*Luthen-related spoilers.*
Andor is just the pinnacle of the (paraphrased) Mindy Project line, “Favorite Character is not a person. It’s a tier.” I’ve fully lost track of how many Favorite Characters posts I’ve written for the show, because even though Cassian is far and away my favorite favorite, every person in the series carves out their specific niche so well. Today, we’re looking at the fascinating figure of Luthen Rael.
We see several different personas from Luthen just within his first few episodes on the show. He’s introduced as one of Bix’s black-market connections, a buyer who’s purchased illicit and stolen goods from Ferrix in the past. When Cassian is in trouble and in need of a big score to skip town, he dusts off a star path unit he stole from an Imperial ship and begs Bix to set up a meeting for him. But when Luthen comes to Ferrix, he reveals he’s far less interested in the star path unit than in the man who stole it from the Empire.
This is how we meet Luthen Rael, Rebel spymaster. While he’s not going on missions or sleeping on the ground for the sake of the cause, he orchestrates the movements and actions of the rebels around him, pulling different strings and connecting different dots. He’s the one who tries to coax Saw Gerrera into playing nice with other Rebel factions, who cultivates an Imperial mole and has the final say on whether Vel’s group can go ahead with the Aldhani heist. He sees Cassian’s talent for “getting inside the Empire’s house” and stealing scraps from them, recognizes that the young man’s anger and disenfranchisement could be a powerful weapon when “properly” directed. When the Pre-Mor corpos descend on Ferrix looking for Cassian, Luthen helps him escape on the condition that he help the Rebel cell on Aldhani complete their mission.
That appears to be the truest Luthen, but there’s one more we meet: the charade he performs back home on Coruscant, that of a preening antiquities dealer who hobnobs with capital elites while running the early days of the Rebellion from his backroom. I love the moment when, as Luthen flies from Aldhani back to Coruscant, we see him actively putting this persona on, taking deliberate time to transform into the façade he shows the rest of the galaxy. It’s fascinating to watch the compartmentalization.
With Luthen at the center of the Rebellion, we see how the cause of freedom is a just one but not always a virtuous one. We see him decide to sacrifice another rebel leader by allowing him to walk into an ambush, rather than jeopardize the position of his mole. We see him decide to burn his valuable acquisition when Cassian goes on the run after Aldhani, sending Vel and Cinta to find and kill him so key information doesn’t fall into enemy hands. And after the success of the Aldhani mission, Mon Mothma realizes how brutal the Empire’s retaliation will be against the galaxy at large. “People will suffer,” she says. Luthen tells her, “That’s the plan.”
He consistently schemes to fight for liberation, but he’s willing to get his hands incredibly dirty to do it, even if the physical hands he uses often belong to other people. Because most things on this show come back to the writing, I’ll close with a small piece of the monologue he delivers in the exemplary “One Way Out”: “What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see.” We haven’t seen a rebel quite like Luthen before, and I’m endlessly intrigued to see where the show will take him next.
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