Warning: SPOILERS for this week’s Andor episodes are ahead!
After starting out as a Star Wars: The Clone Wars guest character, Saw Gerrera rose to prominence when Forest Whittaker played him in Rogue One. In addition to the character standing out from official members of the Rebellion with his extremist views and tactics, Whitaker’s Saw was also visually distinctive with the pressurized suit he was forced to wear and the oxygen mask he frequently needed to breathe from. Three new episodes of Andor Season 2 have been released onto the 2025 TV schedule, and the first two seem to have finally revealed how Saw’s lungs were damaged, and it makes me feel even more sympathy for him.
One of the stories covered in Season 2’s fourth and fifth episodes follows Wilmon Paak, Cassian Andor and Bix Caleen’s friend from Ferrix, as he was embedded with Saw Gerrera’s Partisans. Wil was there to teach Pluti, one of Saw’s men, how to use a machine that can safely mine rhydonium, a fuel source that can easily burn someone from the outside, as well as the inside, provided enough of it is breathed in. Using the machine requires one to memorize eight variations, and Saw refused to let Wil go back to his regular Rebel cohorts until Pluti had no problem handling this task on his own.
But in a surprising turn of events, Saw killed Pluti after Wil taught him all the variations for the machine, as he was spying for the Empire and was going to lead them into a trap. So Wil was instead forced to go on the rhydonium run to work the machine on an unnamed planet. While he was wearing a breathing mask during the process, Saw was just talking nearby, mouth uncovered, about how he developed his strange taste and obsession for “rhydo.”
When he was younger, Saw Gerrera was enslaved in a work camp in a “hot, wet, blistering jungle” on his homeworld of Onderon. It was so hot that a person’s clothes would burn off if they stayed out in the sun too long, and when old men died where they stood, the next day, there’d be nothing left of them but “a bone or two.” But then one day, everyone started to itch, and all but Saw ran away from the camp. This itching came from a rhydonium leak, but She embraced his exposure to this substance, calling it his “sister.”
That’s where it got especially sad with Saw. The rhydonium clearly messed with his mind and is slowly burning away the inside of his body, to the point that he’ll no longer be able to breathe without assistance by the time Rogue One happens. When combined with all the loss he’s dealt with over his life, including the death of his actual sister, Steela, and how he’s willing to carry out horrible deeds in order to hurt the Empire, there’s an argument to be made for him being one of the most tragic characters in the Star Wars mythology.
But Saw has fully embraced the rhydonium’s effect on him, admitting to Wilmon that he is indeed “crazy” and that “revolution is not for the sane.” His stirring words were persuasive enough for Wil to take off his breathing mask and breathe in the rhydonium too, with Saw exclaiming, “Let it in, boy! That’s freedom calling!” I can only hope we don’t see Wil become as addicted to this stuff as Saw did in upcoming Star Wars movies and TV shows, as I don’t want to see him suffer the same kind of physical and mental deterioration Forest Whitaker’s character has.
We’re now halfway through Andor Season 2, with the show reaching its conclusion on May 13. Since I only covered a small portion of what unfolded in these latest three episodes, make sure you head to Disney+ to learn what happened to Cassian Andor, Mon Mothma and the other starring characters this week.
