Andor Season 2 Episode 5 “I Have Friends Everywhere” on Disney+ ends with a bananas monologue from incendiary revolutionary Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) that marries Star Wars lore with Shakespearean-level drama. It’s a tour de force from the Oscar-nominated actor whose character has served as a cautionary tale, role model, hero, and anti-hero in the Star Wars universe. In just one speech, Emmy-winning scribe Beau Willimon explains to the audience why Saw Gerrera has that bizarre breathing tube in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, what horrors befell him offscreen as a young man, and what the super volatile gas rhydonium — or rhydo — is.
Saw Gerrera’s big monologue to young Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhaier) is a perfect encapsulation of what makes Andor rule so hard. It’s Star Wars elevated, and uncut.
**Spoilers for Andor Season 2 Episode 5 “I Have Friends Everywhere,” now streaming on Disney+**
This week’s batch of new Andor episodes take place a full year after Cassian (Diego Luna), Bix (Adria Arjona), and Wilmon were forced to flee their itinerant life on Mina-Rau. While Cassian and Bix, now firmly a couple, are laying low on Coruscant, waiting for their next assignment from Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), Wilmon has been dispatched to offer his peculiar services to extremist rebel leader Saw Gerrera.
You see, Gerrera is hellbent on stealing a highly volatile starship fuel called rhydonium, or rhydo, for short. It takes a deft hand and encyclopedic knowledge of various lock combinations to tap into. Wilmon is initially supposed to train one of Saw’s men, Pluti (Marc Rissmann). However, when Saw figures out that Pluti is an ISB plant, the plan changes. Pluti is killed and Wilmon recruited to finish the job…or die.
You might assume Saw wants the rhydo for weapons or fuel, but Andor Season 2 Episode 5 reveals that he actually is addicted to inhaling the toxic gas. Wilmon is at first horrified, but Gerrera explains in his heated monologue how he first came into contact with the stuff as a young slave in a brutal Imperial worker camp.
“Then one day, everyone started to itch. Everyone, all at once. Even the guards. You could feel your skin coming alive,” Gerrera tells Wilmon. “It was the rhydo. They had a leak. You could feel it before you could smell it.” While everyone else fled in horror, young Saw was curious and stuck around.
At this point, Wilmon cracks the code, opening the valve to the rhydo. “I have always loved you,” an emotional Gerrera says, huffing it all in.
When Wilmon asks how Gerrera can do that, he simply answers, “Because I understand it. Because she’s my sister rhydo, and she loves me!”
“That itch, that burn…you feel how badly she wants to explode?” Saw asks. “Remember this. Remember this moment! This perfect night. You think I’m crazy? Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane!”
Whitaker just keeps going as the score intensifies, pointing out how despite their doomed circumstance, as freedom fighters who will die before the Republic wins, they are still here, now, “ready to fight!”
Inspired, Wilmon takes off his respirator and coughs the rhydo in.
“We’re the rhydo, kid,” Gerrera says. “We’re the fuel. We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air.”
Saw Gerrera’s rhydo speech is absolutely incredible for a number of reasons. One, it’s just yet another spellbinding Andor monologue from the pen of Willimon. (The House of Cards creator also gave us Andy Serkis’s “One way out!” and Stellan Skarsgård’s “I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see!” showstoppers.)
Thematically, though, this speech comes at a time when the Rebellion is approaching a tipping point. Up until now, Luthen, Cassian, and their allies have struggled to make headway from the shadows. With the situation on the wealthy and prominent planet of Ghorman escalating, a wider revolution needs only a spark. A bit of kindling to blow up the seeming calm the Empire has worked so cruelly to enforce. Gerrera’s duel assertion that “revolution is not for the sane” and that he and Wilmon and their contemporaries are the “rhydo,” speaks to these characters’ willingness to violently sacrifice themselves to be that tinder the wider movement needs.
Also, this poetic scene does something that all Star Wars shows, movies, and spin-off entertainment does, but better. Rhydonium is a deep cut Easter egg, previously mentioned in the now “Legends” Star Wars: The Old Republic LucasArts games, as well as episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series and The High Republic titles. It’s an elegant Easter egg, in that super fans will clock it, but casual viewers don’t have to do extra research.
Finally, this whole moment finally elucidates what the heck is going on with Saw Gererra’s strange voice, erratic behavior, physical disfigurement, and beloved breathing tube in Rogue One. When Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), and the rest of the team find themselves in Saw’s clutches, he’s suffering from the end of a very toxic addiction to rhydo. In Star Wars canon, rhydonium can affect the skin, the vocal chords, and more.
Saw Gerrera’s big Andor Season 2 monologue is pure Star Wars genius and unlike anything else anyone on television is coming close to trying.