Imitating Palpatine
In “Announcement” (Andor 1.7), Senator Mon Mothma confides in a friend that her public persona is “a lie. It’s a projection. It’s a front.” She then makes a startling admission about how she learned to hide her true self so effectively: “I’ve learned from Palpatine.” Ironically, an architect of the nascent Rebellion against the Empire is imitating the very Emperor she seeks to overthrow.
Mothma characterizes the strategy she learned from Palpatine as misdirection: “I show the stone in my hand, you miss the knife at your throat. … [A]s long as everyone thinks I’m an irritation, there’s a good chance they’ll miss what I’m really doing.” Like Palpatine when he was a senator, Mothma presents herself as a tireless but innocuous defender of democracy, while in reality working to destabilize the current regime, both from within by playing politics in the Senate and from without by building a coalition of insurgents.
But Mon Mothma is not the only Rebel leader in Andor who resembles Palpatine. In fact, Luthen Rael is the more conspicuous Palpatine copycat. Like Palpatine, Luthen’s public persona is a charming and gregarious dealmaker (only his deals are with customers instead of lawmakers) who wears elegant robes and collects ancient artwork and artifacts. And just as Palpatine adopts the persona of Darth Sidious and dons a hooded black robe whenever he meets with the Sith apprentices and Separatists he is using to attack the Republic, Luthen adopts the persona of “Axis” and dons a hooded black robe whenever he meets with the spies and saboteurs he is using to attack the Empire.
Mon Mothma and Luthen Rael’s imitation of Palpatine in undermining the government through dual personas and duplicity underscores a moral quandary at the heart of Andor: while it may result in good for others, fighting evil on its own terms corrupts the soul. Although Mothma is uncomfortable with Luthen’s more extreme methods and tries to preserve her integrity, in “Rix Road” (Andor 1.12), she lies to her husband and slanders him to divert suspicion from herself, and she makes a deal at the cost of her daughter’s future. In “One Way Out” (Andor 1.10), Luthen confesses, “I wake up every morning to an equation I wrote fifteen years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do… I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.”
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Characters: Luthen Rael / Mon Mothma / Palpatine
Shows: Andor
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Concepts: duality / good and evil / teachers and students / truth and falsehood
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