“I need the endgame!” Luthen Rael declared this to Supervisor Lonni Jung, his insider at the Imperial Security Bureau, back episodes ago—years if we talk about story time. A predator like Meero managing what seemed like a routine mission on Ghorman revealed the Empire’s underlying tactics. Just as Dedra Meero identified Luthen by assembling scattered intelligence, the astute Rebel operative suspected that the Empire’s unexplained galaxy-wide actions were linked to a covert motive he couldn’t yet discern.

Neither Lonni nor Luthen lived much longer after uncovering this clandestine objective. On the eve of their demise—Lonni by Luthen’s hand and Luthen by his own and his adopted daughter and partner Kleya—Lonni dedicated three hours to sifting through Dedra Meero’s records using stolen access codes. It’s apparent that Dedra was operating in a league beyond expectations. As she hunted for Axis, her name for the elusive Luthen, she scavenged for intelligence wherever possible, holding onto misdirected documents rather than reporting them.

During this process, she inadvertently assembled the complete blueprint for the Empire’s ultimate creation, the Death Star. Extracts from Ghorman, kyber crystals sourced from Jedda, assembly on Scarif, with forced labor building components; all using the Emperor’s “Energy Project” as a cover, and the pivotal scientist Galen Erso at the core of the project—a super-weapon that Director Orson Krennic had been developing for ten years.

Now, as Dedra learns during a harrowing interrogation scene in which she’s alternately berated and grilled by the black-gloved Krennic himself, all that information has been stolen by Lonni Jung, who spent three hours logged into her top-secret account the night before. All that information has been passed to Luthen Rael, who killed Lonni afterwards. (War is an ugly business, and Luthen forfeited his right to be thought of as a good person in order to advance a great cause.) Luthen in turn passed it to Kleya, the woman that Axis project head Supervisor Heert (Jacob James Beswick) bullies hospital staff into revealing on security-camera footage.

Unless the Empire catches her, she’ll pass that information along to the wider Rebellion. I don’t have to draw you a picture of what that will look like, because you’ve already seen Star Wars.

The miracle of this penultimate episode of Andor is that despite knowing how everything turns out for just about everyone left on the show — their futures are spelled out in the prequel film Rogue One, their legacies cemented in the original Star Wars film, A New Hope — it’s one of the most suspenseful 30-odd minutes of television I’ve ever seen.

What’s going to happen to Dedra Meero in Imperial custody? During Krennic’s interrogation, her fear, her shame, her embarrassment, her raw terror are written all over her resting sneerface, overlaying it like a palimpsest. One of the few characters left who doesn’t factor into any of the films set after this point, her future is an open question.

Ditto Kleya. Cassian and his Rebel comrades K-2SO and Melshi (Duncan Pow) — the man by Andor’s side when they escaped from prison during last season’s magnificent episode “One Way Out” — receive to a coded distress call on one of Luthen’s frequencies. Jumping to action, they risk everything by going AWOL from the Yavin base to travel to the capital planet of Coruscant to find out what the spymaster wants. But when they arrive, only Kleya is there to greet them. In the safe house that Cassian and Bix once tried to turn into a home — growing more abandoned and decrepit with each visit we’ve paid, a deft and emotionally powerful visual throughline — Kleya reveals to Cassian that Luthen didn’t survive.

As far as she’s concerned, she doesn’t need to survive either. She doesn’t seem to want to survive. Her rationale is that the heroic Rebels on Yavin IV have always regarded Luthen as a disreputable thug; she doesn’t think she’d be welcomed, nor would she want to be by the likes of them. 

What’s important to Kleya is that Luthen’s last message makes it there. Long after Cassian and Bix dipped out of Coruscant for Yavin, long after the center of gravity for the Rebellion shifted to the organized military there, long after Senator Mon Mothma fled the capital after charging the Emperor with genocide, Luthen and Kleya stayed behind for this specific piece of intel, this mystery super-weapon hidden behind every otherwise baffling Imperial atrocity. 

But now, in the final moments, the two veteran Rebel agents are miles apart. Cassian is insistent that he’s not leaving Kleya behind, just to die as a sort of tribute act to her father figure. Kleya is even more insistent that Cassian take her intel seriously, that the information she’s imparting in a series of sentence fragments and proper nouns is the most important information in the galaxy.

And all the while, a tactical force commanded by Heert, with Major Partagaz riding shotgun in the ISB HQ, is on its way. Pointedly, they’re filmed the way deploying American troops or police SWAT teams (who are nothing more or less than soldiers deployed by the American government against its primary enemy, its own people) are filmed. Closeups of uniformed men strapped into jittering seats. Closeups of boots. Closeups of body armor. Closeups of weapons. The full macho force of law enforcement, brought to bear on the problem modern policing was designed to solve: freedom.

Unfortunately for the fascist goons, these hideous pigs who threaten hospitals and treat apartment buildings like enemy fortresses, this is still Star Wars, and every once in a while a gigantic killer droid leaps into action to kill you all. 

So let’s hear it for K-2SO, actor Alan Tudyk’s exceedingly genteel but incredibly deadly reprogrammed Imperial security droid. Once he figures out that communications have been jammed and Imperial soldiers have landed to take his friends down, he does the only thing that makes sense: He starts murdering as many Imperials as he can.

But in the episode-ending cliffhanger, we see the tactical team heading towards the former safe house, guns drawn. K-2SO is nowhere in sight. Kleya and Cassian have no idea the Empire has cracked their code and tracked them down. Will they make it?

Well, yes, they will. Andor, Melshi, and K-2SO are among the stars of Rogue One, the Star Wars prequel to which Andor is a Star Wars prequel. Kleya, Dedra, Partagaz — they’re the open questions. But our eponymous hero and the precious cargo of information he’s protecting will live on. The latter will be passed to Princess Leia Organa, who will get it to Luke Skywalker, who will destroy the Death Star. The prophecy of Cassian Andor, Messenger, will come to pass.

I know all of this. I don’t particularly care. Writer Tom Bissell and director Alonso Ruizpalacious have crafted something so deeply rooted in so much fertile soil that it’s hard to exaggerate the many ways in this episode succeeds. Do you want The Americans/Better Call Saul—style spycraft? You got it. Do you want powerful human interaction between characters you’ve been dying to see together for ages? You got it. Do you want meticulously edited suspense sequences involving cops with guns drawn moving through a dystopian apartment block like it’s Dredd? You got it. Do you want to believe that with human ingenuity and devotion, the fascists can be overthrown?

Do you?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.