A year on, Cassian and Bix have become active operators for Luthen…

Following orders. It’s a tough one. Too ingrained and you develop in people a sense of incompetence – an inability to respond to a situation without guidance, a lack of adaptability, critical thinking or perspective.

Yet without being able to follow orders you breed the conditions for lack of unity, conflicting decisions and terrible responsiveness to high stress moments. Orders and the organisational frameworks that allow them also create the space in which large groups of people can act coherently and accomplish outcomes that no individual can manage under stressors no crowd can survive.

Discipline, in this sense, can accomplish more than expertise and excellence in many more situations than people like to believe.

Andor’s second part is all about discipline, about what it takes to survive under pressure.

In this discipline is also a survival mechanism – allowing stress and terror and fear and pressure to wash around you (until later) so you can continue to act, to do what you have planned. Ill-discipline creates a world in which plans fall apart and when they do people die.

If part 1 of this second season was about understanding that when you embark on a path of resistance there’s no turning back, part 2 is about what it takes to survive walking that path.

Don’t get me wrong, Tony Gilroy is clear that no small amount of luck is required to survive but he’s also clear that if you’re going to resist, knowing when to be patient, when to be cautious (all the time) and when to walk away are crucial incubators of luck.

There’s also the sense that in the desperate actions of resistance, caution is vital. People think caution means hesitancy, means lack of action and commitment. People who tell you this are fools.

Caution within resistance is about knowing when to act because the struggle is asymmetric – the people being struggled against have more power, more resources and can, if they can find the source of resistance crush it with little effort.

It is not a fair fight and too many people think that resisting oppression is about ‘standing up to the bully’ as if we’re in a playground one on one. We’re not. Resisting oppression means that the oppressor has already won the main fight and finds themselves with power over others.

Many people hate to accept this because it implies they’ve failed or that they’re weak.

The truth is that both these things might be true but as Cassian and Luthen understand – these are facts, not judgements and as such, the fight starts from these positions, it doesn’t pretend they don’t exist.

A lack of caution allows the enemy to take advantage, to put our arms up behind our backs and manoeuvre us as they wish. Cassian senses this and refuses to be complicit. Luthen, a step up the chain of command, also sees the enemy wanting to use resistance to their own ends, but he wants it too. Both sides are prepared to sacrifice their people to build their war.

And this is the second part of Andor – when violence finally breaks out there are no winners. We all lose when war comes, but that losing is also unfairly distributed. When power loses it generally has the resources to carry on. When resistors lose, they risk being destroyed and in their destruction the only hope is that the ash of their burning will nourish the seeds of the next generation of resistance.

People die in Andor’s second part because everyone wants them to die – all sides in an unspoken agreement to sacrifice ordinary people in the name of escalation, in the name of truly having their war. There is a sense of careering towards destruction, that what each side really wants is to stop with the appetisers and get to the feast. They want violence for different reasons but they still want it.

Verdict: We know where this ends but there’s half a season to go before we end with Rogue One and it can only get darker from here.

10 agent provocateurs out of 10

Stewart Hotston