This Andor scene will get my vote as one among 2025’s greatest TV moments

We’re not even midway by 2025 but, however I really feel fairly assured that I’ve already watched what is going to probably stay my favourite streaming TV second of the yr.

It got here in the course of the just-ended second season of Andor, the Star Wars live-action prequel to 2016’s Rogue One — and the scene that left me reeling probably the most didn’t come throughout a climactic battle sequence, nor a turning level within the Riot or another form of pivotal twist. It unfolds, as a substitute, in the course of the preparation for one of many many paramilitary missions led by the battle-hardened warlord Noticed Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who’s about to bomb an Imperial pipeline.

On this explicit scene, which comes on the finish of the fifth episode of Andor’s sophomore season, Whitaker’s Gerrera is coaxing the soft-spoken younger insurgent mechanic Wilmon Paak to breath Ryhdonium, the potent fuel that Gerrera is hooked on huffing. At first, it seems like extra of the identical from the unhinged fighter — a grizzled radical whose risky mixture of zealotry and paranoia makes him too excessive for the Alliance however to dedicated to the trigger to give up. Gerrera will get excessive on spaceship fumes; in fact he would.

Solely, there’s truly a robust metaphor wrapped up in it that makes this scene with Paak so unforgettable.

Gerrera isn’t simply huffing fuel; he romanticizes it, as a result of it’s fused to his identification as a foot soldier within the Riot. He wants the stuff, the identical means the Riot wants troopers prepared to present their lives for it.

He reminisces about rising up in a camp the place kids harvested the fuel till their garments melted off and their pores and skin blistered from radiation leaks. “How will you do this?” Paak asks, after Gerrera takes a deep, nearly reverent breath of the fuel. It appears to present him a lot pleasure as to resemble a form of out-of-body euphoria. And he desires Paak to return alongside for a similar experience. “As a result of I perceive it,” Gerrera solutions. “As a result of she’s my sister, rhydo, and he or she loves me. That itch, that burn. You are feeling how badly she desires to blow up?

He continues: “Keep in mind this. Keep in mind this second! This excellent night time. You assume I’m loopy? Sure, I’m. Revolution shouldn’t be for the sane. Take a look at us: Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder. We’ll all be lifeless earlier than the Republic is again and but… right here we’re. The place are you, boy? You’re right here! You’re not with Luthen, you’re right here! You’re proper right here, and also you’re able to combat!”

Paak removes his masks, letting the fuel fill his lungs. He gasps. His face contorts in shock.

“We’re the rhydo, child. We’re the gas. We’re the factor that explodes when there’s an excessive amount of friction within the air. Let it in, boy! That’s freedom calling! Let it in. Let it ruuuun! Let it run wiiiild!”

The scene is poetic, tragic, and pure Andor — a present that strips riot of its romance and divulges its equipment that runs on the gas of sacrifice. On this scene, the firebrand warlord and the quiet mechanic don’t simply put together to mild a fuse; they perceive that they are the fuse. And in that shared recognition — one born of trauma, the opposite of awakening — it produces a scene as highly effective because the fuel they breathe, charged with insanity, readability, and the aching inevitability of what comes subsequent.