What happened in the Ghorman Massacre? Major Andor Season 2 event explained in depth

Andor Season 2, episode 8, "Who Are You?" was one of the darkest moments of the Disney-era Star Wars franchise. It featured the moment that this season of Andor was building towards, the heartbreaking massacre of the Ghorman people. Last week's episodes revealed that the Empire had already committed one atrocity against the Ghorman people when Grand Moff Tarkin landed his ship on some Ghors protesting the Empire's unfair policies.

But this time, the Empire pushed things way too far as it massacred scores of Ghor people and will continue the said genocide until it mines the entire Ghorman planet for Kalkite, and destroys it. Kalkite was introduced right in the first episode of Andor Season 2 when Ben Mendelsohn's Orson Krennic presided over a secret meeting and said:

“No notes, no records, none of you were here, nobody puts this in their calendar. You’re colleagues, superiors, if they’re not in this room, they’re not cleared for the project. The group in this room is the tightest of closed circles.”

---

What is the Empire's purpose behind villainizing Ghorman in Andor Season 2?

In this scene from the season 2 premiere, Krennic informs the imperial officers about a mineral named Kalkite under the Ghorman planet's surface. Krennic tells these officials that the Empire needs the Kalkite for Palpatine's "energy project." But we know that it's a lie because Palpatine wants the Kalkite to power the Death Star. This highlights that even those who worked for the Empire were kept in the dark.

The Empire's attack on the Ghorman people was nothing but a sign of the things to come for the planets across the Star Wars in the form of the Death Star. Tony Gilroy spoke about the dark parallels between the meeting scene from the Andor Season 2 and a N*zi meeting called the Wannsee Convention in The Hollywood Reporter interview after the first three episodes were released:

“The very first scene that Krennic has where he talks about Ghorman, that’s based on the Wannsee convention — the N*zi convention where the N*zis got together and planned the final solution over a business lunch.”

---

What was the impact of Andor Season 2's Ghorman Massacre?

The Ghorman Massacre played a massive role in propelling Mon Mothma's character arc towards her place in the sequel trilogy. It is in the ninth episode of this season that Mon officially joins the rebel forces after defecting from the Imperial Senate. Andor Season 2 showrunner Tony Gilroy teased this moment in a March 2025 interview:

"Canonically, there's the moment where she leaves the Senate, and that's in our timeline. So we're definitely dealing with that, but I would say, of all the characters in the show, of all the hellacious things that people go through, and all of the difficulties and hardships, I don't think anybody has a harder road than she does. Because she has to do everything that everybody else does with all the tension, fear, and anxiety and she has to do it in public."

Gilroy went on to say:

"She has nowhere to hide, and this season just ramps that up to an almost unbearable point. What Genevieve is going to do in this second season — we realized in the first season what a brilliant actress she was and that we hadn't found the limits of what she could do. We still haven't found them. But he opportunity to write for her and write her story large was very important to me in the second season."

Needless to say, the ninth episode of Andor Season 2 delivered on whatever Gilroy said in that interview. Mon Mothma decided to publicly join the rebels in this episode. She escapes the Imperial Senate building after giving this speech critical of Palpatine:

"Fellow senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart," she says. "I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. 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 speech continued:

"The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil," she continues. "When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped form our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman plaza. What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide. And that truth has been exiled from this chamber. And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine."

However, some fans noted that this speech differs from the one we see Mon Mothma deliver in Star Wars: Rebels Season 3 episode 18 "Secret Cargo". In that episode, she gives a speech from inside a Gold Squadron ship broadcast across the galaxy. Her speech went like this:

"I name the Emperor, himself, for ordering the brutal attacks on the people of Ghorman. Their peaceful world is one of countless systems helpless against his oppressive rule. This massacre is proof that our self-appointed Emperor, is little more than a lying executioner, imposing his tyranny under the pretense of security. We cannot allow this evil to stand."

---

Andor Season 2 showrunner Tony Gilroy reveals the reason behind this change

Showrunner Tony Gilroy sat down for an interview with Entertainment Weekly after the release of episodes 7,8, and 9. Acknowledging the change, Gilroy revealed that he and Andor Season 2 writer Dan Gilroy felt restricted by the Rebels' speech. Tony Gilroy's exact words were:

"We are hijacking canon. In canon, she's rescued by the Gold Squadron and the speech that they gave in the cartoon, which was a canonical show, [is on that ship]. And Danny's like, 'Do I have to stick to this f**ing speech?'"

Turns out the makers found a way to add a layer to the established canon by having Cassian Andor help Mon Mothma escape the Imperial forces in the Senate Building, take her to a safe house where she would remain until the Gold Squadron ship arrives there to take her, from where she would deliver her Rebels speech. Here's how Gilroy explained the Andor Season 2 change:

"In a really sneaky way, we're minimizing what they did in Star Wars Rebels, but we're keeping it consistent. We're just saying you don't really know the whole story of what happened."

---

final three episodes of Andor Season 2 will drop next Tuesday. Are you excited? Sound off in the comments section below.