Andor Season 1 is More Vital Than Ever
Why you should catch up on Star Wars prequel series before its return to Disney+.
With its second season fast approaching, there’s no better time to renew that Disney+ subscription and catch up on Andor, the 12-part (soon to be 24-part) prequel series to Star Wars spinoff movie Rogue One. As intimidating as that might sound, the show requires zero homework, or even a working knowledge of George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away — though familiarity might lead to a greater appreciation of what it pulls off, as arguably the best Star Wars story since the original films. However, regardless of its upcoming return, Andor’s first season is also worth watching for its unapologetic inquiry into the mechanics of fascism and the cost of rebellion. Given recent developments in the United States, from the dismantling of vital institutions to the disappearing of dissenters and protesters, it’s even more vital than when it first aired in 2022.
The series’ focus is Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), the furious rogue last seen assisting the Rebellion against the Empire from the shadows, during events leading directly into the original Star Wars (aka A New Hope). Andor, however, opens five years before Cassian would go on his selfless spy mission in Rogue One. Here, he’s mostly concerned with paying off his debts and finding his long lost sister. However, while these setups echo prior movies (the stories of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker), they’re forced to take a backseat when Cassian is roped into events much larger than himself, despite his reluctance to take a stand.
In crafting the original Star Wars, Lucas looked to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a storytelling framework that analyzed myths throughout the ages. Andor harkens back to this influence — primarily, the recurring story beat of a hero “refusing the call” to action. While it traditionally works as the first act of a story, Andor season 1 embodies this beat in its entirety, in order to trace just how authoritarianism can come for someone whether they like it or not. In some ways, Cassian was fated to take up arms against the Empire, simply by virtue of living with its glove against his throat. The show isn’t so much about him refusing to act before stepping up, but rather, about the gradual realization that he has no choice, and that he’s been revolting since long before he realized it.
Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor goes through a journey of reluctant hero to rebel.
The season is neatly divided into three-episode arcs, each concerning a specific location or major development, and each playing out like an intense and detailed feature film (every episode runs about 45 minutes). It wouldn’t be spoiling to mention what those sections are: Cassian begins his story on his adopted homeworld of Ferrix, a mining town under imperial authority (further leased out to the private sector). Before long, he’s hired as part of a Rebel heist outfit targeting a military outpost on Aldhani, a lush planet where the Emperor’s colonial forces have displaced deeply religious indigenous tribes. The next three episodes follow Cassian’s imprisonment, in a riveting story echoing Lucas’ pre-Star Wars sci-fi breakout THX 1138, until finally, all the various subplots culminate in the season’s closing entries.
This compartmentalized structure allows for a more focused unveiling of the series’ themes, since it forces the show to dig deep into a plot that’s constantly moving and evolving. The wonderful thing about Andor is that it achieves all this through a stellar cast of supporting characters, all of whom are regular people on either side of the aisle (except for one particularly adorable droid, Cassian’s loyal home-bot B2EMO). There isn’t a Jedi or lightsaber to be found, and only a single space battle, but the show remains propulsive, and ends up surprisingly philosophical in its approach to resisting fascism. It’s so adept at this that it might make you wonder if Disney — whose Marvel shows have been politically mealy-mouthed and apologetic — was involved with the series at all.
It turns out, according to showrunner Tony Gilroy, that the Mouse House had minimal oversight. The result is a story filled with characters who fall into moral greys. When Cassian first gets in trouble with the law, and seeks the help of his tech-savvy ex-girlfriend Bix (Adria Arjona), he’s turned in to the Empire by her jealous boyfriend Timm (James McArdle), a character who’s immediately empathetic, despite his sinister actions (the close-ups on a silent, stewing McArdle go a long way to humanizing the slimy bastard). When Cassian becomes a mercenary, he’s hired by the duplicitous Rebel recruiter Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), an accelerationist with ulterior motives, but an altruistic end goal of defeating the Empire. Even the sniveling, low-ranking imperial officer Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) becomes a shockingly lovable fixture of Andor — not despite his pathetic dedication to fascist ideology, but because of it.
Even the antagonists are afforded a level of sympathy.
If connecting with characters requires understanding them — far more than it does agreeing with them — Andor succeeds with every single new face that’s introduced. After all, it’s a show that depends on not only knowing what someone is thinking at a given moment, but also, feeling their convictions deep in your bones. So, when their ideologies finally clash, you’re left conflicted too. There’s clearly one “heroic” side in this building skirmish, but it’s hard to call Andor a show of heroes. Rather, it’s a series of great moral compromises, exploring the physical, emotional and ethical cost of resisting oppression, often in unsavory ways.
For instance: there’s a major focus on the character Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), a Rebel leader seen briefly in Rogue One and Return of the Jedi. Her role as a senator on Coruscant — the heart of the Empire — proves wildly complicated, given her attempts to covertly fund Luthen, visiting him under the guise of shopping at the antique store he runs with a plastered grin. Mothma walks a similar boundary between dualities; she’s forced to navigate not only a surveillance state with suffocating financial regulations, but the tendrils of her native culture (from the puritanical planet Chandrila), whose outdated and ugly customs have an outsized importance in political negotiating. No character is afforded an easy moral binary. Certainly not when the logistics of money and allegiances are involved, and the differing ideological factions of the infant Rebellion threaten to break it apart at any moment (a certain Rebel militant from Rogue One makes a brief appearance too).
Some characters are already radicals when the show begins — like Luthen, and his subordinates Vel (Faye Marsaye) and Cinta (Varada Sethu), a couple who disagree over how much to give themselves over to the Rebellion — but Andor is just as much about what radicalizes different people. The answer is never the same in any two instances. For the people of occupied Ferrix, it’s Stormtroopers with lethal aim. For the heist crew on Aldhani, their motives range from vengeance, to idyllic notions of freedom in the abstract. One of them, a young, idealistic thief named Nemik (Alex Lawther), even pens a lucid and moving manifesto on how growing autocracy tries to outpace people’s ability to resist it. Meanwhile, for characters who end up in a brutal labor prison — like Andy Serkis’ instantly magnetic Kino Loy — the answers range from recognizing the Empire’s arbitrary cruelty, to losing faith in systems of justice after being tossed aside. After all, as Nemik writes: “The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.”
The show is nothing if not multifaceted in its approach, with some of the most poetic political dialogue you’re likely to find in any mainstream Hollywood product. However, its overt political themes are always in service of its drama. While it reaches back into the depths of Lucas’ inspirations — Star Wars was designed, in part, as a metaphor for American military overreach in Vietnam — the show is also distinctly its own, casting aside the Original Trilogy’s overtly New Age, hippie spirituality in favor of a more contemporary (and arguably, more revolutionary) use of science-fantasy to illuminate the world around us. And yet, it still maintains Lucas’ hippie spirit.
Andy Serkis makes a standout turn in the season’s most riveting arc.
Not only does the show imbue the Empire with a more concrete ideology — it seeks to crush numerous native cultures under its bootheels — but it further transforms the original aesthetic influences of Star Wars into storytelling devices that represent the battle of a collectivist spirit. The Empire’s Nazi-like uniforms don’t just strike a chord through historical allusion, but by emphasizing the conformity enforced by those who wear them. The people on Ferrix and Aldhani, with their flowing robes and warm Earth tones, don’t simply recall the appearance of different tribal ethnicities (from Celts to Tibetan monks and Nepalese sherpas), but they embody each culture’s expressiveness, their art, their history, and the bonds that matter most to them.
Andor never loses sight of how real empires and rebellions work, or what’s at stake when people choose to undergo the rigorous transformations necessary to become part of a violent revolution. The result is a rousing work of television that gets to the heart of what Star Wars was and has always been about — perhaps in ways more incisive than even the original movies. It’s Star Wars distilled to its very essence, a no-frills saga that strips away the fantasy, but more directly reflects the reality which inspired it in the first place. It isn’t just a story about people who fight, but a story about what people fight for.
