ANDOR Didn’t Show What STAR WARS Could Be, It Showed What It Always Was

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“Everyone has their own rebellion.”

A million words have already been written about Andor and what it means to call it the most grown-up of any Star Wars installment, but for us, this line, spoken by Vel to Cassian in season one’s “The Axe Forgets” is the line that sums up the entire series best. Like the show itself, this line takes a massive galactic rebellion spanning hundreds of worlds and millions of players and brings it down to the personal level, explaining that revolutions happen because when people get pushed too hard, some of them, usually the ones with the least to lose, start pushing back. That’s it. That’s the simple, basic concept that drives the entire show; recasting a behemoth of a space opera as a more familiar story about oppression and the disenfranchised by stripping it of its magic and rooting it in a more recognizable version of the real world than any previous Star Wars installment had ever done.

When Andor premiered on Disney+ in 2022, we didn’t have any reason to be excited about it. A Star Wars prequel series to a Star Wars prequel film, it felt like the usual Disney efforts regarding Star Wars; a strip-mining of every character and concept in the franchise and its extended universe, resulting in low-quality, canon-obsessed fare like Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and The Book of Boba Fett. For a time, The Mandalorian seemed like a fresh new direction for the franchise, but it eventually became just as stuck in the muck of modern Star Wars continuity. The Acolyte showed some promise, but the franchise’s infamously difficult fanbase loathed a show that de-centered white characters and the show over-emphasized the fallibility of the Jedi, a theme that had been beaten into the ground over the years. It seemed like there was nothing new to say in the Star Wars universe and that it would only continue as a content farm, pulling from decades of cartoons and supplemental materials to thrill a never-satisfied fandom’s obsessive need to have their nostalgia centers tickled.

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But show creator Tony Gilroy has done an amazing thing here. By focusing on individuals and their struggles under imperialism, and by pulling references from countless revolutions and uprisings in history, he managed to demonstrate that the Star Wars universe, much like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, is a universe that can tell charmingly whimsical children’s stories or harrowing tales of darkness and destruction. It doesn’t diminish other Star Wars stories to say that Andor is the most adult of any of them because most of them weren’t striving for mature storytelling in the first place. Star Wars is large and contains multitudes. You can have pew-pew battles and Ewoks, and you can have explorations of fascism and power. Put bluntly: Star Wars has space wizards but in the wake of Andor, it now has genocide and rape.

And sure, maybe that sounds like a horrifying idea to you. Star Wars was originally conceived as entertainment for children, after all. But Andor is a series obsessed with the idea of people becoming radicalized under an oppressive system. Andor asks the question that so few Star Wars installments have ever bothered with: What causes a person to become radicalized? What steps and circumstances have to happen along the way to make a person not just want to burn it all down, but actively start burning it all down? When Bix accuses an Imperial soldier of attempted rape, the word lands like a bomb because it wasn’t something ever verbalized in this universe, Sure, Princess Leia got chained up in a metal bikini, but that’s as far as the franchise was ever willing to go in depicting what is, unfortunately, one of the pre-eminent tools used to keep any population in line by fascists. And when it came time to finally depict the Ghorman Massacre, in one of the best episodes ot television you’ll see all year, Andor didn’t shy away from showing the cruelty and violence, the desperation and the loss of hope that comes when an empire exerts control.

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This was what made Andor so great; the way it took the recognizable and used it to explain the actions of people in a fantastical universe.  From casual sexism to luxury hotels, morning talk shows to queer people, techno music to fashion design to the French; Andor made the whimsical into the real in order to show what oppression truly feels like. Because while we were dazzled and delighted by the space French and the wedding dances, the show was slyly slipping in depictions of all the tools of fascism that wears the population down: stultifying bureaucracy, mind-numbing propaganda, endless surveillance, and the constant threat of slavery, work camps, and yes, rape. Andor is the most adult Star Wars story ever told not because someone said “shit” or someone called sexual assault for what it was, but because it treated all of its characters like actual people, with the same fears, prejudices, and frustrations that we recognize in our own lives. At every opportunity, Andor showed the pettiness and cruelty that defines fascists, just as it showed the messiness, paranoia and insanity that defines most rebellions in their nascent stages. Rebels and revolutionaries, the first ones to pick up a brick or punch a cop, by definition, have to be crazy or broken people and Andor didn’t shy away from showing that.

It was helped tremendously by what should be considered one of the most spectacular casts in Star Wars history, including Stellan Skarsgard, Kathryn Hunter, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Diego Luna, Forest Whitaker, Anton Lesser, Fiona Shaw, Genevieve O’Reilly (in what should be a career-making performance for her), and introduced fascinating new characters like Elizabeth Dulau’s Kleya, Denise Hough’s Dedra, Kurt Soller’s Syril or Faye Marsay’s Vel. Across the board, Andor benefited from fantastic performances and it’s to the show’s tremendous credit that it took the time to let these characters breathe a little. Did we absolutely need to watch Syril and Dedra have lunch with his mother? Did we need to sit through so many dull ISB meetings? Did we need to hear the Ghorman national anthem or spend so much time on the wedding of a side character? The answer is an unequivocal yes to all of it. By slowing down the adventure aspects of Star Wars and getting to spend time in the lives of these characters, we can understand all of their motivations and actions all that much better because of it. This isn’t a criticism of A New Hope, which is an entirely different creature, but think of Princess Leia watching her entire planet getting destroyed and having virtually no on-screen reaction to it. Andor took the time to show you these people and why they fight, which makes all of their sacrifices and triumphs all the sweeter to watch.

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On a slightly shallower level, Andor looked absolutely amazing. From the stunning costume design by Michael Wilkinson, who clothed Mon Mothma in some of the most amazing costumes in Star Wars history, to the eye-popping production design. All of the gorgeous brutalist architecture looked amazing and the digital effects were seamless, making every world feel heavy with the weight of realness. The creators of Andor also understood the aesthetic value of the tactile and auditory nature of Star Wars and indulged it at every turn; all of those buttons and switches and toggles, all the ka-chunks and swishes and pews that make up the ASMR of Star Wars. Nevermind Mon Mothma dancing to techno for an hour, the world cries out for an hour of Kleya turning dials and flipping switches.

Having showered it with compliments, we have to note that the decision to compress the planned five seasons down to two through the use of time jumps didn’t always work. While it felt like we were getting a new movie every week, which was fun, the format meant that the story occasionally suffered. From a dramatic standpoint, there were certain scenes and confrontations that were probably needed, like Mon’s adjustment to being a revolutionary after decades of living as an elite, or the reactions of her husband and daughter to her abandonment of them. But the weakest parts of Andor came when it needed to be slotted into pre-existing canon and continuity. The show had mostly been very clever about avoiding this sort of thing, but as the series closed the gap between it and Rogue One, there were a few somewhat clumsy moments, such as the one explaining why Mon needed to be taken to Yavin by characters never seen in this series or the camera lingering on Melshi just a little too long. For the most part, Andor is a series that can be watched without any knowledge of Star Wars canon, except for the last couple of hours.

We were initially a bit torn about Bix’s ending. Her arc was a difficult one that resulted in her diminishment in the story, from a smuggler and spy to a traumatized and worried girlfriend and finally, to motherhood on the sidelines. But first, Andor is not exactly lacking in portrayals of women with conviction, ethics, and bravery. Second, ending on Bix and Cassian’s child safe on Planet Wheat with B2EMO is a message of hope that makes Cassian’s sacrifice in Rogue One all the more poignant and sad. After all, rebellions are built on hope. We’re just praying that no one at Lucasfilm gets the idea to turn that kid into some sort of lore figure. We don’t need Poe Dameron to be Cassian Andor’s kid any more than we needed Rey to be Palpatine’s granddaughter. Andor had a lot to say about a lot of weighty topics and concepts, but at its heart, it was about all of the forgotten and faceless people who made sacrifices no one will ever know about in order to secure freedom for people they would never meet. Using this story to establish another hereditary line of heroism in Star Wars would be a terrible mistake.

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Andor doesn’t diminish other versions of Star Wars, but it does open up the entire universe to more thoughtful storytelling, should any creator want to pick up on it. We know we’re dying to see some of these characters again, especially Kleya and Mon Mothma. But not only does Andor not diminish the rest of Star Wars, it tends to deepen the lore considerably, knowing how hard it was to get that rebellion started. We just know that the next time we watch A New Hope, we’re going to be picturing Kleya and Vel just offscreen in the Yavin scenes, rolling their eyes at those clowns Luke and Han.

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