All About "Andor"

Minor spoilers ahead.

"Andor" represents a major departure from the "Star Wars" content generated for Disney+ so far.  It's closest in spirit to the "Rogue One" film, which it serves as a prequel to, following the early career of resistance fighter Cassian Andor (Diego Luna).  This is a series aimed at an older audience, and is focused on the nuts and bolts of the Rebellion, just when it was getting started.  To that end, it's a much grimmer, talkier, murkier look at the "Star Wars" universe, full of echoes of real world conflicts.  It's also much larger in scope, with a first season that covers several different arcs - a getaway, a heist, and a prison break most prominently - while exploring the lives of major players on both sides of the conflict.

There are still plenty of action scenes and special effects in the series, but you won't see any lightsabers and Force users, and very few alien species.  Instead we have Rebel operative Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) who uses the front of a Coruscant antiques dealer while setting up dangerous missions secretly funded by Imperial Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly).  We have Andor's home planet of Ferrix, where he lives with his adoptive mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw) and her droid B2EMO (Dave Chapman) under the increasingly hostile governance of the Empire.  Equally fascinating are the villains in the show, including a low level security guard, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), who becomes obsessed with catching Andor, and Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious Imperial security official who wants to move up in the Imperial bureaucracy.

While Andor is a charismatic figure, and Diego Luna is wonderful in the part, he's often not the most interesting character in the stories that play out over the course of the show.  Instead, he serves as an excellent everyman figure seeing all these different parts of the galaxy along with the audience.  One week, he and his friend Bix (Adria Arjona) are trying to figure out how to sell stolen equipment and leave the planet.  The next, he's on a heist with Rebel leader Vel Seltha (Faye Marsay) to steal an Imperial payroll.  And after that, he's quickly scooped up into a forced labor camp with Kino Loy (Andy Serkis) for multiple episodes.  Subplots follow Mon, Luthen, Syril, Dedra, and others.  We get a macroscopic view of how the Empire oppresses all these different people and planets, and a big part of Andor's character progression is how he eventually comes to the decision to join the Rebellion.

Like "Rogue One," "Andor" was created and largely written by Tony Gilroy, who is best known for the Jason Bourne movies and "Michael Clayton."  As a result, "Andor" feels less like the action adventure space fantasy that most "Star Wars" media has been and more like a dystopian allegory.  The characters are so much more nuanced and the choices they're faced with are often so much more complex that I can't see anyone under the age of twelve having much patience for this show.  Genevieve O'Reilly is one of the standouts as Mon Mothma, who has to delicately manage her political career and loveless marriage, while hiding the flow of money going to the Rebellion.  The Empire's atrocities are also much more chilling in a mundane and realistic way.   Early on, we learn that Andor was rescued as a child from his original home planet by Maarva, shortly before everyone on it was wiped out by an Imperial mining accident.

"Andor" is easily one of the best pieces of "Star Wars" media produced since the original film trilogy, and I'd like more in this vein.  It's nice to see all the resources that this franchise has at its disposal put in service of a story with more substance to it.  And frankly, it's a relief to find out that "Star Wars" works just fine without the Jedi and all their drama.  However, it would be a mistake for all of "Star Wars" to move in this direction, because the audience for it is necessarily more limited than something like "The Mandalorian."  "Andor" is already planned to stop after its next season, which will end right where "Rogue One" begins. 

---