Andor Just Introduced Space Morse Code
How else are you supposed to send secret messages?
Star Wars is so relatable, it’s often jarring to remember it happens a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. That’s why nobody blinks when someone is running through a scene in the original trilogy carrying an ice cream maker or when a Rubik’s cube shows up on the Onyx Cinder in Skeleton Crew.
But because this is Star Wars, these “Earth-like” elements are usually given some sort of Star Wars twist. Qui-Gon makes a wager with Watto not with dice, but with “chance cubes.” Lando doesn’t play poker, he plays Sabacc. Max Rebo and his band play not jazz, but “jizz.” In Andor Season 2 Episode 11, we get yet another Star Wars equivalent of a common Earth concept, and it has a strange tie to The Mandalorian.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Andor Season 2 Episodes 10-12.
Kleya has always been Luthen Rael’s head of communications, running a secret radio station within the antiques shop.
In Episode 11 of Andor Season 2, Kleya is in hiding after being discovered by the ISB. Completely cornered, she only has one option to communicate with the Rebel forces on Yavin. But she can’t risk speaking over the airwaves, so she is forced to communicate with a two-button code. For the average viewer, it’s very clearly Morse code. However, when I tried to decode it myself, it only came up as “UATS” repeated over and over, so clearly this is something else.
But of course, this isn’t Morse code — Samuel Morse doesn’t exist in Star Wars canon. It’s probably a code called Dadita, which appeared in Karen Traviss’ Republic Commando novel Order 66, published in 2008. But that novel is now considered part of the non-canon Legends timeline, so it may be something else entirely.
Dadita was an obscure way to communicate using a combination of dots and dashes, developed by the ancient Mandalorians as a way to communicate in secret. It was so obscure, in fact, that not many people even knew it existed. Perhaps as Luthen and Kleya were developing the secret radio transmissions they ran out of the antique shop, they stumbled across this code and distributed it for use in emergencies just like this one.
The loss of Luthen makes Kleya a major target for the ISB.
It works, of course — Cassian manages to get the distress call and come to Kleya’s aid, but there’s not much said about this code and its origins. But if this is, in fact, Dadita, then it means the Rebellion has had ties to ancient Mandalorians this entire time, about a decade before The Mandalorian takes place on the timeline.
Maybe this is just the beginning of Dadita’s appearance in Star Wars, and we’ll see Din Djarin use it to communicate in the future. He’s already canonically a fan of non-verbal communication, as he’s fluent in the sign language of the Tusken raiders. Perhaps we’ll see Grogu and Din Djarin communicate through taps or beeps in The Mandalorian and Grogu, in the language of his people.
