Andor Is the Best Star Wars You Will Ever See
As with the first season, Andor pushes the envelope for what Star Wars, which is to say Disney, is able to portray. This is not a kids’ show: Cassian’s romantic interest and fellow Rebel, Bix (Adria Arjona), who is still processing having been tortured last season, this time survives an attempted rape and copes with the aftermath of both traumas through what is essentially painkiller addiction. Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), the icy intelligence officer introduced last season, is more fleshed out this time, recounting her own backstory as an orphan raised entirely in the service of the Empire’s new order. An obsessive control freak, she is as comfortable manipulating her beta-male partner, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), and his meddling mother (Kathryn Hunter) as she is the fledgling resistance movement of Ghorman, which she has engineered as an elaborate psyop. Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), the aristocratic liberal senator and a lonely voice of resistance, wrestles with marrying off her young daughter to cement an alliance with a white-collar criminal so that she can funnel monetary support to armed insurgents. And as the leader of a conspiratorial rebel network, Luthen is both directly and indirectly responsible for murdering innocents and allies in the service of the larger cause; he and his assistant Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) can reasonably be called terrorists, and we are invited to sympathize with them. From what we see of Imperial rule, it’s clear that high-minded speeches and nonviolent demonstrations are not going to cut it.
What it takes to defy a tyrannical government is not an abstract question to American audiences in 2025. Though Gilroy has downplayed specific contemporary political resonances, in interviews surrounding the show, his Star Wars scripts have been remarkably prescient. Rogue One came out the same year Donald Trump first won the presidency, and its portrayal of Rebels struggling against terrifying odds dovetailed well with the emergent (if perhaps retrospectively cringe) “Resistance” movement of Trump’s first term. Andor is now concluding against the backdrop of Trump’s return to power, this time in a position to make good on his dictatorial threats.
The second Trump administration has been marked by the arbitrary arrest, deportation, and dehumanizing incarceration of innocent people without a shred of due process, an experience Cassian himself is subjected to in the show’s first season. It has seen an autocratic executive branch reduce the legislative one to a rubber-stamp body with scattered, impotent dissenting voices, much like the Imperial Senate on Coruscant under Emperor Palpatine, whose abuses can be named but not prevented by a handful of idealistic senators like Mothma and Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits). And the further entrenchment of U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians eerily parallels the brutal Imperial crackdown on Ghorman that Mothma alone is willing to call a “genocide” (a step no U.S. senator has yet been willing to take), in a speech before the Senate, warning that objective truth has become a casualty of Palpatine’s regime.
