Late to Andor: Why Dedra Meero’s fate HURTS as a professional and as a woman

 

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Late to Andor: Why Dedra Meero’s fate HURTS as a professional and as a woman

by Jen Davies, nerd

Dec 17, 2025

Note: This essay is full of spoilers. Don't read if you haven't watched all of Andor.

My spouse and I were late getting to Andor, and he made me eke it out over weeks rather than letting me binge it. “It's how we're meant to watch a TV series,” he argued. Yes, and it always made me crazy to have to wait for next episodes. Things would live rent-free in my head for days, or longer after a season-ending cliffhanger. I can still call up the hollow feeling that followed the ST:TNG line, “I am Locutus of Borg.” Months of anxiety until the new season began to air!

We finished Andor mid-November, and at the end of the last episode (last chance to avoid spoilers) I wept for Dedra Meero and her fate. And it felt worse because I had gloated about the operation on Ferrix going sideways on her (though I liked her enough that I was glad to see Syril show up to play policeman one more time to rescue her), and gloated again at her inability to stomach the Ghorman violence that she has created. “Not cut out for fieldwork, eh Dedra?” I sneered at her as she retched. It wasn't fair of me, we knew she hadn't wanted to be there, but she also could not refuse to be herself: a strategic analyst with a keen sense for how to manipulate people and situations. So she didn't say no to the work.

In great part I wept because of the exceptional performance by Denise Gough. I had been admiring the nuances of her approach to the role throughout the show: subtle expressions and minor shifts to show what was happening beneath the necessarily-cool surface. Dedra’s take-down of (poor, simple) Syril’s obnoxious mother (also a brilliant performance) was incredible in its execution. I couldn't help but like Dedra, and in spite of hating her work I admired the tenacity and competence (til the end) with which she pursued it.

Good writing helped, but Denise was also able to broadcast the obsession as it took over more and more of Dedra’s existence, leading to the (probable) mistake Dedra made (or trap she fell into) in trying to arrest Luthen without appropriate resources onsite. I understand why Dedra did it: Luthen had been “winning” at the information game for so long, and because she was obsessed with him she needed him, and her boss, and her coworkers to know it was HER who caught the spider at the centre of the web of the rebellion. That was where the competence cracked, and as a counsellor I think it's instructive to take a look at the “breakage” and ponder why someone who was otherwise so capable could screw up so badly just as she achieved a major goal.

Her fate hurts me as a professional

Dedra makes mistakes, some of which I would argue are the result of too strong a focus on goals. She was blinded by a myopic focus on finding Axis (Luthen) to the exclusion of other threats. I can understand that intense goal-focus - organizations IRL are often very good at rewarding the achievement of goals with recognition or bonuses or perks. Setting and accomplishing goals is also rewarding itself for those of us who just like to cross things off our to-do lists!

It's a short distance between the death of Syril Karn and the end of the show, but we see Dedra become even more obsessed with Axis (Luthen), and begin taking even greater risks by bringing Syril to Ghorman to spy for her (and unwittingly help Krennic’s project move forward). In that short span we can presume that she is grieving for Syril in her own way. It's rare to find a professional who has not had their work affected negatively in some way or another by an outside-of-work life event. One of the hardest life events to handle is the death of a loved one, and I have some experience - so I empathize very much with Dedra. I can understand how she would make mistakes that she would not usually have made, because she was not thinking clearly in her planning, and because she had different emotional needs than she usually would. She wasn't herself at the end. How lucky are the rest of us, not to make life-ending mistakes, or career-ending mistakes, as a result of being impacted by grief. 

Her fate hurts me as a woman

As a professional in my own field I resonate with the need to be seen by others in my field as competent, and to set and achieve goals that I and others see as worthy. I admire Dedra’s focus and effort. Women often have to work that much harder to earn a reputation for competence for worthiness due to old-fashioned attitudes that persist in a lot of workplaces. Notice she was the only woman in that ISB board room, or at least the only one who was doing anything of note? The Empire’s administration seems to have a gender bias too. So it hurts me as another woman that she had to work so much harder to earn a place at the top information table, only to mess it up because she still felt like she had to prove her worth to everyone (by going to get Luthen with too small a team), and ensure nobody else laid a claim to her results. It's a maddening experience to have other people take credit for your work, and research shows that women more frequently than men have their ideas “borrowed”. It's natural to want credit for your work.** So I understand why she did what she did, even though it turned out to be a career-ending error.

Blinding ourselves to what we don't want to see leads to a close encounter with it

At the same time, it's worthwhile looking at how Dedra was also blinded by her own beliefs. Clearly something terrible and “dis-ordered” had happened to her or was part of her upbringing, because she was willing to go to extreme lengths to protect the “law and order” promised by the Empire - and overlook hints that there was an ugly side to it all, like the prison/manufacturing pipeline. It was order, except it did not follow the law (offenders were not released when their time was finished). 

Dedra was so sure that she was one of the “good guys,” working to keep chaos at bay on behalf of the Empire, that she could not react appropriately when she had evidence that actually the Empire was doing some awful things. The Krennic data package that she accidentally received (not sure it was an accident, but let's say it was) should have twigged concern about other programs that were not above board. All that work she had done on Ghorman was not for energy generation, but to build a planet-killing weapon? Yikes! That's not law and order anymore - just order, like the prison system we find her abandoned to spend the rest of her life, probably without trial, in at the end. But she was so focused on Axis, and so unable to take note or action of anything else that she just kept going, and ran headlong into her own personal disaster.

And so I wept for Dedra, as she wept for herself.

Resources

**Women’s ideas get “borrowed” (ie, stolen)

https://www.fastcompany.com/91334740/how-to-prevent-theftosterone-men-stealing-womens-ideas-at-work

https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2012/12/03/womens-ideas-do-men-intentionally-steal-them/