'Rebellions are built on hope'
Andor, the Star Wars series about a little-known character, ends its two excellent seasons next week amid some alarming echoes to the real world. PLUS: Leafs!
In the opening few moments of the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a young girl watches helplessly as her mother is shot to death and her father taken hostage. The scene then shifts to a Rebel officer who learns valuable intel from a spy about the Empire’s plans for some kind of super-weapon. He then has to kill the spy to make a clean getaway.
It is brutal, unflinching stuff, far more like a cold espionage thriller than something from the world that George Lucas launched in 1977, with its cute droids and dashing heroes and villains that are helpfully clad in black.
And it’s partly why Rogue One is the best Star Wars film since the 1980s — instead of dealing with Lucas’s increasingly complicated sand box, it was a simple, compelling story that still managed to answer a key Star Wars question: just how did the Rebel Alliance get the plans for the Death Star, anyway?
When Disney launched the first season of Andor, the television show about one of Rogue One’s doomed heroes, three years ago, there was reason enough to have some trepidation. Were they about to take a great character and fill his backstory with all kinds of complicated world-building and a furry sidekick who would do great merch business? It’s not like Disney had been knocking it out of the park since buying Lucasfilm in 2012.
The Force Awakens (2015): Better than the Lucas-helmed prequels, but also hilariously similar to the 1977 original. An orphan who lives on a desert planet and turns out to have great powers? You don’t say.
The Last Jedi (2017): My favourite of the new trilogy, with some very cool parts, but inexplicably unmoored from the films that preceded and followed it. (The explanation is that they were created by different people who were figuring out the narrative arc on the fly, but that is a very weird way to make a trilogy.)
Rise of Skywalker (2019): Gah. Let’s move on.
Disney’s Lucasfilm had continued to do great work on the animated-series side, and The Mandalorian (2019) had some excellent moments, but the other television offerings were just OK: The Book of Boba Fett (2021) ran out of story and morphed into a continuation of The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) was a six-episode amuse bouche about the Jedi legend’s early days in exile. Those last two shows felt like Disney just trying to squeeze something out of popular characters that hadn’t been on screen for awhile.
Cassian Andor, on the other hand, was a relative nobody. He didn’t have the Force, or cool-ass armour, or a friendship with a cuddly alien. How was this guy going to anchor a series?
He did it, it turns out, by not having to anchor it at all. Andor, now three-quarters of the way through its second season, has been the Star Wars series that Star Wars fans never knew they wanted, precisely because it’s not trying too hard to be a Star Wars series. Much like Rogue One, it ignores a lot of the Lucas galaxy’s conventions. There are no Jedi and no Sith, and no great big battle set-pieces either on land or in space. It’s more like a spy thriller, but set in a familiar world — and at a time where that world is rapidly changing.
And that last part is the unexpected genius of Andor: creator Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote Rogue One, leaned into the idea of an Empire that was tipping into fascism. It’s easily forgotten because the original trilogy was set in an era where the Emperor was already a totalitarian ruler who shared a design aesthetic with the Nazis, but it didn’t become that way overnight. Andor examines what it was like for the regular people who were discovering that their nominally democratic galaxy was in fact becoming a police state.
Cassian Andor’s main antagonists are the Imperial Security Bureau, basically the Empire’s secret police. He gets sent in Season 1 to a labour camp, after a dubious conviction with nothing in the way of due process. In Season 2 he ends up on Ghorman, where the Empire is using the ISB to plant the seeds of an uprising that they can use as the pretext for martial law.
That this series is airing in 2025, with the United States under the rule of a President who literally seems intent on ignoring the courts and imposing his own form of authoritarian rule, is just a coincidence — Season 2 could have been airing during Joe Biden’s second term, or Kamala Harris’s first. But it isn’t, which makes it, in some ways, alarmingly relatable. One of the biggest moments in Season 2 comes with a speech in Episode 9, as a character decries an Imperial massacre of innocent civilians. The Empire, naturally, wants it to be known as the lawful response to an insurgency.
“The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” the Rebel character says. “When truth leaves us — when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest."
I mean … Coruscant? Washington, DC? You decide.
While I’ve made a point here of noting the ways in which Andor is not a typical Star Wars thing — people actually swear! — it still manages to give a nod here and there to viewers who are well versed in the Lucasverse. The title of this post, “Rebellions are built on hope,” comes from the most memorable quote of Rogue One. Andor gives us the quote’s origin story, as it comes from a hotel desk clerk, of all people.
Which is, in the end, what makes Andor so special. It’s new and unusual, but still moored, just enough, to the larger world that George Lucas spawned out of his bearded head. The best compliment I can pay it is that it makes one a little sad about what could have been. Why haven’t the people with the keys to Star Wars managed to do this more often?
The final three episodes of Andor will air on Tuesday on Disney+
Have the Maple Leafs become … playoff savvy?
This post is being published on Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Toronto Maple Leafs attempt to go up 3-0 in a playoff series for the second straight time.
That is a sentence that would previously have been unthinkable. In my latest for theScore, I considered whether this really is a different Leafs team, and came to this shocking conclusion: maybe.