CONTAINS SPOILERS

For once in their lives, Star Wars fans have a right to be upset. By the time any franchise devotees reach the end of Tony Gilroy’s ground-level Rebellion drama Andor, there’s a strong possibility they’ll feel more ashen than when they saw Princess Leia Mary Poppins herself back to safety in The Last Jedi, or more wrung-out than Oscar Isaac muttering “Somehow, Palpatine returned”. Yet for all of the cries across the galaxy that Star Wars isn’t what it once was, Andor is a rare part of the most divisive IP in the world’s expansive tapestry that is actually upsetting for all the right reasons.

Introduced in Death Star plan heist adventure Rogue One, Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor is a Rebel stalwart who has seen a lot. In his first 12 episode Disney+ outing, he killed coppers, fled his hometown, crippled an Imperial sector’s bank accounts, got sent to a maximum security concentration camp, and then saw his friends and family crushed under the Empire’s boot-heel, and that’s simplifying the terrible time he has as his moral compass galvanises towards revolution. In his ambitiously-mounted second season, Gilroy reintroduces him as a game workman being sent on espionage missions to far-flung parts of the galaxy; from an Imperial test-pilot to a suave fashion designer and then to an exhausted war journalist, Luna wears Cassian’s fatigue well, tracking the process of how a wounded hero becomes a scabbed-over soldier with increasing depth and feeling. Around him are threads following Genevieve O’Reilly’s struggling senator Mon Mothma and her high-stakes battle to keep the Rebellion funded under tightening scrutiny, the loosening control of Stellan Skarsgård’s antique-dealer-cum-rebel-line-manager Luthen Rael, an icy Imperial romance between uppity pencil-pusher Syril Karn (Kyle Sollner) and sneer-faced iron lady Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), and some appropriately bizarre asides involving Forest Whitaker’s unhinged separatist Saw Gerrera. 

For a show called Andor, it’s quite amazing how Andor himself is just a mere cog in an intricate war machine powered by near-misses, incompetency and slow-burn coincidence. Gilroy’s overall vision has always been fascinatingly granular, taking its time to re-establish the Star Wars universe at great length and attention-to-detail. There are aspects of this gritty vision that err dangerously close to our own reality, sometimes to brilliant effect, other times in a way that flattens out the wonder of the rich, limitless textures of Lucas’ original sci-fi. One character disassociates to a Loose Women/The View-style chat show starring Ruby Wax which plays much more Hunger Games than it does Star Wars, and while there is something disturbingly real about news correspondents reporting atrocities with the exact phrases used in Imperial board rooms, there is perhaps a little too much inspiration taken from how we live in our universe. Granted, Gilroy’s decisions here aren’t as egregious as the recent decision to create an entire planet of Spielbergian suburbs in Skeleton Crew, yet Andor’s relationship to our realm occasionally gets on the wrong side of anachronistic.

Its finger on the political pulse, however, is exactly correct. So-called ‘fans’ of this world have been getting bolder in their attempts to shut down diversity within recent strands of Star Wars (fuelled unfortunately by wrongheaded reactionary schools of thought), and maybe this has been Gilroy’s crusade to create such a bitter pill for them to swallow that it quietens them for good. In fleshing out the oppression that Lucas sketched out in his original films, Gilroy has become a leading force in education through entertainment. 

In Andor’s greatest arc (a five-episode dramatisation of (and the build-up to) the fateful, mythologised Ghorman Massacre from old Star Wars Legends lore), Gilroy thoroughly illustrates an oppressed, peaceful world under breaking point, casting French-speaking actors as its rising revolutionaries and coding their costuming and language as distinctly Gallic. This is where Andor earns its anachronistic stripes, extrapolating the already-fascist stylings of the Empire and showing their opposers in the fashionable, trenchcoat-and-beret-wearing Ghor populace, drawing a real-world parallel between Nazi-occupied France and Star Wars’ own balance-tipping event that sparks revolution and the end of an empire. Although we know the rebels are eventually victorious once Luke Skywalker sets to good use a lethal combo of the Force and a proton torpedo, it’s great suffering that brought everyone there, and Andor’s most shocking chapter (its second season’s eighth episode, ‘Who Are You?’) depicts it in uncompromising detail. The resilience of the Ghor marching on their occupied town square (cleverly framed as the site of a previous 500 person massacre by the infamous Grand Moff Tarkin), chanting “we are the Ghor! The galaxy is watching!” and stirring a chorus of their planetary anthem in protest against the Empire is magnificently, emotively mounted. The moving and stoic ensemble who give face to these people is something Star Wars has never managed to pull off: looking pain and terror dead in the face.

Compare that to the ‘Oh no! Anyway…’ destruction of Alderaan in the 1977 original, and this is night and day; Lucas footnoted the genocide in Star Wars, while Gilroy dedicates time to the tragedy, shading in grey areas between rebels and oppressors as both are caught up in the whirlwind of evil stomping out good. There is a marvellously knotty relationship between the easily-manipulated Syril Karn (seen in the middle of the season as a smarmy branch manager of the Empire’s Bureau of Standards) and Ghorman rights activist Carro Rylanz (instantly recognisable Inglourious Basterds actor Richard Sammel), and between adjacent arc writers Beau Willimon and Dan Gilroy, the scenes they share become more and more tense and upsetting, to a horrible end point that galls the viewer with the bitter sting of tough consequences. This emerges as the hard-edged heart of the show, where complicated heroes and uncertain villains clash and no one learns anything except the acrid taste of vengeance and how quickly manipulation can pass the point of no return.

Sollner and Sammel are just two of the excellent performers given the spotlight in the huge roster of Andor original characters that hold more complexity than any character who lived through the entire Skywalker saga, and there are almost too many to do justice for in a single article. Gilroy’s focus is intelligently intimate, taking time away from Cassian’s missions to find extra fascination in characters like Luthen Rael’s assistant Kleya, portrayed in a star-making turn by British actress Elizabeth Dulau. The last thing anyone would have expected is for a good portion of the final arc to be dedicated to her memories and cynical view of the larger rebellion when her adopted father is in peril, and yet she commands the action like a seasoned pro, fiercely determined to do the impossible as she sets out to tie up loose ends against all personal interest. Gilroy’s strong female characters don’t stop there; Mon Mothma’s plot threads simmer along to a crucial speech that marks the first time truth has been told at the Senate in decades, and Adria Arjona’s Bix reinforces herself as the show’s battered, bittersweet backbone, reaching the brink of personal doom but emerging as a constant reminder of what matters: survival, and then peace. Out of their mouths come phrases Star Wars has never dared speak before this; Gilroy is unafraid to have his female characters openly say ‘rape’ and ‘genocide’, which has indeed annoyed some ‘fans’ who have no right to call themselves as much. In keeping such terrible things part of his conversation, Andor becomes an enlightening study on how to do better.

There’s also Faye Marsay’s Vel and Varada Sethu’s Cinta, whose tumultuous romance forms a tragic parallel with Cassian’s own with Bix, showing the sacrifices those in love have to make in times of war, and it’s this kind of relationship which grounds Andor even further; Star Wars romances previous to these have been chaste and sexless, yet there’s physical chemistry abound between each couple that feels positively Wachowski-esque. Say what you will about the Matrix sequels, they have an undeniable attention to sensuous touch to make the alone time between lovers the thing to fight for, not just letting love be an abstract concept that is inherently worth fighting for, but establishing it in tender moments of intimacy before world-changing events. 

Time is afforded to flesh out Stellan Skarsgård’s master of shadows Luthen too, thanks to a flashback-heavy episode near the backend that gives context you never knew you needed to this cryptic character with a unique moral compass. Delivering monologues like salty servings of Swedish gravlax was his specialty in season one (him growling “I’ve made my mind a sunless place” sticks with you even years later), and he continues on in with veteran-levels of class here, closing off the story of a forgotten hero of the rebellion who took risk after risk until the consequences finally caught up with him. Ending his character the way Gilroy does is unexpected but appropriate; in living his life in obscurity, he leaves it behind in a similarly peripheral way. Gilroy resists the urge to send off his three-dimensional characters in blazes of glory, cultivating an atmosphere of dread week-by-week not unlike Game of Thrones, and then doing a clever about-face in tying off narrative threads in very low-key ways. The fallen heroes of the rebellion who don’t make it to Rogue One are mourned, yes, but their sacrifice is felt more deeply in the attention Gilroy gives to those who burn their lives to make a sunrise they’ll never see. 

It really will be a shame if Andor is the last mature effort we get from the Star Wars enterprise. A costly endeavour (an estimated $645 million was spent on the entire 24 episode run) that has far less marketing and merchandising opportunities than other Disney outings for Star Wars, this may be the grown-up Star Wars project many were screaming for, and one can hope the goodwill and positivity from thoughtful, engaged viewers is enough to show the House of Mouse that there is a future in this type of programming. In igniting the on-screen rebellion, it ignites its own debates about the state of the world right now; about complacency when atrocities are happening around you; about when it is right to exercise vengeance against absolute evil; about the eternal arm-wrestle between love for your loved ones and a love for the cause. Andor is meaty, hard-to-swallow and often unpalatably sad. It is mercifully over, its story is earnestly wrapped up. And it would be nice to see something like it again.

SIMON’S ARCHIVE – ANDOR SEASON 2