and Bix get to Coruscant, her scenes get repetitive and wearying. When she harries Cassian and his handler Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) to include her on rebel missions, it’s unclear who we’re meant to feel more sympathy for: Them, for having to manage this traumatized, erratic woman who keeps insisting she should be trusted with delicate undercover work she doesn’t seem capable of; or her, for being kept like a canary in a cage, with no clear purpose and nothing to do but wait for the next round of trying to convince her patronizing keepers to let her do something meaningful that would distract and focus her.
But her arc takes a sharp upswing at the end of episode 6, “What a Festive Evening,” when Bix confronts Doctor Gorst, subjects him to his own horrific torture device, and blows the hell out of him, all with a cold, rational confidence that suggests Luthen and Cassian were wrong to handle her with kid gloves all along. When she and Cassian walk away from his office together, too cool to look back at Gorst’s exploding building, they’re finally confident, competent partners instead of caretaker and patient — or worse, the regressive “damsel in despair and valiant savior” pairing Andor has flirted with turning them into.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Granted, that scene is Bix’s high point for season 2 — from that point forward, she’s mostly around to serve Cassian’s arc, by pushing him to accept a Force healer’s read on him instead of shrugging her off, and eventually, nobly breaking up with him so his concerns for her won’t hold him back in his fight against the rebellion. (Side note, “I’m dumping you in order to not hamper your great destiny” is a pretty baller tactic, and if I was still in the dating field, I’d definitely keep that one in my back pocket.)
Bix was never on the top 10 list of Andor’s most developed, nuanced, or interesting characters, and apart from the Doctor Gorst payoff, she’s mostly in a pretty thankless role throughout the show. She’s the designated smallest-scale representative of the Empire’s predations, and the one most personal to Cassian. She’s the problem he can’t fix until the Empire is defeated, the person he needs to protect and can’t, needs to save and can’t, not without bringing down an entire fascist regime. She’s a focus for his heroism first, a sounding board for his angst second, and a character in her own right last.
Which is why I was positive she was going to get killed in order to motivate him further, in order to deepen that angst and firm up his resolve. Having Bix instead basically say “You’re better off without me, and the best thing I can give the rebellion is all the time and energy you’re spending on me” is such a bold, strange move that I suspect Tony Gilroy is well aware of what fridging narratives look like, and how much it seemed like he was toying with one. The problem with that resolution, though, is that there’s so little drama in it. Bix is right — she is a drag on Cassian’s attention and resources, and they are better off without each other. Their separation doesn’t have the sting of a tragic love story where starcrossed lovers have to leave each other. To me, it just felt like a relief to have it over with.
But it isn’t over. Andor’s very final shot has Bix back on the agricultural planet of Mina-Rau, smiling bravely toward the future in a post-Death Star world, holding Cassian Andor’s child. (In case there’s any debate there, Tony Gilroy has expressly confirmed that the child she’s holding is theirs, and that she knew she was already pregnant when she left Cassian.) It’s meant as a moment of hope and looking toward the future, an acknowledgement that Cassian is about to die (in the action of Rogue One), but that even if he doesn’t know it, his bloodline will live on.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
I’m not a fan of that ending — it plays into another huge cliché for female characters in media, the “lost my love but still have his baby” circle-of-life schtick that’s meant to make the death of a beloved character feel OK because their lineage lives on. To me, that particular trope has always felt more cynical and manipulative than heartfelt: People aren’t like Kleenex, with another new one popping up whenever the last one goes off to its reward, and all of them essentially fulfilling the same purpose. Having someone’s genetics in the world isn’t a replacement for having them around. (Not even in a galaxy where Force talent and destiny seem to be passed down in the bloodline.) It’s nice to learn at the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever that T’Challa had a secret kid, I guess, but it doesn’t make me miss Chadwick Boseman any less, or soften the blow of losing a talented actor with a bright future so early.
I’ve argued a lot about this one with less-cynical people at Polygon and elsewhere, though, and they’ve rightly pointed out that Cassian having a child that he’ll never know about is a pointed answer to Luthen’s incandescent “burning my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see” speech from season 1. Cassian and Luthen and all the others who did die while fighting the good fight throughout Andor were fighting on behalf of people like this nameless child, who will get to see the sunrise they made possible. It’s meant as a reminder that all this suffering had a purpose beyond the immediate moment.
That purpose includes Bix as well: Her safety and security in the show’s final moments is meant to pay off all the pain Cassian endured. He’s finally fixed the problem she posed, I guess, to put it in the bitterest terms. But in spite of all my dubiousness over her Andor plotline — especially in the shadow of the show’s far more nuanced, complicated, and especially interesting female characters — I’m just so grateful she didn’t have to die to make that happen.
