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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘ANDOR’: THE ‘STAR WARS’ SHOW THAT KNOWS WHAT FASCISM REALLY
LOOKS LIKE  
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Tyler Huckabee
May 6, 2025
Sojourners
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_ Andor, Tony Gilroy’s prequel series leading up to the events of
Rogue One, is a Star Wars story about the people who would be
background extras in other Star Wars stories. _

Andor, Disney

 

In 2018, blockbuster guru James Cameron hosted a fascinating
conversation with _Star Wars_ creator George Lucas. While discussing
the original trilogy for Cameron’s _Story of Science
Fiction _series, the conversation turned to war and resistance.
Cameron observes that the Rebel Alliance is not playing by any
accepted mainstream definition of heroism. 

CAMERON: The good guys are the rebels. They’re using asymmetric
warfare against a highly organized empire. I think we call those guys
terrorists today. We call them Mujahideen. We call them al Qaeda. 

LUCAS: When I did it, they were called Viet Cong. 

CAMERON: Exactly. So were you thinking of that at the time? 

LUCAS: Yes. 

Money, ubiquity, and familiarity have blunted the radical force of
Lucas’ original vision, so much so that it’s not unusual
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nostalgia-poisoned fans wistfully recalling his original trilogy as a
time before “everything got so political.” But Cameron, always a
fine student of sci-fi politics, notes that not only were Luke, Leia,
and Han taking part in an explicitly political drama; they were
fighting on the side most of the viewing public — at least in modern
Western politics — would consider “the bad guys.” 

CAMERON: f you look at the inception of [the United States of
America], it’s a very noble fight. You look at the situation now,
where America’s so proud of being the biggest economy and most
powerful military force on the planet: It’s become the Empire!”

LUCAS: It was the Empire during the Vietnam War. But we never learned
from England or Rome or a dozen other empires that went on for
hundreds of years, or sometimes thousands of years. We never got it. 

_Star Wars _fans are not inclined to see themselves as the Storm
Troopers any more than Christian readers of the New Testament are
inclined to see themselves as the Romans. It would take a pretty
dramatic and radical type of _Star Wars _story to resituate the
whole galactic conflict within a political framework that snapped
Lucas’ original vision back into focus. It would take something
like _Andor. _The second season, which is releasing in three-episode
batches on Disney+, is one of the better TV shows of any genre so far
this year. 

_Andor_, Tony Gilroy’s prequel series leading up to the events
of _Rogue One_, is a _Star Wars _story about the people who would
be background extras in other _Star Wars _stories. There are no
chosen ones bringing balance to the Force or deposed princesses being
rescued by New Hopes. There are only ordinary people struggling to
live, love, fight, and die with some dignity beneath an authoritarian
shadow. 

Take the show’s namesake Cassian Andor (a gripping, locked-in Diego
Luna), who has spent the better part of his life cautiously tiptoeing
around Imperial rule until circumstances drag him into the thick of
the fledgling fight. He is not a revolutionary like Saw Gerrera
(Forest Whitaker) or a disaffected elite like Mon Mothma (Genevieve
O’Reilly). He’s just a guy who becomes surrounded by men and women
who’ve devoted themselves to desperate, scrambling efforts to do
some sort of damage to the Empire, and decides to start doing his own
part to gum up the cogs of the Imperial machine.

And it is a _machine. Andor_’s Empire is a long way down from the
space magic and planet explosions familiar to all. At this show’s
ground level, the Empire does not need the Force to choke the life out
of you. The first episode of Season 2 boldly devotes nearly a third of
its running time to an Empire boardroom meeting, where Imperial
director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) discusses a heady plan for
galactic energy independence that is clearly a thin pretext for
further authoritarian overreach. This Empire runs on bureaucracy,
veiled threats, and countless low-level cogs who are just doing their
jobs. All this gives _Andor _something _Star Wars_ hasn’t had in
ages: timeliness. 

READ MORE: Rogue One Adds a Dark, Sobering Chapter To Ongoing 'Wars'
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Lucas himself made attempts to go here in his prequel trilogy, which
was dinged by fans and critics alike for spending too much time on
political discourse around trade routes, exploring how a nascent
Empire topped the democratic order by smuggling fascist rule in
through populist economic policy. Read basically any headline in the
United States right now and you’ll be forced to admit that Lucas was
downright prophetic here, even if it all ended up being very boring to
watch. But that might have been part of the point: The collapse of
democracies is often boring. 

Admit it. Didn’t you think fascism would _feel _different? That it
would explode onto the scene rather than creep in through bureaucratic
channels? It has been one of the strangest features of the last few
months of Trump’s second term, a term that has been marked by
lawlessness and defiance of the constitutional order. As I write this,
there are men and women rotting in jails who’ve committed no crime
except holding opinions
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government doesn’t like. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
detained college students
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the street, fathers
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their cars, and children
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young to know what’s going on. There’s at least one man
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seems to have disappeared entirely. The Supreme Court has ordered the
executive branch to outline steps for its plans to return a man ICE
accidentally threw into an El Salvador prison, and that order seems to
be collecting dust
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Several judges have been arrested
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police, while our self-proclaimed president-king, having already tried
to defy the results of one election, is now bragging about winning
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election in which he is not legally allowed to participate. If this is
not authoritarianism, what would authoritarianism look like? And yet
the processes that got us here — a series of below-the-fold policy
decisions, conservative radicalization, liberal capitulation, dark
money transfers, and manufactured moral panics — failed to arrest
the attention of the mainstream voting public until it was too late. 

And how goes the struggle against this clear and present threat to
democracy? Most of us are just trying to keep our heads down and get
by, which is easier for some than others. We’re scared and upset,
sure, but what are we really supposed to do? It turns out that for
people of certain means, life under authoritarianism can kind of, sort
of, go on. As Luke Skywalker himself would “later” whine to
Obi-Wan Kenobi in _A New Hope_: “It’s not that I like the Empire,
I hate it. But there’s nothing I can do about it right now.”

But that doesn’t really sit right, so some of us get involved with
local resistance efforts, throwing our time and resources toward
protecting immigrants, defending the rights of transgender kids, and
shoring up voting rights in our communities. But the more involved you
get, the more it seems like these efforts are a waste of time. The
work is small potatoes, dull, and doesn’t seem to have much of an
impact. And any time there is some sort of attempt at bold, defiant
action, it gets hobbled by pesky infighting. 

_Andor _is keenly aware of all this, and for every daring daylight
raid on an Imperial outpost, there are three scenes in which our
“heroes” are frustrated by their own lack of organization,
resources, or unified front. When Cassian finds himself stranded amid
an unfamiliar and hostile resistance group, he tries to assure them
that he’s for the Rebellion. 

“Whose rebellion?” they spit back, right before falling prey to
their own factions. Leftist infighting, it seems, is a constant in any
galaxy. 

And there’s an astounding sequence when Mon, faced with mounting
threats on all sides of her clandestine attempts to aid the burgeoning
Rebellion, all but disassociates at her daughter’s arranged wedding.
Knocking back a few drinks, hitting the dance floor, and losing
yourself in a desperate bid for joy might be familiar to anyone
who’s ever found themselves so paralyzed by this administration’s
actions that escapism felt like the only option available. 

This is all a long way of saying that _Andor _understands that
resistance is hard, messy, boring, and comes with as many irritating
setbacks as it does great personal risks. Very few of us will get to
be Han Solo shaking off TIE Fighters or Kylo Ren bisecting Supreme
Leader Snoke with a lightsaber. But you don’t get those moments
without the frustrating work of building an alliance.
In _Andor, _Cassian, Mon, Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), and the rest
are trying to organize a rebellion — and find that doing so sucks.
But then, the only thing worse than fighting fascism is accepting it.

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Tyler Huckabee [[link removed]]

Tyler Huckabee is the managing editor of sojo.net.

* Andor
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* disney+
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* Star Wars
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* Fascism
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