Nothing in Dedra’s actions indicate that she was the traitor. If she was a double agent, why did she burn Luthen, and then screw up his arrest? It benefits absolutely no-one.
Besides, if Krennic though she was the traitor, why was capturing Kleya so urgent for him? Dedra could have told the Rebels about the Death Star at any time; it’s not like she just found out about it.
You have to figure that the Death Star had some pretty serious security attached to it. Had the Rebels known about it for a year or so, he’d have expected to catch at least a few spies trying to get into the DS project. He knows he hasn’t caught any such spies, so he’s hoping that means the Rebels aren’t aware of the DS project, and he still has a chance at keeping it secret.
She spent years collecting highly classified information she was not supposed to have by means she was not supposed to use. She VERY much looks like a rebel spy from the empires POV.
Also it’s an Empire. It doesn’t matter one wit what she did or didn’t do. They want her in prison that’s where she goes.
But if they actually thought she was a spy they would have tortured her to death for information instead of dropping her into a nameless cell.
Yeah, I don’t think they actually thought she was spy for the rebels, but she WAS doing illegal shit that lead directly to the rebels getting the most highly classified info in the empire. She’s not in prison because “evil empire doing evil empire shit”, they have legit reasons to put her there.
No he suspected Lonni.
Krennic:
You and your fringey friend Supervisor Jung spent three hours last night logged into your account. Now shall we take a guess at what he might have told Luthen Rael?
I also love the little detail of Lonni saying he had a two hour window but Krennic noting he was in there for three hours. That may be how he was found out.
What I love about this is that it echoes things I have seen in a work environment. Who was working on that project again? Are they still working on it? I don’t have time to figure it out, I’ll just send it to them and they can forward it if they need to. I’m pretty sure that’s why Dedra was still getting updates on the Axis file.
I don’t think it was about who would fold and who wouldn’t or Lonni being untrustworthy. I think it was simply that Luthen did the calculus and determined that (1) the odds of getting off planet for any of them weren’t great and (2) any one of them, Luthen* included, likely would have folded under sustained interrogation, but (3) Lonni couldn’t be trusted to take his own life before it came to that.
Lonni gave good service to the rebellion. As good as any of them. He deserved to be remembered as a hero, but, you know, deserves got nothing to do with it. Luthen understood that.
*As evidenced by the fact he tried to take his own life rather than be interrogated, and Kleya finished the job for him when it came to that.
Lonni also just couldn’t be trusted in general. If he can betray the Empire, he can just as easily betray the Rebellion. Double agents have been known to change their minds when things get too tough.
100% disagree. Lonni was a hero. And in any event, they didn’t need to give him a position of influence or insight into the the rebellion. They could have just sent him somewhere safe, which is all he wanted. Also recall that Luthen himself was a “traitor” to the empire. And so was the ex-stormtrooper in season 1 (the one who taught them how to march and carry themselves as imperial footsoldiers).
Lonni was a man who spent years doing some of the most horrible work imaginable, probably having to carry out or at least bring about atrocities against the very people he was fighting to liberate, and then at the end of it, when he gets the critical intelligence that will allow the rebellion to literally save the galaxy, he understandably has had enough and wants to finally be out of there.
Instead, he is shot dead by his handler. Not because he can’t be trusted or because he deserves it, but because he hasn’t yet grasped, as Luthen has (and eventually Andor, too) that they were all dead the moment they set down this path. So Luthen has to do for Lonni what Lonni cannot do for himself.
It really is a terrible tragedy, and that damn flyboy Luke gets all the glory. Honestly, it makes me kind of *angry to think that Luke and Han get all the glory at the end of ANH. Forget about Chewie: where’s Lonni’s medal? (and Andor’s, and Luthen’s, and all the rest).
*Yes, yes, I know. It’s all just a TV show / movie.
You know, we don’t actually see the whole ceremony, do we?
It is pretty remarkable that they took time for a ceremony at all given that a pissed-off Emperor was probably sending a thousand Star Destroyers hurling in their direction.
It’s not the movie’s strongest point now. It doesn’t really make any sense, if you think about it, that the Death Star arrived at Yavin without a bunch of destroyers. But hey, in 1977 all this content wasn’t planned. (Indeed, if you think about it, the Rebel habit of putting all their eggs in one basket makes no sense to begin with.)
Most Star Wars stuff ranges from mediocre to awful - the prequels are ghastly, the sequals are bad, most of the TV shows are amazingly bad. Andor was sensationally good, absolutely on par with Star Wars itself and the absurd genius that The Empire Strikes Back was. It’s right there with those masterworks, with The Mandalorian’s first two seasons a hair behind.
I was never as huge a fan of Rogue One as others were but it’s ahead of most Star Wars content. Now I actually bump it up a little because Andor gives it some cool context, and makes Cassian Andor himself more interesting, and a sad and poignant figure. In Rogue One he’s the shooty commando guy. Now we know he was a man with, honesty, a sad life, who turned it into something noble and worthwhile, and even then in the end he died never having met his child. It makes Andor a stand in for a million people who have given their lives for a true cause and whose names we don’t recall. Here was a man who, again and again, put his life on the line to do the right thing, and he gave up his chance at a real life. It’s thematically perfect.
Andor is better than Rogue One because Rogue One had too much fanservice and pointless pew-pew to be super great. And IMHO it’s because Andor wasn’t a movie. Stringing the story out over 24 episodes meant they had to deal with CHARACTER, and they nailed it.
That’s rich to that Lonni couldn’t be trusted when Luthen constantly lied and manipulated him while Lonni risked his and his family’s lives. At his most charitable, Luthen killed him to save him the torture, attempt to keep his name clean and possibly keep his family safe. Or he was just tying a lose end. Who knows?
Luthen was very clear on his motives: the Cause was everything. Luthen and Saw were the same in that regard. Their methods were very different, but they didn’t have moral qualms about anything in their pursuits.
Frankly, I think the medal ceremony makes even more sense now. In less than a month the rebellion lost:
Luthen
Saw
Andor
Admiral Raddus
Rogue One Squad
Everyone on Alderan
It’s probably nice to have a ceremony to celebrate actual survivors.
Yeah, Luthen didn’t kill Lonni to prevent pain and suffering to Lonni and his family. That may have been an effect, but the goal was preventing the Empire from learning capturing him and learning more. If Luthen could have teleported Lonni to Yavin and saved him with 0% chance of anything going wrong, he’d have done that too, it’s just that the wellbeing of Lonni was inconsequential to protecting the cause.
In espionage, compartmentalization is the name of the game. I do wonder if Lonni knew much of anything. He did have year and years of contact and work that the Empire needed to interrogate him over so best to be safe I guess.
Well, actually… 
If you look at the whole history of the Star Wars universe, mostly as seen through video games, they have a history of having load bearing bosses, so they know that, if they can kill the Emperor, the whole Empire will collapse, so it makes sense to gather all their forces in one place, for one big battle to determine the fate of the galaxy.