Why the Star Wars Galaxy Enraptures Me: A Look at Andor

Before I begin, I would like to mention that the work I am talking about today is easiest found on Disney+. Disney+ is currently facing a boycott from The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for the freedom of Palestine. I say this to note that I believe in the liberation of the Palestinian people and ask that if this show interests you, you turn to other means such as the blu-ray release or pirating to watch them. This is not a neat trick to avoid taking ownership of the boycott but instead to note that BDS boycotts are designed to be targeted and scalable so more people can join in on the boycott in an attempt to make it more effective. That note out of the way, let’s talk Star Wars.

Every so often I get put into what I call a Star Wars hole. It is essentially a hyper-fixation from my youth that returns much like Sheev Palpatine in Rise of Skywalker. Whilst I am in these holes, my media consumption and much of my brain wandering is filled with Star Wars stuff. As I am once again in a Star Wars hole, as such, I wanted to talk about the show and semi-compare it to the original trilogy of Star Wars films to explain why I have fallen in love with the Star Wars setting and why it has the capacity to through me into a spiral where all I think about are spaceships, blasters, the politics of a galaxy, and space wizards. Andor is a 12-episode season of “prestige” TV that follows the machinations of the Rebellion in the years before the Battle of Yavin, which is the events at the end of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope. Also featured heavily are the attempts of the empire to nip this resistance in the bud before it can seriously destabilize the empire. This show has a very interesting ethos that I believe are illustrative to what makes good Star Wars. Andor is filled with believable characters who feel grounded and real, with locations that do the same. It is enrapturing making you wish to follow the exploits and trials of all involved and truly makes you feel you rate inhabiting the galaxy.

In Andor, we have a wide variety of people as our main cast, from small town nobodies such as Cassian Andor and his friends Bix and Brasso, to the elite such as Luthen Rael, an important player in setting up the rebellion, and Mon Mothma, a member of the Imperial Senate who secretly funds the rebellion. What unites all these characters is a sense of groundedness. We see their worries and fears and they make sense. Andor and his friends are trying to survive in a hostile world attempting to grind them down. Rael and Mothma are extremely stressed due to their positions are covert operators acting against a totalitarian empire. Our antagonists are equally believable. Syril Karn is low level corporate cop in the other fringes of the empire. He dreams of being bigger than his low status background and wishes to do real service to the empire and rise through the ranks. This leads him to make understandable and real mistakes that ruin his life. The staff at the ISB, the section of the empire tasked with keeping the people in line and not rebelling, are imposing but in a way that uses the totalizing force of an empire rather than relying on brute force. They are cogs in a very dangerous and dehumanizing machine. The show manages to do this via superb, understated acting. Every character has little ticks and twitches that show their inner emotions. This allows for there to be large impact when a character raises their voice or gets physical. We get long shots of the characters just existing in their spaces to set up who they are and what they do. All this leads to tension building, often over multiple episodes, until it is paid off and released and gives a great sense of catharsis. These characters can be contrasted to those of the original trilogy.

Our main Character, Cassian Andor, is very different from Luke Skywalker. Luke is a person with a special destiny; he has an important role to play in the galaxy by nature of his birth. Cassian on the other hand, is just some guy. He holds a hatred of the empire and steals from them, but he has no real purpose beyond survive. Yet that impetus to survive gives him a variety of important skills that make him useful to the rebellion, he can pilot, shoot, is good at coming up with plans, and is very good at reading people. This gets him the attention of Luthen Rael, an important piece of the early rebellion who attempts to recruit Andor to the cause. This difference between protagonists makes the galaxy feel large and full of people. Cassian’s past explains how he got the way he is, but it does not have to be Cassian Andor who does what he does. Anyone with similar skills could slot into his place.  By allowing for the possibility that this story could be someone other that Andor’s it allows one to imagine other stories in a similar vein. Real could have had this conversation with any number of people and probably has to recruit others to the cause. Rael himself is more utilitarian than the the rebellion we see in the original trilogy. He is fuelled by anger more than the hope of that rebellion. This leads him to be more pragmatic and work with all kinds of people in order to bring the empire down. He is willing to forgo an entire rebellious cell in order to keep a contact he views more important secure. One can see why his style of leading the rebellion changes later on in the timeline but also how it was instrumental in bringing together that cause. What is a continuity is the fire we see in the nascent rebellion in Andor is the same as Leia and the others from the rebellion in A New Hope. The cell we follow in episodes 4-6 of Andor as well as the prisoners desire for freedom in that arc are a match for the pilots who attack the Death Star. They know the tyranny the empire brings, and they are willing to die to stop it. The empire they fight appears differently.

The empire we see in Andor is not quite at the full strength we see in A New Hope. This change helps Andor feel real and tactile. The empire in A New Hope is totalizing, it is an all-powerful force that can just barely be dented. Many people die just to deny the empire the Death Star, and yet while its loss is substantive, after that battle the empire remains in the overwhelming advantage. They are able to mount a successful counterattack in the next movie, fittingly called The Empire Strikes Back, and in the third film they are well on their way to building a second Death Star. Andor is partially a story of how that empire comes to be. This gives it important texture to the world of Star Wars. We start Andor well after the empire has taken root, it is a going concern for all, even on a far away system such as we start the show on. Yet, rather than the regular storm trooper we would see in the original trilogy, we see corporate security officers. They are less imposing than the storm trooper and feel more pitiful. Their power does flow from the emperor, but it is a long and circuitous route for it to get to him. They are angry people using their power to terrorize the citizenry but leave the viewer feeling they were not good enough for the regular imperial forces. The security we see are dangerous fuck-ups, people who should not be trusted with power due to their incompetence but given it because the real power players in the heart of the empire are not yet able or willing to pull the plug on them.

Yet, a theme of Andor is the encroaching empire. After the arc with corporate security, we see regular imperial troops for the fist time in the show. They appear more buttoned up and are doing more actual work of imperialism The corporate security fail because they attempt to go where they have no control, we see the regular forces exerting that control. We hear how years ago they pushed the people who lived on Aldani to corporate zones where they work in factories rather than live their traditional life. We see them harass and intimidate people using their air superiority and how the Aldani people hate them. It is also a glimpse of the first recognizable imperial symbol, the tie fighter aircraft, which is terrifying in this show. Slowly, we are seeing the empire of the original series take shape in this prequel.

After this arc, the show moves to a tourist destination planet that is fully occupied. There is an ever-present security forces, notably in the storm trooper outfit. They are able to arbitrarily arrest and sentence people, sending Andor to a prison that screams standard imperial architecture. It is a large imposing building in the middle of a lake. The interior is all white, evoking the Death Star interior that is so striking. Yet, at the end of the series, we scale back and go to regular imperial troops and not storm troopers. This is to show how the power of the empire radiates. The more control the empire has, the closer the show hues to original trilogy iconography. This allows the world of Star Wars in Andor to feel real, we are seeing the story of how the empire came to become so far ranging, and what people did to fight back. The non-imperial locations of Andor also invoke a tactile and grounded feeling.

Andor is largely shot on location with actual sets. This allows for places in the world to feel absolutely real because rather than be constructed using computer graphics, they are truly real. This lends to places such as the town on the planet of Ferrex our protagonist’s hometown, feeling full of life and having a deep texture one wants to pour into. This allows for the moments of violence such as the police raid on the town to be punctuated despite the lower stakes than other Star Wars stories. There is some property damage and about 4 people die in that failed raid, yet it feels harrowing because we have a deep sense of place in that town. We spent three episodes there getting to know its people and places. This use of real sets also frees up the CG animators to work their magic on scenes where they can be truly beneficial, such as the astronomical phenomena, the Eye of Aldani, which is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. It also allows for the space combat scene to look gorgeous as well. This is taken right out of the original trilogy, where due to the time the film was made in, everything needed to be done with sets, puppets, and miniatures. Places such as Mos Eisley and the Millennium Falcon have a tactile feeling. One could easily imagine being part of the crowd or touching the junk in the ship. This gave those movies the same inhabited feeling Andor has as the places were actual places people were moving around. The trilogy was telling a much bigger and louder story, but it was still able to feel more grounded than the prequels which came later.

This combination of superb characters and locations transported me back to why I fell in love with the Star Wars setting. When used well, it has the ability to feel like an entirely realized world that I want to inhabit and learn about forever. Andor is the Star Wars thing most able to give me that feeling of the galaxy being a real place I can be in. It’s focus on relatively small-time characters who are not the focus of much else in the series allows the galaxy to feel truly expansive and filled with trillions of individual stories I could explore and invent forever.