Jorge Cotte
The revolutionary politics of Andor.
Star Wars made it too easy to be anti-fascist. In 1977, the film’s iconic opening crawl situated its viewers in a galaxy “far, far away,” one defined by the battle between a rebel alliance and an evil empire. Despite this backdrop for Luke Skywalker’s heroics, the original Star Wars boiled political ideology down to a battle of good versus evil. The bad guys were dressed in easy-to-spot uniforms, and the good guys just needed to search within themselves and trust their seemingly magical powers. And thanks to the original film’s many sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and expansions, galactic rebellion has now been subsumed into a personal hero’s journey that is practically synonymous with the franchise itself.
But what was the rebellion against the Empire like before its first appearance in Star Wars: A New Hope, with its hive of activity and sophisticated military operations? Over recent years, a series of prequels have attempted to answer this question, including 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which introduced us to the character of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and culminating in the current Disney+ series Andor, which takes Star Wars back into the heart of revolution. A show about how a petty thief becomes a rebel intelligence officer who will give up his life for a cause he believes in, Andor depicts the nascent rebellion against the Empire—a senator secretly funding rebel activity, a spymaster orchestrating events behind the scenes, the towns and planets where the slow burn of oppression finally boils over into outright struggle—as well as the imperial counterintelligence officers seeking to stymie and manipulate this revolutionary energy.
Unlike the first three Star Wars prequels, which labored under their infamously sluggish dialogue and obtuse pseudoscience, Andor is a TV series that requires no caveats. Created by Tony Gilroy, whose credits include Michael Clayton and the Jason Bourne movies, the series is more indebted to John le Carré than George Lucas at the level of tone and plot: There are no Jedis, lightsaber duels, or members of the Skywalker family. And at the level of craft—writing, acting, production design, and editing—Andor is impressive. It is as thoughtful about the fashions that people wear on the silk-producing planet of Ghorman as it is about their efforts to arm themselves against imperial occupation. Rather than caricaturing state-sanctioned oppression and resorting to a planet-level view of the costs of resistance, Andor looks them squarely in the face. Regardless of how you feel about Star Wars, it might be the best series you’ll watch this year.
When we first meet Cassian Andor (again played by Diego Luna), he is searching and lost. Orphaned and dispossessed at a young age, he’s found a family and a new home on Ferrix, a planet running on a salvage economy, ruled by the Empire but controlled by private security. Cassian hates the Empire but is politically detached, cynical and disconnected. He’s a smuggler, like Han Solo, but without the quips and smirking, and he definitely would shoot Greedo first. By the time of Rogue One, however, Cassian will have become a leader and a mentor who teaches Jyn Erso that “rebellions are built on hope.” But his road to get there is long.
Cassian’s journey begins when his exploits leave two security guards dead, bringing the Empire’s fist down on Ferrix. Cassian is thrust into the employ of Luthen Rael, who poses as a dealer in antiquities looted by the Empire but who really fancies himself the underground puppet master of the rebellion. Played with relish by Stellan Skarsgård, Rael is one of the show’s most delectable creations. He serves as the Empire’s dark twin—there’s no line he won’t cross, no asset he’ll preserve if he sees an advantage for his cause or a disadvantage for the Empire. Rael initially spots Cassian’s potential and skills and decides to recruit him, but his own ruthlessness and willingness to exploit others also pits the two against each other.
In his efforts to keep the rebellion growing, Rael collaborates with the militant radical Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), handles a source embedded in the Imperial Security Bureau (the galactic version of the Gestapo), and manages Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), the senator introduced in the original trilogy, who struggles to live a double life as a genteel liberal politician and a financier of insurgent activity. But Rael’s foray into Ferrix draws the attention of a rising star at the ISB, Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), who begins piecing together evidence of an organized resistance network she calls “Axis.” Along with Cassian’s journey, Andor follows Meero’s efforts to expose and eventually target Axis. With every small victory the resistance claims, Meero gains more evidence, and the noose tightens around Rael and Cassian.
If the first season of Andor is about conversion, then the second is about the cost of commitment. The series’ episodes are clustered into arcs following Cassian’s adventures: In season one, there’s a heist, a prison break, and a homecoming, and it all ends with Cassian, once more orphaned and dispossessed, submitting to Rael’s tutelage. Season two accelerates the timeline, with each three-episode arc propelling us forward a year until the season ends just before the events of Rogue One. Cassian no longer questions whether rebellion is right, but he still struggles against the demands placed on him by everyone who sees how important he is to the cause.
The urgency of resistance is explored in Andor with a painstaking granularity. The series tracks the ways in which the Empire subjugates those under its rule: the cultural and ecological genocide on Al¬dhani, the imperial occupation of Ferrix, the use of enslaved prison labor and arbitrary sentences, the charade of checking papers and documentation, the people being dragged out of their homes, the highly targeted propaganda, the imperial armories situated in town squares, and, of course, the fabricated and contrived justifications for military destruction and the loss of human life.
Andor’s attention to detail stands out, especially in Luke Hull’s inventive production design. Adding to that detail is the horror of a politics not far removed from our own: The primary theme of season two is the Empire’s murderous violence and its ecological violation of a people and a planet to extract the resources necessary for a secret project run by Director Orson Krennic, whom we will meet again in Rogue One. Ghorman was once a prosperous world, a planet key to the textile industry and united by the organizing efforts among its inhabitants, all new to resisting the Empire. In the first season of Andor, the Ferrix uprising surprises the imperial forces, but on Ghorman the Empire goads the rebels into a situation where it can justify their massacre.
Though Andor is a series where the main character’s fate is already known, the individual efforts within and outside the resistance keep us absorbed from one episode to the next. As the years pass, the rebel alliance grows in numbers and stature and organizing capabilities. Soon the more moderate vision of the former senators in its leadership govern what the rebellion will or will not do. Rael, whose efforts kept the embers of resistance alive in earlier years, now becomes an outsider, with methods and attitudes that seem outdated. His style doesn’t fit the careful deliberations of a rebellion that now has something major to lose.
If there are drawbacks to season two (other than composer Nicholas Britell’s reduced involvement), they are the moments when the story becomes overly dependent on the events of Rogue One, and you can feel the show’s rudder shifting so that its ending can also be the set-up for a film. Cassian’s destiny is explicitly discussed, perhaps as a way for the series to acknowledge that we all know how this ends. As the series draws closer to the iconic events of the original Star Wars, the rebellion becomes sanded down, more respectable, and the franchise’s tropes sift to the surface. As a prequel to a prequel, Andor gets to be messier, dirtier, more ambivalent and more honest—until it can’t. The Death Star is always looming.
In both of Andor’s season finales, there is a dispatch, an excerpt from a manifesto, that plays over pivotal scenes. The manifesto was bequeathed by Nemik, its author, to Cassian after his very first mission for the rebels. When Cassian receives it, he is merely a hired hand, someone not ready to hear its message—but by the end of the series, that message will have spread, despite the Empire’s efforts to contain it, across the galaxy.
This catalyzing message is broadcast, passed like a blueprint for the kind of hope that makes rebellion possible. Within it is not the power to lift ships out of swamps or to wield a particular weapon in battle, but instead an idea for our own world as much as for another: “Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy…. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”
The dispatch is significant not just for its content but for its transmission. Rogue One took a line from Star Wars’ famous opening (“Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the Death Star”) and turned it into a movie about making the ultimate sacrifice to obtain and transmit information. Andor takes just the phrase “rebel spies” and asks how ordinary people become revolutionaries. We know going into the series that Nemik is right, that the day will come when “one single thing will break the siege.” Andor sets out to depict those moments of defiance, resistance, and insurrection that make such a break possible. It is about the costs of building an insurgency, but also about how empire chews up its own faithful and how the spirit of rebellion foments and passes between people. It is the rare prequel to a prequel that, in its ingenuity, its seriousness, and its artful expression, redeems its descendants.
Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/star-wars-andor-disney-season-2/#
