Anyone who watches Andor on Disney+ had to have known what was coming. Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) literally laid out the Empire’s plans for Ghorman all the way back in the Andor Season 2 premiere. Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) came up with the foolproof plan to get an entire galaxy to shrug off a genocide. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) even stressed to Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) last week that Ghorman looked doom to burn. Still, what happens to the people of Ghorman over the course of Andor Season 2 Episodes 7, 8, and 9 is still absolutely devastating.
**Spoilers for Andor Season 2 Episodes 7-9, now streaming on Disney+**
The Ghorman that Cassian Andor visits in this week’s trio of new Andor episodes is nothing like the vibrant, cultural hub we saw last week. In just a year, the Empire has squashed all community, transforming the capital city of Palmo into a police state. Imperial reporters buzz around the mostly empty city plaza, giving soundbites about the latest sectarian violence. Dedra Meero is finally on the ground, getting ready to lure the Ghor into a protest that’s really a trap.
The Empire specifically incites violence to give themselves the cover of massacring the citizens of Palmo.
“What’s a non-controversial, non-ideological victim of authoritarianism? And it’s community. It’s always community,” Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy told DECIDER earlier this week. “Look what the Empire’s destroying all the way through all of Star Wars: community, planets, cultures. You know, families, groups, towns, cities. It’s all about the destruction of community.”
Gilroy has been emphatic in every interview about the Disney+ show that he specifically pulled from history’s greatest hits of fascism and rebellion for Andor. What happens on Ghorman isn’t supposed to represent a specific genocide, even if the storyline features numerous references to the events and aesthetics of World War II. Krennic’s initial mountaintop offsite is a nod to the Wannsee Conference, the meeting where Nazi officials planned the logistics of the Holocaust. The Ghor are played by French actors speaking an original alien language built around the phonetics of their native tongue.
When DECIDER asked Gilroy if Ghorman was intentionally designed as a white, European-coded culture, he admitted that these cultural and racial nods were a “really big topic of conversation.”
“Presenting an idealized society, or some sort of idealized utopian diversity in the planet, does not help me tell the story of oppression on Ghorman,” Gilroy said. “Because one of the main weapons that’s being used on the Ghormans is, ‘Oh my god, look at them. They’re so insular. They stick to themselves. They let us come there and buy all their stuff, but they don’t mix with us.’”
“Their own pride and insularity are being used against them as a weapon.”
Gilroy said that once he realized how the Empire would twist the Ghor’s culture against themselves, internal discussions landed on “the idea of French actors.”
“That’s the rationale for it. That’s why Ghorman is the way it is,” he said, adding there were “really fascinating meta-conversations about that, as you can imagine.”
“That was the one line that I had three years ago. You know, if I have an idealized society, it doesn’t help me tell an oppressive story.”
“Well, I don’t know, man. People are going to have to pick the genocide they want to talk about.”
Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy on potential parallels being drawn between Ghorman and real life.
Part of this particular oppressive story is the pernicious way in which the Empire has managed to sway public opinion against the Ghor. While most of the Galactic Empire’s citizens take the Empire’s side that the proud, violent, anti-Imperial Ghorman had it coming, only Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) has the guts to call it a genocide out loud.
While Andor Season 2 Episodes 7 and 8 deal with the actual battle between the Ghorman Front and the Empire, Episode 9 is a tense political thriller tracking the politician’s plan to stand up to the Emperor and Cassian Andor’s attempt to spirit her off-world before she can be captured or killed.
DECIDER asked Gilroy if he was prepared for audiences in 2025 to see a clear analogy between Mon Mothma’s speech and present day genocides that are ignored by politicians or the press.
“Well, I don’t know, man,” he said. “People are going to have to pick the genocide they want to talk about.”
“The sorry truth is there are only several thousand genocides that are written about to choose from. So, I mean, it’s an historical repeating fact.”
A tragic repeating fact and one that Andor tackles head on, without blinking in this week’s installments.
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