How 'Andor' Redefined 'Star Wars'

This article contains spoilers for the first season of Andor.

After Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrived in 2019, I was feeling pretty low about the future of the franchise. The past several years only further that sentiment as it looked like Star Wars wasn’t interested in telling stories as much as it was about furthering recognition of other Star Wars things. If you’ve watched every Star Wars show and read every Star Wars book and played every Star Wars game, then it’s probably a thrill to see lore references littering The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-wan Kenobi. But nothing here really questions the world of Star Wars or offers anything concrete beyond broad ideas like “The Mandalorian learns to love the most adorable creature in the galaxy,” and “Boba Fett takes rejuvenating baths.”

We’re also in a time when studios are not only retreating into IP, but also into prequels. Prequels give the illusion of moving a story forward, but present the security of knowing you can’t really rock the boat in any massive way. Rings of Power and House of the Dragon were both fine for what they were, but their massive budgets belie the safety of their stories, which essentially function as long prologues to a coming war. House of the Dragon feels a bit more propulsive because of its time jumps, but both shows rest on relative comfort. House of the Dragon gives you the brutality and politicking of Game of Thrones, and Rings of Power is leading to the creation of The One Ring and the reveal of Sauron. At their core, these shows don’t want to upset their audience but rather bring them the comfort of familiarity and recognition.

At first blush, it seemed like the new Star Wars series, Andor, would follow such a pattern. The series, which just finished its 12-episode first season and will have a 12-episode second season, leads up to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In that film, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is a Rebel operative on the team to steal the plans for the Death Star and transmit them to the Rebel Alliance. Spoiler for Rogue One: everyone dies. They succeed into sending the plans, but the Empire destroys the base and the surrounding area.

Instead of showing us what we know and where we’ve been on a trip to a known destination, showrunner Tony Gilroy told a story that is as thoughtful and exhilarating as Star Wars has done since The Last Jedi, and it’s because both Andor and Rian Johnson’s 2017 share the same strength.

Rebels and Imperials

Star Wars is a fascinating property. The original 1977 film is lightning in a bottle, an idea for a children’s movie that creator and director George Lucas couldn’t fathom as the cultural powerhouse it would become. That’s why as lived-in as the world feels, it also exists in broad strokes of the Hero’s Journey set amidst intergalactic civil war crossing paths with magical warrior monks. The Original Trilogy doesn’t need to go into the details of the Empire because they’re clearly coded as fascist and it’s simply enough to define them as “the bad guys.”

Gilroy, the Oscar-nominated writer and director of Michael Clayton and the co-writer of Rogue One (as well as the uncredited director of its reshoots), chooses to play to the grim reality of Imperial life in the lead-up to Star Wars: A New Hope. Rogue One already distinguishes itself as a Star Wars story without Jedi (and the Vader stuff feels like something that was added in reshoots); Andor carries that forward by focusing not only primarily on humans (there are very few droids or alien races), but also trying to answer why people would join the Rebellion or the Empire.

Choosing to play to the human stakes, Andor asks how people live under the Empire. While A New Hope quickly sorts everyone into good guys and bad guys, Andor’s first season is a tour of the Empire through the eyes of its main character as he goes from a ne’er-do-well to someone committed to fighting the Empire. On its surface, that seems like a tough question: why wouldn’t you fight the Empire? But in this world, we see that a lot of people are going along to get along. They don’t love the Empire, but they think they can live in peace if they stay out its way. But as Andor learns at one point, that’s not good enough. While trying to lay low in relative comfort, he’s swept up as a person-of-interest in a random crime, quickly sentenced to six years in prison, and his shouts of, “I’m just a tourist!” fall on deaf ears.

There are also those who genuinely love the Empire. One of the more genius additions to the story is Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), who starts out as a deputy security guard for an Imperial-related company and desperately craves the order and rules the Empire provides. Within the ISB (Imperial Service Bureau), we can see a nest of high-cheekboned vipers fighting for position. Andor consistently returns to cruel bureaucracies; it’s not interested in the capital-E Evil of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. It wants to show why this new galactic order appeals to people, how corruption easily infests it ranks, and the casual brutality it inflicts in order to stay on top.

On the flip side, the Rebellion is not some easily identifiable group where you hop a ship to Yavin IV and get your own X-Wing (looking at you, Luke Skywalker). It’s splintered, beset with internecine squabbles, and the moral costs of sacrificing a few to further the larger goals of the group. The mental costs are best represented by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a Galactic Senator who must live in public while working to fund the nascent rebellion, and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), a mastermind of the rebellion who poses as an antiquities dealer. As opposed to a group of guys in black vests and funny helmets, the Rebellion is a complicated idea that can’t conscript anyone, but requires total devotion given the cost of freedom.

Andor’s journey in Season 1 about how he learns the value of Rebellion, why he has to give his life to it, and how far the Empire’s reach and evil goes. While it’s a great character journey (and almost every character in Andor feels distinct), it also takes Star Wars in a direction that feels far more vital and necessary than the bland merchandise machine of recent entries. Yes, there are Andor toys, but I don’t know if we’ll be seeing a Narkina 5 prison camp playset or a video game based around Imperial bureaucracy. It’s fairly incredible that Disney backed anything this openly radical (the finale has entire monologue from a deceased character’s journal about the necessity of insurrection against fascism), not only when you consider recent Star Wars output, but how far the franchise has run from anything remotely controversial since The Last Jedi, another piece that questions the foundations of the franchise.

We, Not Me

Star Wars, by virtue of being around for over 40 years and a lot of room to tell stories within its universe, has a lot of inherent conflicts. No one is the King of Star Wars (not even George Lucas after selling Lucasfilm to Disney), and Star Wars doesn’t have to be only one thing. Even A New Hope is not one thing. It’s intergalactic civil war, but also there are space wizards.

However, as the world changes and our ideas about heroism change and develop, Star Wars has split into different direction. Not to rehash The Last Jedi, but one of the most fascinating aspects of that film is that it rests firmly on the idea that greatness can come from anywhere. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has arguably the most prestigious lineage in the galaxy, and he now feels compelled to rule with an iron fist, embracing Darth Vader, the grandfather he never even knew. Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a nobody from nowhere, but she mirrors Kylo perfectly not only in her love for others and desire to be found, but also what she represents. If evil can be dynastic, then you don’t have to be born to famous parents to make the galaxy a better place.

The Last Jedi openly rejects the notion of a lone savior through Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) arc in the film. When Rey comes to recruit him, he fires back, “You think what? I'm gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order? What did you think was going to happen here?” Aside from writer/director Rian Johnson purposefully going against audience expectation1, he then turns this remark on its head at the film’s climax when Luke does go out to face down the whole First Order except it's an illusion. The real purpose is to give the Resistance time to escape and build throughout the galaxy. Victory rests not on the individual, but on the collective.

Rogue One, which came out the year before The Last Jedi, flirts with that idea, but it’s ultimately Jyn Erso’s (Felicity Jones) story with the rest of the ensemble providing some nice color to the proceedings. Andor feels like the first Star Wars entry since Last Jedi that turns its attention back to the collective whole. Every narrative choice is largely about self-abnegation in favor of serving the Rebellion. The Empire may seem like a faceless evil (after all, Darth Vader wears a mask as do stormtroopers), but we can see the endless jockeying for position among ISB agents. Meanwhile, those in the Rebellion must remain anonymous for their own safety. They have to work in secret and pull from the ranks of ordinary people.

Look at every story arc in Andor (the show is structured like three movies rather an episodic series, which means you really need to watch the first three episodes for it to click into place; I hate to be that guy, but that’s how they built the show) and you’ll see narratives about regular people doing extraordinary things in the face of overwhelming odds. The stories themselves are the stuff of pulp narratives—bank heist! prison break!—but it’s all grounded in the struggle against fascism. Furthermore, these narratives function as awakenings. They show characters coming to the realization that collective power is the only thing that will bring the Empire down. Not everyone is going to be the legendary Luke Skywalker (and as The Last Jedi shows, being a legend isn’t all it’s cracked up to be), but that doesn’t mean their contributions don’t count. That doesn’t mean that standing up to fascism isn’t worth it.

I like Star Wars a lot. I don’t love every Star Wars thing, but the world of Star Wars has captured my imagination since I was six-years-old and a babysitter showed me and my friend the original trilogy on VHS. I don’t think Star Wars is sacrosanct, and I realize that it’s a piece of IP for one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. But that doesn’t make Andor any less remarkable. It’s a show with real conflicts on its mind, unpredictable outcomes to its plotlines (we know the fates of Andor and Mon Mothma, and everyone else is fair game), and an investment in the faceless masses as able to do extraordinary thing.

In the age of superheroes, we’re told that there are special people in the world and they should be trusted to defend it. It’s a rather Randian ideal, and while I don’t think people walk out of a Marvel movie and pick up a copy of The Fountainhead, there’s real merit in expressing ideas of virtue separate from skill. In an age where we’ve ached to be the star of the show through social media only to feel lonelier than ever as algorithms pit us against each other and a pandemic separated us, Andor, despite its bleakness in showing the Empire’s evil, is refreshing and uplifting. It asks us to believe in ideals bigger than ourselves for our collective betterment. That’s how you take down a Death Star.