The Best Sci-Fi Episode Of 2025 Won The Emmy It Deserved

"Andor" is officially an Emmy darling. A "Star Wars" show shouldn't have been anyone's first pick for a Best Drama Writing award, but that's what the second and final season of "Andor" won at the 77th Emmy Awards.

It helps that, unlike the show's first season, it wasn't competing against the superlative final season of "Succession" this time. (At the 75th Emmys, the "Andor" episode "One Way Out" lost Best Drama Writing to "Connor's Wedding" from "Succession.") "Andor" is a sci-fi series set in a galaxy far, far away, while "Succession" dramatizes America's billionaire class with a roman à clef about the Murdoch family of News Corp. And yet, both shows are some of the most brutally honest TV about the world we live in. (More on that soon.)

Specifically, "Andor" won this prize for the episode "Welcome to the Rebellion." It's both the second season's ninth episode and the final episode of the season's third arc, as written by Dan Gilroy (brother of the series' creator, Tony Gilroy). There's a lot to love about this installment, which carries on from the Imperial massacre on the planet Ghorman in the previous episode, "Who Are You?"

The series' narrative lines finally intersect as Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) rescues Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) from Coruscant, as she can no longer hide and resist in plain sight. (Hence, "Welcome to the Rebellion.") "Andor" is a thrilling spy show, and this sort of sustained chase sequence is what that genre does best.

Then there's the heartbreaking conclusion, where Cassian's beloved Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) leaves him behind; his work in the Rebellion is too important, she's decided, and they must postpone their happy ending until the war is over. If you've seen "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," you'll know that Cassian will never live to see the sun rise on a world free of the Empire. (But, as the very last scene of "Andor" shows, his sacrifice meant that Bix and their child did.)

The crux of the episode, though, is Mon giving a speech in the Galactic Senate, denouncing the Ghorman massacre and the unseen Emperor Palpatine. Like Mon dropping any pretense that she isn't a Rebel, this is when "Andor" most loudly declares what it's saying about the real world.

The "Andor" season 2 premiere features Imperials discussing their need for the mineral kalkite to finish the Death Star's reactor lenses. Ghorman has a surplus of kalkite, so they'll need to strip-mine the planet. Of course, they can't just march in and take it, as that would incite revolt. Instead, they must slowly tighten their squeeze on Ghorman and incite its people to revolt. Then, through a careful propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Imperials' Ministry of Enlightenment, they can portray the massacre as self-defense.

Mon's Senate speech alludes to this perversion of truth, but her words apply to the real world too. We live in an age many have called "post-truth," where personalized media consumption and hyper-polarization lets and encourages people to believe what they want. The Orwellian phrase "alternative facts" was even introduced less than two days into the first Trump administration back in 2017. The destruction of truth makes it all the more difficult to resist tyranny. Without shared acknowledgement of what's true and what isn't, you cannot have a civil society or democracy. Mon Mothma's speech spells this out so eloquently it could be delivered on the floor of the United States Congress, unedited:

"The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest."

Where euphemisms are a politician's second nature, Mon does not hold her tongue when it comes to condemning the Empire and her colleagues' complicity: "What happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide!"

This line of the speech is particularly stirring. Mon is making a point of calling a genocide what it is. As "Welcome to the Rebellion" aired, U.S. politicians and the media have refused to use that term to refer to the Israeli military actions in Gaza, even as entities ranging from the United Nations to the International Criminal Court to Amnesty International say that's what is happening.

Now, O'Reilly has said to The Guardian that she filmed Mon's speech in about May 2023, so it clearly wasn't written with current events in mind. Yet, Tony Gilroy has said (on "To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes") that he endorses this comparison: "Let it ring in their ears."

 A work of fiction, let alone science-fiction, is the one that's speaking with honesty where others won't. That's the highest praise one can give "Andor," as well as the deepest slight one can make against the world it was created in.

"Andor" is streaming on Disney+.