Andor season 2 has taken up residence in my head in a way that few TV shows do and none have since Sense8. This post is an attempt to articulate some of the reasons why I like it, given that it is, from a certain point of view, just Star Wars.
This post is spoiler-free.
I’ve been watching Star Wars since I first saw it in East Kilbride cinema on UK release in 1978. Over the past half century I have followed the films and TV series, including the animated series, and dipped into the novels. Much as I have, for the most part, enjoyed the recent TV shows as casual viewing, they don’t do anything new with the base material; I’ve seen them described as dramatised fan fiction and that has a ring of truth. A major problem raised by Andor is that it implicitly highlights issues with those other Star Wars shows (and films) and the two principal issues it spotlights are their circumscribed writing and constrained imagination.
The thing is, the other shows and films all focus one way or another on the fantasy/sword and sorcery elements of the Force, the Jedi and the Sith. Andor dispenses with those elements almost completely, although it does touch on the Force, recognising that the Force is diagnostic of Star Wars.
Andor also presents the brutality of the Empire in ways rarely seen since we saw the smouldering skeletons of Lars and Beru in Star Wars (1977). The cruelty is much more tangible than pantomime villains such as Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine. The rebellion here is not about abstract struggles between the light and dark sides of the Force, it arises from Imperial oppression.
Star Wars has been political since its inception; it is other things as well, but there is a political core. The genius of Lucas was to wrap so many contemporary elements and resonances in a fairy-tale package, though, over time, the fairy-tale wrapping has been mistaken for the packaged goods. The way the stories have developed over the past half century has often obscured the metaphorical payload or treated the struggle against the Empire as simply part of the mise-en-scene and/or simplified it into Robin Hood terms (Robin good, Sheriff of Nottingham bad.) Andor takes the politics seriously and is written by a very talented writer who knows his history. Tony Gilroy rips away the fancy wrapping and exposes what’s in the box.
(Some readers might object that aspects of this have been explored in the Expanded Universe of books and comics, and no doubt that is correct. However, I have only dipped into the books and, I have to say, haven’t really enjoyed most of those I’ve read, so can’t really comment on that.)
The premise of Andor is simple: what happened to create the rebellion that Luke Skywalker parachutes into? Who were the rebels? What did they rebel against? What shaped them as people? This premise is extended also to two of the principal antagonists, Syril Karn and Dedra Meero, who are also two of the most compelling characters in the show.
At the core is the titular protagonist Cassian Andor who features in Rogue One. We follow his journey from small-time thief looking for his sister to the hardened revolutionary of Rogue One, but he is only one player in a larger movement. We also see the radicalisation of Senator Mon Mothma, the role of social and political elites, and multiple squabbling factions who may or may not be the People’s Popular Front of Judea. We get cynical manoeuvring by Imperial security forces and revolutionary masterminds alike. None of the main characters are cyphers, most are morally complex. Storylines echo and mirror each other as they intertwine: we condemn the actions and attitudes of Imperial characters without necessarily noticing that the radicals are doing and thinking exactly the same things. There are no gratuitous redemption arcs; bad things happen to good people. All is brought to life by actors and actresses allowed to be at the very top of their game.
The result is that episodes 2.07, 2.08 and 2.09, which deal with the build up to the Ghorman Massacre, the massacre itself and its immediate aftermath have been hailed as three of the best executed episodes in recent TV, not simply in the Star Wars universe. The final three episodes, 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12, are perfect.
Andor implicitly questions the focus on militarised mysticism of the rest of Star Wars. It isn’t that other aspects of that universe have not previously featured, more that Andor shifts the core paradigm away from fights between samurai in space to the lives of everyone else in that universe.
Andor forces us to conclude that exploring the Star Wars galaxy solely through the Jedi and Sith is like exploring the course of World War 2 solely through internal doctrinal arguments in the Vatican and factional infighting in the Swiss Guard.
That isn’t to say that the Force is something to be ignored, just that there are other ways to explore and engage with it, much as the machinations of the Culture are only suggested fleetingly at the close of Iain M Banks’s Inversions.
Andor has often been described as Star Wars for grown-ups, but there’s more to it than that: to date, in broad terms, Star Wars as a ‘franchise’ (I dislike that term) has devolved into space opera and fantasy; Andor returns it to science fiction by engaging with the central metaphors of the original, as did The Last Jedi.
From the moment the Star Wars universe began to expand with the release of The Empire Strikes Back and the early novelisations, it has been a very flexible palette with scope for many different stories and tonalities. I do not think that from now on every new release should be a gritty political drama, but I do think that we can hope that everything now should be seen creatively as before and after Andor: Andor has raised the bar of what we should hope, and rebellions are built on hope.
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