Favorite Characters: Maarva Andor (Andor)

*Maarva-related spoilers.*

Before we get started, I remember the 2007 WGA strike. I remember how shows got derailed or canceled, how seasons ended abruptly, and how some shows never recovered their momentum when they came back. That said, I 100% believe in paying writers what they’re worth and stand behind the WGA going forward. It’s especially apt that I’m talking about Andor today, a show that continually bowled me over with the strength of its writing. #DoTheWriteThing

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of Maarva at the start of Andor. I knew Fiona Shaw could bring it, but I didn’t know what it would be. By the middle of the season, though, I realized just how much I enjoyed watching this complex character. While she’s far from perfect, she’s always interesting.

We meet Maarva as Cassian’s somewhat long-suffering mother. She loves Cassian dearly, but she also knows how lost he is. As he gets himself into trouble and then plows through determined excuses to explain away his bruises, she’s equal parts worried and aggravated. Why won’t he listen? Why does he torture himself with a fruitless search for his sister, who was left behind on Kenari and is almost surely dead? She knows what he could be capable of, and it pains her to see him going down a path where she can’t protect him.

Over the course of the season, we see plenty more of Maarva from this perspective. We see how she never stops loving Cassian, always believing the best in him despite his present missteps. When Cassian returns to Ferrix in the middle of the season, flush with cash he can’t explain, he urges her to come with him as he runs away from his troubles. At her refusal, he tells her he can’t leave without her, explaining, “I’ll be worried about you all the time.” Smiling, Maarva replies, “That’s just love. Nothing you can do about that.”

While this aspect of Maarva is awesome enough, it isn’t all she is. We know that she lost her husband Clem in a brutal way—he was killed by Stormtroopers when Cassian was a teenager. Clem was Maarva’s partner in more ways than one, and after his death, there was a lot she had to navigate on her own. She eventually confesses to Cassian that, for years, she couldn’t bring herself to walk through the square where Clem had been hanged.

What changes that, the feeling of overwhelming dread and anguish connected with the site of her husband’s death? Unbeknownst to Maarva, it’s Cassian himself. When she hears of the successful Rebel mission on Aldhani, she’s energized like never before. Maarva had never been one to passively go along with the Empire—she had some choice words for the Pre-Mor corpos who tried to arrest Cassian earlier in the season—but she’d never actively taken the fight to them. Hearing about the blow struck on Aldhani, all bets are off. She can’t leave Ferrix because she’s ready to take part in a revolution, and where better to start than in her own town? So she stays, bidding farewell to Cassian, never knowing that he was crucial to the success of that fateful mission.

This new revolutionary spirit carries Maarva through to the end. Even in death, when the town follows the tradition of playing the final holo-message she pre-recorded for them, she stokes the fires of rebellion. As her image looms large above her friends and neighbors, she tells them, “There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it’s here. […] The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness, it is never more alive than when we sleep.”

In other words? Stone cold BAMF!

Before I wrap things up, I do have to mention the circumstances of Cassian’s “adoption.” It’s obviously true that Maarva loves Cassian and he loves her. It’s also true that, if she and Clem hadn’t taken him away from Kenari, he likely would’ve been killed in time by the toxic mining disaster than devastated the planet, just one of the many victims of both the Republic and the Empire’s colonialism. However, she definitely took a kid from his home, one who didn’t speak her language and who had to be drugged because he wouldn’t go with her and Clem willingly. As a result, she knew nothing about Cassian’s sister, or any of the other children there, until it was too late to go back for them. Maarva is a great character, and her relationship with Cassian is so compelling, but it began with a hastily conceived paternalistic decision on her part.