MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR ANDOR SEASON TWO AHEAD
"It had to be done.”
“It gets tiring saying that, doesn’t it?”
In mid-April 2025, David Ehlrich of IndieWire proclaimed a cultural shift was underway. This shift centered on the grand disparity between how audiences rapturously received Sinners and tepidly responded to the announcement of Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter (which was unveiled the same day Sinners began its theatrical run). For Ehlrich, this was a sign of audiences hungering for something new rather than just being served up the promise that the Adam Project auteur had some new Star Wars thing on the horizon.
It’s a solid analysis, and I’d like to throw my hat into the ring on potential harbingers of new artistic norms. If anything has plunged a dagger into the heart of typical middling Disney+ streaming fare or fan-service-driven Mouse House blockbusters, it’s a production this company itself created. How can you go back to The Book of Boba Fett or The Rise of Skywalker when Andor exists? In its second and final season, Andor solidified its place as just flat-out great art, not just slightly more contemplative than usual Star Wars fare. Considering the next theatrically released Star Wars film is hinging its earliest buzz on the idea of Clone Wars veterans Rotta the Hutt and Embo returning, it’s clear Andor is an anomaly in a sea of callbacks.
Lucasfilm won’t make something like this again. Cherish its virtues. Treasure its originality. Realize how Andor reaffirms the shortcomings of other Star Wars media.
The last 12 episodes of Andor consist of four storylines taking place over three installments each. Between each narrative arc is a one-year-time jump. Rebel fighter Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is back as the centerpiece of this program taking place between Episodes III and IV of the Star Wars saga. The Galactic Empire rules everything with an authoritarian fist. Any opposition or individuality is crushed by their mighty boot. Andor is the centerpiece of the proceedings. However, much like the fight for freedom does not boil down to one soul, neither do Andor's various scripts solely linger on Andor.
Key supporting characters include mechanical genius Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), the extremely morally murky secret rebellion coordinator Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard), Imperial Security Bureau strategic supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), Imperial figure Syril Karn (Kylle Soller), stealthily subversive Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), and Luthen's assistant Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau). They’re all navigating obligations and desires that won’t result in any medals or parades. Not even fascist supporters like Karn or Meero will be crowned royalty if they succeed in wiping out the rebellion. The best they can hope for is possible promotions. These are mundane people, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of greater accomplishments…for good and for evil.
Watching Severance’s second season earlier this year, I was reminded how good writing renders lore irrelevant. On that show, characters often talked in heightened Lumon Industries jibber-jabber, yet it didn’t matter if you understood every inch of the verbiage or not. The writing wisely made sure the underlying emotions were the point, not the mythos. All the world-specific vernaculars were just verbal garnishes. A similar deft phenomenon exists within Andor’s excellent season two writing. In episode eight, "Who Are You?", a betrayed Karn confronts Meero about how she and the Empire lied to him about what Imperial forces are doing on the planet Ghorman.
In his tirade, he mentions that Imperial forces are gathering on various specific sectors of this planet, each of which has kooky names that could only exist in Star Wars. Memorizing these peculiar combinations of vowels and consonants isn’t the point, though. His bitter anger makes it constantly clear what Karn is saying. That’s the genius of Andor. It’s a Star Wars show where the lore is often intentionally immaterial. Other Star Wars programs like The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett ground people’s emotional investment entirely in how much they watched previous animated Star Wars productions. If you don’t know Cad Bane, Bo-Katan, or Ezra Bridger beforehand, then there’s nothing here for you.
Andor, meanwhile, has infinitely more standalone pleasures. Pre-existing Star Wars characters like Andor, Mothma, Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), and Senator Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt) manifest across the various narratives, but they each have such vividly specific roles in Andor that pre-existing expertise on their respective Wookieepedia pages isn’t necessary. Happily, “references” in the show manifest instead through historical nods rather than grinding the plot to a halt for a Darth Maul cameo. For instance, Ghorman protestors in “Who Are You?” shout out the phrase “The galaxy is watching!” as they march through the streets. Such a refrain hauntingly echoes the “The whole world is watching!” rallying cry from anti-Vietnam protestors in 1968.
That particular parallel to reality inhabits the finest episode of Andor’s second season. That’s a mighty high compliment given how extraordinary this batch of 12 episodes is, but “Who Are You?” more than earns it. This installment concerns Andor and Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhaier) travelling to Ghorman to assassinate Meero just as a peaceful protest form the local population unfolds. This event, directed at Imperial forces harming the planet and its people, culminates in Ghorman denizens congregating in a town square where, years earlier, an Imperial-sanctioned massacre occurred. History, as it often does in real life, repeats itself. Off in the distance, an Imperial sniper shoots and kills one of troopers intimidating the protestors. A lie is dispersed that the shot came from the protestors, which gives Imperial forces justification to slaughter all the unarmed protestors.
What follows is a harrowing sequence devoid of any of the catharsis or exciting heroics dominating other Star Wars battle sequences. Instead, this set piece evokes The Battle of Algiers or real footage of cops brutalizing protestors in The Seed of the Sacred Fig or Whose Streets. Committing to a downbeat ending and truly unnerving imagery of ordinary souls screaming as laser blasts fly right over their heads accentuates the production’s haunting atmosphere. In this emotionally draining episode, a piece of Star Wars media reaches tremendous artistry through evoking reality rather than just referencing the franchise’s legacy. I didn’t think an episode of Star Wars television could either operate like this or tap into such viscerally realistic visuals. “Who Are You?” proved me wrong, as did so many other tragically relevant and subversive second season Andor outings.
“Who Are You?’s” tangibly tragic imagery is a microcosm of the fantastic visuals seeping into so many Andor episodes. A crucial part of that visual scheme is a welcome willingness to emphasize empty space. Wide shots placing characters like Bix or Andor on the far side of the frame convey such a vivid sense of scale. All these characters are ultimately cogs in larger machines. Andor’s strikingly expansive images bittersweetly encapsulate that. More intimate blocking, meanwhile, is equally successful. Having Bix stare straight into the camera head-on while reading portions of her final message to Cassian, for instance, lends extra emotional weight to her farewell.
Across nearly 12 hours of television, Andor’s second season can’t help but drum up some shortcomings. Chiefly, condensing four seasons of planned additional material into just 12 episodes results in semi-rushed corners of certain supporting storylines. Such minor issues, though, are dramatically outweighed by all that these final episodes do oh so right. That includes often undramatic endings for characters we’ve come to know and love. Nobody gets tidy resolutions here. Unresolved emotional yearnings are intentionally left dangling in the wind. Enduring another day often feels more like a curse than a blessing to those Andor characters who make it to the show’s final minutes.
Within that home stretch of series finale "Jedha, Kyber, Erso,” a familiar voice is heard. Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther) recites his manifesto. "The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort," he remarks through an audio recording. It has now been years since he perished. A conversation between Partagaz (Anton Lesser), who is listening to this recording, and another Imperial officer reveals that the author of this manifesto is now unknown. Yet Nemik hasn’t vanished into history. His words live on. Partagaz himself admits that they keep cropping up everywhere.
Existence is challenging under the best of times. Existence under authoritarianism every more so. Andor unflinchingly chronicles both the endless manifestations of rebellion and the weariness of even securing minor victories in rebelling against fascism. Yet it is necessary to rebel. To live. To keep going. You don’t need glory or statues carved in your honor to have lived a fulfilling life. Andor concerns souls like Cassian Andor or Nemik that George Eliot wrote about in her book Middlemarch (which inspired the title of Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life). Andor's characters deliver what Eliot would call "unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Stories about such “hidden” souls are rendered with deliciously poetic dialogue (every word out of Krennic's mouth when he's interrogating Meero is so phenomenally distinctive), visual mastery, and profound emotional power in the hands of Andor artists like showrunner Tony Gilroy. The show even manages to deliver two loveable droid characters (I forgot how much I adored every inch of K-2SO until he came on-screen and was hysterical) and queer women kissing on-screen. Robots, gay ladies, and a contempt for authoritarianism, those are the core traits of all good art. Perhaps this is the end of an era for Star Wars or even the realization of this galaxy’s full creative potential. Andor’s larger place in cultural history will materialize in time. What will remain eternally clear, though, is the jaw-dropping artistry imbued into these 12 remarkable episodes.