Spoilers
Season Two of Andor finally arrived and it delivered. Even if you don’t like Star Wars it is worth watching this series. It is rich in detail, character and features excellent writing.
The show had to bridge the four year gap between the events of Season One and the start of the movie Rogue One which came out in 2016 and to which this show is a prequel. This means following both the growing rebellion against the Empire as well as the genocidal intent of the Imperial death machine. As any good sequel must, the stakes are raised considerably.
What does Andor do so well? It’s key plot beats are all understood in the context of capitalism; especially the growing dread and fear as the Empire resorts to more and more brutal actions to maintain control.
From paperless refugees working as agricultural labourers terrified of the Imperial audit, to the propaganda by Imperial PR specialists and the casual abuse of power by security forces, to the planned and orchestrated manipulation of people to create the conditions for clampdowns and massacres – Andor shows the cynical side of authoritarian control. Mon Mothma uses her last speech in the senate before she is extracted in an electrifying sequence to denounce genocide – a word we are all familiar with from the slaughter by the IDF in Gaza.
In this sense Andor has appealed to a lot of people because it is a more complex, detailed and emotionally rich story within the Star Wars universe. This can cause jarring dislocations, Andor precedes Rogue One which precedes A New Hope – and the is a family movie aimed at children. That isn’t the case of Andor, which addresses torture, sexual assault and complicated political manoeuverings.
The story arc leading to the massacre on Ghorman is some of the most intense TV made in recent years, on a par with anything from Breaking Bad or The Wire and stands in a different world to the other Star Wars shows Disney have made.
What makes this show so compelling isn’t just that it is a show about rebellion and revolution with a fundamentally hopeful message. This is in large part what has made it so attractive to people. But it does not pull its punches – leftist infighting, liberal complacency and deep mistrust dominate. Lead characters die in firefights with no fanfare or final speech and barely a moment to mourn.
The concept of sacrifice for the revolution is at the heart of this – and what personally motivates you. Luthen Rael is horrified from his time in the military part of a team murdering civilians; Andor suffers wrongful imprisonment and is driven by the need to help save people int he way that he couldn’t save his sister; Mon Mothma has core principles about justice and freedom based on her commitment to democracy from her role as as senator. But every character goes through profound loss as part of their commitment.
Showrunner Tony Gilroy took Disney’s money – $290 million of it – and made an incredibly expensive show that asks the fundamental questions – when faced with tyranny are you willing to fight it? And if so, what are you willing to sacrifice?
It brings to mind the US revolutionary James Cannon’s speech on the way to prison (for opposing US imperialism in World War Two):
Everything is in order on our side. We neither laugh nor weep; we understand. We have understood from the beginning what might be the consequences of our undertaking. All people pay for their ideas what they think the ideas are worth. If some men are not prepared to pay with the sacrifice of one day’s liberty or the missing of one meal or a little inconvenience for the sake of their ideas, they are only saying thereby that they set no serious value upon them. But we think our ideas are the most important thing in this world, that they represent the whole future of mankind. That is why, if we have to pay even a high price for the sake of those ideas, we pay it without whimpering.
And hanging over the whole show are the events of Rogue One, when Andor leads his troops in a suicide mission to Scarif to get the plans for the Death Star which allowed a farm boy from Tattooine to blow it up with his X Wing a few weeks later. Admittedly, he had help from the force – but the point Andor is making is that without the magical force that the lucky Jedi have, the rest of us just have our wits and community.
Andor season two shows the rebellion grow from isolated networks and individual ‘heroics’ to a coordinated force, the Rebel Alliance. Force must be met with force, reaction by rebellion, oppression by revolution.
The question of class is also crucial in these struggles. Yes the Rebel Alliance is led by ex senators who we see as coming from rich families from their homeworlds – but the rebellions from ordinary people are what Andor has added. At the end of Season One on Ferrix, the uprising is started by the scrap and salvage tech workers. On Ghorman in Season Two the fight against the strip mining and violent extraction of metals that will likely destroy the planet is one of the main triggers of the protest that the imperial stormtroopers mercilessly gun down.
Control and the necessary resistance, imperial violence against communities. These are class questions first and foremost. And who are the mass forces that will overthrow this authoritarian regime?
The code word the rebels use when they are undercover and need to identify each other speaks to the sense of community that rebellions and revolutions need to develop and deepen; “I have friends everywhere.”
By the end of the show, the failure to contain the rebellion leads one senior intelligence officer to take his own life rather than face a life in prison or death by firing squad. Listening to Nemik’s manifesto (who Tony Gilroy modelled on Trotsky) he mourns “It just keeps spreading…”
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