Andor Deepens and Expands the Star Wars Universe

Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy once said he was “never interested” in Star Wars before joining Rogue One. Yet with this meticulously crafted gift of a series, he has fulfilled many of the ambitions George Lucas espoused with the original trilogy and even more emphatically clarified with the prequels (we can save the discussion over how well he did that for another day). It is a story of rebellion against empire that soon winds its way through the many-tiered world of Imperial and Rebel bureaucracy. It deepens the mythos and uses it in novel, and I think important, ways.

Note: This review is essentially spoiler free but does refer to some general plot information and minor character moments.

Diego Luna as Cassian Andor. © 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

Cassian Andor, for the unfamiliar, is Diego Luna’s Rebel pilot from 2016’s Rogue One, to which Andor is a prequel. Gilroy wrote reshoots for Rogue One, but his work here is much closer to his scripts for the Jason Bourne series and the classic white-collar crime thriller (and 2007 best picture-nominee) Michael Clayton—rooms of agents swapping tips about contacts, people delivering monologues while staring out windows of skyscrapers, dueling allegiances, rivalries across departments. Cassian runs afoul of a couple security contractors at a brothel where he’s looking for his sister. Things go badly and he winds up on the run. His friend Bix (Adria Arjona) collects and sells gear to Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), a man working for a secret subversive anti-Imperial organization. Cassian asks her to make contact so he can hock an expensive piece of Imperial equipment he’s stolen for money to go on the lam until the heat dies down.

Thus begins the tale of how a man from humble origins will rise to become a hero of Rogue One. But while I like Rogue One—and a big part of that is Luna’s performance—Andor is a prequel to that film the way The Lord of the Rings is a sequel to The Hobbit. It’s a larger, more detailed story down to its bones. It takes this enormous palette that is the Star Wars universe and winds through all its bureaucracies and societies sick with the violence of empire.

Left to right: Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard), Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and Sergeant Mosk (Alex Ferns). Lucasfilm Ltd.

The show takes an enormous risk with its first two episodes, which are paced slower than any Star Wars–based screen property that’s not a holiday special. But those episodes serve a purpose. They’re full of emotions and details that get cut when the fate of a million worlds is on the line. And subsequent episodes rise on the shoulders of those details, allowing the show to become deeply stirring and disturbing in ways that feel at least conceptually beyond the Disney+ foul line.

In an interview with podcast The Rogue Ones, Gilroy said he took inspiration from all sorts of rebellions from real-life human history, including the French revolution and the Bolsheviks in Russia. Lucas intended the prequels at least partially as criticism of George W. Bush, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq War, but Andor digs into the specifics of occupation, methods of resistance and guerilla warfare, and how abuses of power and cruelty maintain themselves socially and politically across a whole society of people. Star Wars has a few massacres in the mythology, so Andor isn’t a complete left-field move, but the property has never tied itself so closely to the less inspiring legacy of tertiary (i.e., not “star”) wars.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

The first three episodes do not feature a single direct member of the Empire and only two active members of what will eventually become the Rebel Alliance. Cassian’s home of Ferrix is an industrial planet with all sorts of specific customs and landmarks, which the show explores at length; the thesis proven again and again is that the small details can actually become the larger point if the filmmakers allow for silence. For instance, Ferrix lies outside Imperial jurisdiction, overseen by a security contractor working for the Empire. The people of Ferrix are not part of a violent, organized rebellion, but when troops land, they resist in secretive and less obvious ways (like banging metal clubs all across town to warn anyone on the run that the heat is en route). The security contractors, who underestimate the locals, dismiss this as “bluff and bluster,” because that’s the only method they know. Power and resistance, exhibiting themselves differently under different circumstances, with nary a Skywalker in sight.

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At least no Skywalkers by that name, though one associate of Luthen’s seems to be one in spirit. The young woman (Elizabeth Dulau) looks, talks, dresses, and does her hair very much like Leia, but the character is credited as “Kleya.” No word yet whether that’s a joke, a corporate redirection, or a “much too late” future reveal, but I think the viewer is meant to ask what Leia would be doing at this stage in the building of a resistance movement, based on what we know about resistance movements of the past. What role would a princess and senator’s daughter have? Is the movement organized by aristocracy? How does that affect their methods and who gets hurt? Andor asks, and occasionally answers, these questions. It’s wild.

On the other side of the conflict, we have Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), one of the security agents who believes in the Empire and all it represents. Karn is as important to the show as Cassian—even, or especially, after his single-minded devotion to order proves a less winning strategy for navigating an Imperial career than he hoped. Series highlight Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is a supervisor for the Imperial Security Bureau, inspiring as a woman succeeding in a field that’s always been dominated by male British character actors even as she navigates an evil organization. Her skill and attention to detail enable a fascist machine to succeed more fully.

Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) with fellow members of the Empire. Lucasfilm Ltd.

These contradictions fuel Andor and allow it to grow beyond a tale of bad guys on big ships versus good guys on little ones, deepening and expanding against the only world where we’ve actually observed them. The show invites comparisons more than the franchise ever has. For those whose question while watching Star Wars has been “What is the wider cost of all of this?,” Andor tries to give an honest answer.

But the best part of the series has nothing to do with questions and answers. It’s the quiet character moments that populate the middle chapters, moments that don’t trigger alarms or register on the butterfly-effect scale but deepen and haunt everything around them: Luthen rehearsing the shift from stone-faced Rebel agent to the performative swagger of his Coruscant shopkeeper alter ego; Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) struggling with her daughter, Leida, who has embraced old Chandrilan cultural traditions like child marriage against her mother’s wishes in an act of, ironically, rebellion. There’s a scene at a dinner table in the fourth episode where Mon has apparently made an appointment to go somewhere with Leida. The details are left vague; they don’t matter. Leida, who is 14, tells her mother she doesn’t want to go. Mon has apparently planned this event as a chance for her and her daughter to spend time together amid her busy schedule, but her daughter no longer wants scraps. Mon can’t see that, so she steamrolls, accusing Leida of being “hurtful.” This tells us something about Mon: she wants to be a key figure in healing a galaxy at war, but she can’t see her share of the conflict under her own roof.

Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), Leida Mothma (Bronte Carmichael) and Perrin Fertha (Alastair Mackenzie). Lucasfilm Ltd.

In the aforementioned podcast interview, Tony Gilroy made a pitch to the most earnest Star Wars fans who tossed aside previous quotes about him not caring about the property. “We’re going … places you never thought were going to be true to canon,” he said. “We’re going to never be cynical about it. We’re going to take it more seriously than anybody ever took it.”

Was he telling the truth? All the evidence is now on screen, and my mind has been made up since the third episode.

All episodes of Andor’s first season are now streaming on Disney+.