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| “ | You're in my net, Bix. Are you a fish or are you a thief? | „ |
| ~ Dedra Meero whilst interrogating Bix Caleen. |
| “ | Dedra: A vintage Imperial starpath unit. What do you think? A little damaged, perhaps, but I'd say it's held it's value. I have dreamt... of this. Too many versions to remember. And here you were, all that time. Hiding in the shelter of Imperial peace and quiet. Luthen: And I've known you all along. Hardly seems fair. Dedra: You disgust me. Luthen: Do you want to know why? Dedra: Everything you stand for. Luthen: Freedom scares you. Dedra: Freedom. You don't want freedom. You want chaos. Chaos for everyone but you. Ruin the galaxy and then run back to your ridiculous wig and little workshop. |
„ |
| ~ Dedra finally confronting "Axis" upon discovering he is Luthen Rael. |
Lieutenant Supervisor Dedra Meero is the main antagonist of the 2022 Disney+ Star Wars streaming series Andor.
She is a zealous and ambitious officer of the Imperial Security Bureau, the Galactic Empire's primary law enforcement agency, who serves with the rank of lieutenant and the position of supervisor. She is the archenemy of Luthen Rael also known as Axis.
Five years before the Battle of Yavin, Dedra was among the first of the Imperials to piece together that there is a growing rebellion against the Empire actively underway, leading her to do everything in her power, and even what isn't, to make sure all those responsible were found and eliminated.
She was portrayed by Denise Gough.
Quick Answers
How does Dedra Meero's ambition impact her role in Andor?
What makes Dedra Meero a formidable antagonist in Andor?
How does Dedra Meero's character develop in Andor?
What are Dedra Meero's motivations in the Star Wars series Andor?
How does Dedra Meero's rivalry with Luthen Rael unfold in Andor?
Personality[]
| “ | Andor came back to Ferrix three nights after Aldhani with money in his pocket! | „ |
| ~ Dedra finally accusing Andor, and her villainous breakdown. |
Dedra Meero is a devout believer of the Galactic Empire who sees all of their actions, no matter how heinous, as necessary for the security of the galaxy and is a fierce enforcer of their ideology for law and order. Exceptionally cunning and intelligent, with only a few pieces of the puzzle, Dedra was able to correctly deduce that a series of attacks against the Empire were in fact all coordinated by the same movement, discovering the fledgling rebellion.
Frustrated by her department's lack of drive or will to investigate these events, Dedra has no qualms whatsoever about going against direct orders if she feels they do not hold the best interests of the Empire, and was wholly willing to break whatever rules needed if it means getting the job done, something that irritated and angered her coworkers but at the same time impressed her superiors.
Being so devoted to the Empire, she harbored contempt for the bulk of the galaxy, thinking those who question or resent Imperial rule were weak and ignorant. Even within her own organization, she looked down upon those of lesser rank than her and holds deep disgust towards those who get in her way, because in her eyes, that means they were also in the way of the Empire. Dedra is such a sociopath that she genuinely struggles to smile, seen when she was practicing how to smile for her dinner with Eedy.
Despite her fanaticism and authoritarian ideals, Dedra is not entirely heartless. She is capable of both gratitude and love, as after Syril saved her life and the two would eventually become lovers. She was also fierce in her defense of Syril against his overly critical mother Eedy, and despite her dislike of her, she was willing to both allow and encourage Syril to have a healthy relationship with her so long as the woman did not interfere with their lives in any negative way and demanded she start treating her son better.
She has also, despite everything she has done, not discarded her conscience altogether, as she was both horrified at the genocide she herself orchestrated on Ghorman and later devastated by the death of Syril. Ultimately for her failure to capture and eliminate the rebel movement and missing files, Dedra is falsely accused of being a rebel spy, leading to her being imprisoned and left a broken mess on the prison planet Narkina 5.
Biography[]
Dedra Meero was the ISB Supervisor who was relentlessly hunting Cassian Andor and his connections to the vast insurgency network run by Luthen Rael, the rebel codenamed "Axis".
After being introduced as an Imperial who was clearly desperate to rise through the Empire's ranks, her later years showed how truly cruel she could be. Dedra was the only ISB agent to realize that supposedly unrelated rebel activities were actually part of an organized rebellion. Her persistence earned respect from her superiors and gave her greater authority in the Empire.
Dedra was later recruited by Director Krennic at the Mathleen Divide to oversee the Empire's Ghorman initiative, a mass manipulation and resulting genocide that would allow the Empire to begin brutally mining the planet's resources for the classified Death Star project. However, Dedra never fully gave up on her vendetta to one day capture and bring "Axis" into custody as she was a true facist believer in her quest to bring him in.
Later Dedra met Syril's overbearing mother, Eedy Karn. As part of their awkward dinner conversation, Eedy asked Dedra about her early life and family, to which she replied that she did not have one. Her parents were arrested when she was three years old, so she was taken in by the Galactic Empire and grew up in an Imperial kinderblock. She had been indoctrinated for practically her whole life, which explained much about her stern personality and her unwavering devotion to the Empire.
Over the following two years, Dedra oversaw ISB security operations growing on Ghorman. Meero quietly transferred Syril Karn to Ghorman as director of the Imperial Bureau of Standards Field Office. Meero took numerous precautions to conceal the nature of their relationship from rebel elements. Meero successfully used Karn to feed information to the Ghorman front about classified military shipments through Palmo.
Later the Ghorman Front became both radicalized and desperate from the deteriorating situation, Meero had accomplished her goal of justifying a severely tightened Imperial regime on the planet. She arrived in person in Palmo to oversee the final stages of the covert ISB operation that would result in the Ghorman Massacre.
On command from Major Partagaz in Coruscant, Meero gave the order in her command center overlooking the plaza, an order which led to an Imperial sniper killing one of the riot control officers. However, Karn angrily confronted her for her complicity in the imminent bloodshed and broke up with her then left.
Following the massacre and Karn's death, which occured despite Meero's efforts to locate him in the crowd, she was psychologically shaken and, in the privately of the safe room, pulled at her collar and uniform in a panic.
In the aftermath of the Ghorman Massacre, Dedra inadvertently received classified files regarding the Death Star project Stardust. However, she kept the oversight to herself as the files aided in her quest to track down Axis. Unfortunately for Dedra, Luthen's mole within the ISB stole her access codes that gained the files and shared the intel about the Death Star with Luthen.
When Dedra arrived at his antiquities shop to confront Luthen, things didn’t exactly go the way she had planned. It was there that Dedra unveiled the Imperial N-S9 Starpath Unit that had put her on Luthen’s trail four years earlier. It was her obsession with Axis that brought her to his shop.
However, upon realizing that he was about to be taken into Imperial custody, Luthen decided to attempt taking his own life rather than risk being tortured into revealing details about the Rebellion to the Empire and stabbed himself with a Nautolan blade. When Dedra realized what Luthen had done, she immediately called for assistance.
Once the other ISB agents arrived, though, the very first words out of her mouth had nothing to do with Luthen lying near dead on the floor in front of her. It was her worry that he was destroying evidence referring to his ruined communication center equipment.
Specifically, Dedra began panicking about Luthen dying, not because she cared about his well being as a person whatsoever but because he, too, could have provided or served as evidence and give information about the Rebellion.
Although Dedra had been nothing but loyal to the Empire and had been raised by the Empire itself, Dedra was ultimately accused of helping the Rebels and betraying the Empire, which it landed her in jail. Specifically seeing Orson Krennic jab a finger onto her head when he interrogated her reinforced that she, like most other Imperials, were just a cog in the machine.
Dedra Meero is sent to prison as she leveraged the Death Star files to find leads on apprehending Axis (Luthen), which she shouldn’t have access to in the first place. Although she manages to find Axis, she still gets arrested for working on the case without permission.
Director Orson Krennic later stepped in to interrogate her, and despite insisting that she didn’t know anything about Lonni Jung using her access codes to learn about the files and the information regarding the Death Star, she ultimately was sent to the Narkina 5 prison cell.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Dedra's backstory, as she explained to Eedy Karn, does not fit the established timeline based on the events of the Prequel and Original Trilogies. She claimed to have been raised in an Imperial Kinder-Block after her criminal parents were arrested when she was at the age of 3. However, at the point, she explained this backstory, the Empire had only been in power for roughly 14-15 years, and even if one theorizes that Dedra is in her early 30s at the oldest, she still would have been a teenager at the youngest by the time the Clone Wars ended. It is currently unclear if her backstory were a simple lie she invented on the spot or a simply modified version of the truth (meaning it is possible that she was raised in a Republic Kinder-Block and simply preferred to use the Empire's current name).
