As an Amazon Associate, I earn on qualifying purchases made through affiliate links on this site.

Episodes 7, 8 and 9 were some of the best episodes of Andor we’ve had. We get to see all the work the Empire put into Ghorman paying off, as they take over the planet, starting a chain of events that will eventually lead to their destruction at the hands of the Rebel Alliance.

One of the biggest reasons for this is Mon Mothma, who denounces Palpatine in the Senate after the atrocity on Ghorman, speaking out in defence of truth, and the Emperor’s lies and manipulation.

In its own way, it’s a powerful scene, and means a lot when you’ve seen where it comes from, how it’s been built up in the first and second seasons of the show. But the closer you look at it, the more it doesn’t make sense, and in fact, it could be one of the worst ideas Mon Mothma’s had. It this point, it might have been better to do what Bail Organa does, and keep quiet, staying on in the Senate for a couple more years.

For context, we need some backstory on the Ghorman Massacre. This was an event that’s mentioned, but never shown, in the Expanded Universe stories. These are now classed as ‘Legends’, so wouldn’t have any bearing on the show. In that atrocity, Tarkin travels to Ghorman shortly after the ascension of Palpatine, and is met with a crowd of protesters blocking his ship from landing. In a very typical Tarkin move, he lands on tops of the Ghor, killing and injuring hundreds of them.

Early on, it was speculated that this would be what was shown in Andor season two, but that wasn’t the case. The Tarkin massacre is still mentioned, but as a separate event that happened more than a decade before. In fact, there’s even a monument been erected to it on Ghorman, and it’s around this that the second massacre happens.

It’s strange that the second massacre should become such a turning point for the Empire and their hold on the galaxy. It’s true that the Empire committed more and more brutal acts as their power grew, and more world came under their control, all while Palpatine drew the Senate’s teeth, but is it really all that remarkable at this point, that it should force Mon Mothma to become a fugitive?

By this point, the Empire has already committed countless brutal killings, including the liquidation of Kamino, as shown in The Bad Batch. There’s no way that Mothma wouldn’t know about these things, especially once she became involved with people like Luthen Rael, and she’s clearly shrugged off several equally unpleasant events, using her political power to challenge the Empire, rather than outright rebel against them.

It’s also remarkable how careful the Imperials were with their plans for Ghorman, taking at least two years to put it into effect, and trying to find an alternative, as they are a well-known world, and the source of expensive fabrics. If they had simply wanted to exterminate the Ghor and take the planet, they could, but instead they went slowly, building an elaborate plan, and planting plenty of evidence to incriminate the Ghorman rebels.

Viewers know what’s really going on, but this has to be seen from the point of view of a senator, or just a regular Imperial citizen, who only has the official news and reports to go on. The fact is, from an outside perspective, it doesn’t look good for the Ghor. Granted, the Empire was occupying the planet, but it was a largely peaceful affair. We aren’t shown any brutality or political arrests. The citizens are allowed to peacefully protest, and life seems more or less normal.

The crowd that gathers in the square before the massacre, to protest the landing of equipment for mining the planet, could also be seen as a peaceful events, that the Empire allowed to happen, with little or no provocation on their part. The Empire begins the fight by shooting one of their own men, but this is engineered so it looks like one of the Ghor shot first, giving them a reason to fire back into the crowd. What makes it worse is that dozens of the people assembled had brought along blasters, and even explosives, which gives more credence to the idea they were to blame. The weapons could be traced back to the Imperial shipments they were stolen from, and the presence of outside agitators is to some extent true, as Andor, Wilmon, Cinta and Val were all present on the planet at one time or another, and at least two of them would be known fugitives.

The only way anyone outside the planet would know what really happened would be if they had inside intel from the rebels themselves. For the rest of the galaxy, they have to rely on the holonet, and the Imperial spin on events. Even then, the images of dead troops, and the Ghorman protestors firing at them, is hard to deny. The transmission by the rebels asking for help, if it was heard at all, would just be taken as another lie by the terrorists on a distant planet, where the truth would be hard to verify independently.

The fact Mon Mothma chooses this event as the reason for permanently leaving the senate and joining the rebellion openly is a strange one, as the majority of senators who heard her speech denouncing Palpatine and his hold on the truth would not know any different, or else would not care. The rest of the people who saw the holonet transmission would also likely view her as a traitor, choosing a moment when the Emperor looked weak to attack her political opponent, before throwing in her lot with the rebels that apparently murdered dozens of troops on Ghorman.

Not only that, but during her escape from the Senate building, in the company of one of those same rebels, her innocent driver is shot and killed, making her appear even more guilty of treason.

While this speech, and the one shown in Star Wars: Rebels, would likely be a rousing call to anyone who was already defying the Empire, it wouldn’t be likely to have much effect on the average citizen. Her words, and most certainly her actions, could easily be used by the Imperial authorities to make her into a traitor, and if the fact she had been secretly funding rebels for years came out, there would be plenty of evidence to implicate her in the massacre, firmly making her into a villain, and the troops killed on Ghorman into heroes.

This makes it a very odd place for Mon Mothma to make a stand. At this point, the Empire is in control of hundreds, thousands of worlds, and is brutally subjugating many. There was a similar event on Ferrix just a few years earlier, and this is clearly not a singular occurrence. It’s also strange that the equally barbaric massacre by Tarkin went largely unpunished. In contrast, the second massacre was well planned to give the Empire plausible deniability, with plenty of evidence pointing to rebel forces. As such, it seems an odd time for her to leave, and remove one of the few official voices that could speak out on such things, not to mention how this could put her home world of Chandrilla, and her family, in danger.

Her leadership is, of course, vitally important to the Rebel Alliance in the future, but it doesn’t seem that she’s particularly aware of what’s happening on Yavin 4, and her presence would likely be a negative one for the rebels, in the eyes of regular Coruscant inhabitants, and it might have been better for her to put up with it for a little longer.

It seems an odd choice that this should become the decisive moment when the rebellion becomes ‘official’, so to speak. Andor is a well-written show generally, and it would seem that a better trigger could have been thought up. One where the Empire was clearly implicated, and were Mon’s outcry would have been a wake up call to the galaxy, which could then be compounded by the destruction of the Death Star showing that the Empire isn’t invincible. As it is, it feels more like an awkward, and perhaps slightly rushed, attempt to get all the characters were they need to be in time for Rogue One.

Thanks for reading! I’m looking to grow my audience for my blog, so would really appreciate any help you can give. Please consider liking this post, and sharing it on social media. You can also subscribe to receive posts by email, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Also, if you’d like to, you can donate through Buy Me A Coffee to help keep things running!

Thankyou!