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Andor, now in its second and final season, is continually pushing the envelope for what makes a Star Wars show. A storyline from the first chapter arc has some fans up in arms. Bix Caleen, played by Adria Arjona, is hiding out on the agricultural planet of Mina-Rau when the Empire comes calling to round up illegal migrants. When an Imperial officer pays her special attention, we know it’s not going to end well.
Episode three, Harvest, culminates with the officer attempting to brutally rape Bix in her home. She manages to fight him off in a protracted battle that ends with him staggering out to his vehicle, only to fall and smack his head in a fatal blow. In case the audience had any doubt what was at stake, Bix tells his fellow officer: “He tried to rape me”.
Watching the screeners for review, I knew this would be a divisive moment. Audiences have grown fatigued with female characters being subjected to rape-as-character-development. It was basically the entire discourse of Game of Thrones, where a world filled with dragons and magic still subjected women to violent sexual assault seemingly at every opportunity.
Bix’s attack is not played for titillation, but her storyline did give me pause. This is a character that has already experienced extreme bodily violation and trauma. In the first season, she is interrogated by the ISB’s (Imperial Security Bureau) Doctor Gorst, who tortures her with the sounds of alien Dizonite children screaming as they are killed.
The torture is a clear analogue to the worst of real world war crimes, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the likes of the CIA to break the minds and bodies of those deemed terrorists. Bix barely survived, and is clearly still mentally fragile when season two of Andor picks up a year later. To then write her an attempted rape scene seems like a lot of horror and trauma to pile onto a single character.
But for some Star Wars fans, it was the explicit demonstration that rape exists in the galactic universe that was too much. “Vader wouldn't tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it,” fan account StarWarsTheory posted on X. “It has no place in Star Wars. Period. Unnecessary.”
Seriously? Darth Vader, the person who murdered a bunch of children then force-choked Padme while she was pregnant? Did we not all watch Revenge of the Sith?
SA in SW feels unnecessary. You can portray power dynamics and making the audience hate the empire in other ways without taking it to such a disgusting place.
— StarWarsTheory (@realswtheory) April 23, 2025
Vader wouldn't tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it.
It has no place in Star Wars. Period. Unnecessary.
Sexual assault has always been present in Star Wars, Andor is just brave enough to name it for what it is. This is, after all, the franchise famous for putting Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in a revealing bikini (which the actor famously hated wearing) and chains for a narrative arc that boiled down to her being sold into sex slavery.
Genocidal colonial enterprises like the Empire don’t menace the galaxy with clone armies and build planet-destroying weapons just to draw the line at rape. Star Wars has always held a mirror up to humanity’s worst atrocities. Andor is determined to be unflinching in its real-world parallels, and a migrant worker without documentation, as Bix is, would be very much at risk of assault from corrupt authorities.
Andor creator Tony Gilroy has been clear that he is drawing a direct line to the real world with Bix’s story. “I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape,” Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter. “Armies and power throughout history” have used rape as a deliberate tactic, he added, suggesting that “to not touch on it, in some way” would be a glaring omission.
The scenes between Bix and the Imperial officer are masterfully shot. From the moment he corners her working in a grain silo, the tension ratchets up to an uncomfortable notch. As a woman, it made me cringe to watch her try to bat away his advances without offending him and risking escalation. When he returns to find her alone in the house, his insinuation – that she could escape being detained for being undocumented in return for sexual favours – was truly scary.
Still, I question why they chose to give this storyline to Bix specifically, given her character’s journey has been to survive one form of torture at the hands of the Empire only to be thoroughly retraumatised. “I was really trying to make a path for Bix that would ultimately lead to clarity — but a difficult path to get back to clarity,” explained Gilroy. Hmm. Do women need to survive a violent rape attempt to find clarity? I don’t think that’s how that works.
What does work, though, is that this attempted rape scene is intercut with the aristocratic wedding scene on Chandrila. Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), drunk and twirling on the dancefloor as she finally processes having effectively sold her own daughter into an arranged marriage in return for funds to shore up the Rebel cause.
While Leida, a teenage girl caught up in reactionary traditionalism, has happily agreed to this marriage, it still feels decidedly uneasy. The moment where her new husband symbolically cuts off her hair braids in front of the congregation are an obvious symbol of ritual virginity-taking. It’s unlikely a coincidence that her name sounds so much like Leda, from the Greek myth of a Spartan queen raped by a god. Mon has failed to protect her daughter from the fate she herself suffered.
While I don’t agree with everything about how Andor chose to name rape as a tool of violent oppression, it’s commendable that it chose to make it part of the Star Wars canon. It’s a huge deal, particularly given that this is a Disney show.
The creators have used this Rogue One prequel to turn over the space opera rock and look at the ickier bits of what it would take for the nascent Rebel Alliance to fight back against the evil Empire. I just hope Bix catches a break in the next episodes, and hopefully gets some space therapy.
