What 'Andor' Gets Wrong About Torture

Yes, torture is cruel and dehumanizing. But, just as importantly, it's self-defeating.

[Mild spoilers for the ninth episode of Andor herein!]

In a recent episode of the CEREBRO Podcast, Connor Goldsmith got into a rabbit trail about the nature of torture with his guest Spencer Ackerman during their conversation about the incestuous fraternal Nazi twins turned b-list X-Men villains Fenris. (Don’t worry, this is neither an X-Men post nor an incestuous twins post).

Ackerman is the author of Reign of Terror, an charting the legacy of 9/11 and the Iraq War to the modern era, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. He’s very smart about the nature of creeping fascism in particular, and has some good thoughts on the role that government-sanctioned torture played in eroding American democracy to its current level of decay. In his conversation with Connor, he noted that while the aim of torture is to dehumanize the person being tortured, it is a weapon that ultimately fires both ways, dehumanizing both the tortured and the torturer. Whether it’s the rack during the Spanish Inquisition or waterboarding at Abu Gharib, it does not matter how “successful” torture is in getting someone to talk. Once you start using torture in any battle of good versus evil, evil is winning.

I thought about during the ninth episode of Andor, when our rebel-adjacent hero Bix is captured and tortured for information by fast-rising Imperial star Meero. Like a lot of people, I’ve been consistently wowed by Andor, a defibrillator on the heart of my interest in the Star Wars franchise. The scene with Meero and Bix is terrific, giving Denise Gough as Meero the opportunity to chew out a deliciously nasty monologue as she prepares Bix for the ugly business of information extraction — in this case, a form of excruciating audio torture.

As Adam Serwer wrote in his great piece on Andor, what makes this show work is its shifted perspective on the Star Wars universe. We’re used to seeing the a-list figureheads of these movements duel their fates, the galaxy in balance as various Skywalkers and Kenobis vie for the higher ground. What Andor does is focus the action on Extra #3 — the people who fight and die in the background while our capital H-Heroes are bringing peace and justice to the galaxy. In this show, we’re not following a Hero’s Journey so much as exploring, as Serwer put it, “what kind of person joins the Rebels or goes Imperial, and why.”