[COLUMN] Andor is the Purest Star Wars | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Andor in its entirety, with the show having wrapped its second and final season last week on Disney+. If you haven’t seen it, you should. I promise I’ll shut up about Andor now.

Every once in a while, the complaint surfaces that Andor, which wrapped up its run this week, is not sufficiently Star Wars. While this criticism is often framed somewhat ambiguously, as if it were a self-evident truth that merits no further unpacking, it seems to come down to certain elements that these critics perceive to be missing from Andor: Jedi, Sith, lightsabers, that sort of thing. The implication is that Andor is not one with the Force, and this separates it from Star Wars.

This is interesting, because the Force clearly does run through Andor. The show exists on the periphery of “the Skywalker Saga”, the spine of mainstream Star Wars media. The series is a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was itself a prequel to the original Star Wars. As such, the show operates at two levels removed from the 1977 classic. There is a sense in which Andor exists at the very fringes of the narrative established in that original film.

This is reflected in the way that the series directly engages with elements like the Force. In the first season, revolutionary Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) offers Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) a necklace as collateral, made from kyber crystal, the element that powers lightsabers. In the second season, Bix Caleen’s (Adria Arjona) takes Cassian to visit a Force Healer (Josie Walker) to help heal a troublesome blaster wound, with Cassian dismissing her mysticism as hocus pocus mumbo jumbo.

However, if one takes a step back and looks at Andor as a whole, the show is very engaged with the idea of the Force. The characters do not identify it as such. Many of the characters do not even perceive or understand it. However, Andor returns time and again to the idea that there is some invisible force that holds the universe together, that connects people to one another and which guides them towards purpose. Cassian may not believe in it, but it is there.

It’s worth considering the origins of Star Wars. George Lucas conceived of Star Wars as an allegory for the Vietnam War. To Lucas, America “was the Empire during the Vietnam War.” The Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) was Richard Nixon. Star Wars was the project that Lucas made after his friend Francis Ford Coppola took control of the film that would become Apocalypse Now, and so it became a holding space for all of Lucas’ ideas about that conflict.

Under Lucas, Star Wars retained its political edge. Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith are both definitive movies of the early Bush era, with critics quick to draw parallels between the rise of the Empire and American policy during the War on Terror. Lucas didn’t acknowledge any intentionality, instead arguing that history was plagiarizing itself. “The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable,” he stated in Cannes, in May 2005.

This is similar to how showrunner Tony Gilroy talks about Andor. The show is timely. The second season opens with Imperial forces victimizing undocumented labor. The season’s preoccupation is “the loss of an objective reality” and “the death of truth”, timely themes in this “post-truth” era. However, Gilroy argues the show is simply drawing from history, describing his process as “catalogue shopping throughout 6,000 years for all kinds of things [he] can [use] all the way through the show.”

In this sense, Andor is a return to the revolutionary and political spirit of the original Star Wars, something that has been largely absent from contemporary Star Wars streaming shows like The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew. This revolutionary spirit is so central to the core of Star Wars that it seems facile to engage with any other facet of the franchise without understanding it in this context. This is particularly true of the Force.

As franchises age, it is increasingly common to treat them as museums of continuity and trivia. This approach reduces big ideas to checklists of minutiae and references. So “the Force” becomes synonymous with the Jedi and the Sith, with lightsabers and midichlorians. It becomes organized and delineated. There is a hierarchy imposed on it, a rational ordering structure. There is, after all, that old story about people marking “Jedi” as their religion on census forms in the United Kingdom.

However, Lucas had a very different conception of the Force. “If you get into the ecology of it then everything is connected,” Lucas argued. “Everything. If something happens to one part, then it happens to all parts, and that, ultimately, is one of the main movements in Star Wars. This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart. The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknowable.”

This is, incidentally, the conception of the Force advanced in The Last Jedi. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) asks Rey (Daisy Ridley), “What do you know about the Force?” Rey replies as many Star Wars fans might, explaining, “It’s a power that Jedi have that lets them control people and make things float.” Luke sighs, correcting her, “The Force is not a power you have. It’s not about lifting rocks. It’s the energy between all things, a tension, a balance, that binds the universe together.”

Luke instructs Rey to meditate and connect with the world. “What do you see?” he presses her. Her eyes closed, Rey begins to commune with the natural world around her. “The island,” she narrates. “Life. Death and decay, that feeds new life. Warmth. Cold. Peace. Violence.” The Force is not any one of these things, but it ties them all together. Luke hammers the point, asking, “And between it all?” Rey responds, “Balance and energy. A Force.”

The Last Jedi dared to suggest that the Jedi did not maintain a monopoly on the Force. “That Force does not belong to the Jedi,” Luke advises Rey. “To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies, is vanity.” The Last Jedi commits to this idea, revealing that Rey is really “Rey from Nowhere”, that she is not part of some royal bloodline, and ending with the implication that the Force can even move through an anonymous child slave (Temirlan Blaev) cleaning out a stable on a distant world.

This democratization of the Force seemed to challenge conceptions of what Star Wars could be. In the next movie, The Rise of Skywalker, JJ Abrams clumsily revealed Rey was really the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, thus keeping the Force “in the family”, so to speak. The Skywalkers remained central to the Star Wars saga. A digitally de-aged Luke appeared in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, while Anakin (Hayden Christensen) appeared in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka.

In this context, Andor feels like a return to George Lucas’ original conception of the Force, as articulated by The Last Jedi. The Force is only mentioned a handful of times within the show, but it is ever present. It finds constant expression in a variety of ways, even if the characters themselves do not explicitly identify it as such, because they do not exist within the framework of Jedi and Sith orthodoxy.

Lucas pointedly refers to the Force as “the energy, the fuel” that drives the universe. The second season of Andor involves a subplot that focuses on Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) stealing the fuel rhydonium from the Empire, leading to a monologue in which he describes “rhydo” as “the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air.” He explains, “I understand it, because she’s my sister, Rhydo, and she loves me. That itch, that burn, you feel how badly she wants to explode?”

Saw is talking about revolution as an abstract concept – “revolution is not for the sane!” – but he frames it as an abstract cosmological force. Luthen also talks about the revolution as something that requires combustible fuel. Cassian fears that Luthen’s stoking of rebellion on Ghorman will lead the planet to “go up in flames.” Luthen responds, “Then it will burn… very brightly.” There is a sense that universe is bound together by something large and intangible.

Young Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther) writes a manifesto that circulates widely. He speaks from beyond the grave, like Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, Alec Guinness) addressing Luke. Nemik contends freedom “occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere.” Pointedly, his closing plea to “try” feels like a rejoinder to Yoda’s (Frank Oz) assertion that “there is no try.”

The show genuinely believes in Nemik. In his final moments before ending his own life, having dedicated his career to the imposition of Imperial order, Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser) listens back to Nemik’s manifesto. “Just keeps spreading, doesn’t it?” Partagaz muses, quietly. “Why do you think that is?” The implication is that it spreads because it is true. It speaks to something profound that exists beyond the rational and materialist confines of the larger world.

There are moments when Andor makes this subtext explicitly spiritual. The first season culminates in an uprising on Ferrix at the funeral of Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw). As Corv (Noof Ousellam) explains, Ferrix burial customs are distinctive. “The dead are bricked,” he tells Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). “They mix your ashes with mortar and local stone dust, put your name on and fire it up.” After that, “they find you a wall.”

It is a very literal expression of the idea that the individual is greater than themselves, that they are part of something larger than just their own life. In death, they become part of the literal fabric of the world. What is this but another expression of the central thesis of the Force, and in particular the idea that death allows one to become part of the larger living Force? Fittingly, Maarva addresses Ferrix from beyond the grave, as a holoprojection that inspires and guides rebellion.

Part of the beauty and the structure of Andor is the show’s scope and scale. It is built around that idea Lucas articulated as essential to the Force, that “if something happens to one part, then it happens to all parts.” Throughout Andor, characters and events are connected to one another in ways that only the audience can understand due to the way that the story is told and the show is edited. There is a thread to the universe, perceptible only to those outside of it.

Cassian will never know that the parts he assembled on Narkina 5 were actually for the Death Star, the weapon that will ultimately kill him on Scarif. When Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) confronts Cassian on the Ghorman Plaza, looking for catharsis for the career that he destroyed in his pursuit of Cassian, the rebel can only respond with a question, “Who are you?” The two lives have been intertwined, but Cassian does not recognize him. He cannot see those connections from his vantage point.

Some of the characters within the narrative can sense these connections, even if they cannot name them as the Force. Andor heavily implies that the title character is guided by something other than his own free will. When Cassian warns Luthen that the Empire will find him, Luthen replies, “You act as if we had a choice. Eventually they’ll hang us both, won’t they? We set that course the first time we met.” Cassian disputes this idea, but Luthen presses him, “You see no truth in that?”

“I make my own decisions,” Cassian insists, but the show itself disputes that idea. “Is that what you’ve been doing?” Luthen asks, mockery in his voice. “Sometimes I wonder. You appeared when I needed you – Aldhani, Narkina, Ferrix, Seinar, Mina-Rau, Ghorman – and here we are.” This comes shortly after the Force Healer on Yavin describes Cassian as “a messenger” and tells Bix, “There’s some place he needs to be.” It’s ultimately Bix who decides for Cassian, leaving him to the Rebellion.

This connection to the larger cosmology of Star Wars becomes more apparent in the show’s final arc. That final arc is built around the death of Luthen, framing the character in the grand Star Wars tradition of “problematic absent father figures” to both Cassian Andor and to Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau). After Luthen is captured by Meero, he attempts suicide. Meero rushes him to hospital, and Kleya is forced to infiltrate the hospital to kill Luthen before he can be revived and tortured.

At the risk of being glib, this is the quintessential Star Wars story: a mythic reframing of a child turning off their father’s life support machine, as Luke must ultimately do for Darth Vader (James Earl Jones, David Prowse) in The Return of the Jedi. It is a very conscious and very deliberate parallel, and it is not the first time that Andor has evoked Vader in its framing of Luthen. Luthen’s powerhouse monologue in the first season is framed to evoke Vader’s iconic “I am your father!” scene.

This is not the only obvious Star Wars parallel to be found in the final stretch of Andor. In the show’s opening scenes, it defined Cassian Andor as a character shaped by loss. He was born as Kassa on the planet Kenari, one of a handful of survivors of a brutal ethnic cleansing. He is searching for his long lost sister Kerri (Belle Swarc). This neatly mirrors the familial arc of Luke Skywalker, who discovers that Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is his long-lost sister in Return of the Jedi.

Following Luthen’s death, Cassian embarks upon a risky mission to Coruscant to rescue Kleya before she can be captured by Imperial forces. The show very consciously wants the audience to understand Kleya as a surrogate for Cassian’s long-lost sister Kerri. Kleya shares Kerri’s brown hair. She is another of Luthen’s lost children. Right before making the trip, Cassian is haunted by nightmares of Kerri, cementing the connection and demonstrating that the loss still weighs heavy on his mind.

More than that, the show reveals that Kleya has a very similar background to Cassian. On some distant world, Luthen was complicit in eradicating the indigenous population, when he found a young girl hiding in the storage space on his ship. This is obviously not Kenari. There is talk of clearing out a “basement” and setting “that whole street on fire”, suggesting a very different ecosphere than the jungle planet of Kenari. However, Kleya is another victim of colonialism and imperialism.

Indeed, part of the genius of Andor is the way in which it reframes Cassian’s arc in Rogue One. In that movie, Cassian is enlisted by Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) to help steal the plans for the Death Star, enabling the events of the original Star Wars. Knowing Cassian’s history as articulated by Andor, it is possible to understand Jyn as another surrogate sister standing in for Kerri. Jyn is another orphan of the broader imperial and colonial project, another short brunette who needs Cassian’s help.

Kleya and Jyn are Cassian’s sisters in a more abstract sense than Leia is Luke’s sister, just as Luthen is Cassian’s father in a more metaphorical sense than Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Still, it is a very pointed invocation of the narrative framework of the original Star Wars. Indeed, Kleya is even named and styled in such way as to evoke Leia, to suggest that connection. In exploring this familial dynamic, Andor is in very direct conversation with the original Star Wars trilogy.

While the similarities invite the comparison, it is the differences that are revealing. The original Star Wars trilogy evolved into a tale of nobility and bloodlines. There is nothing wrong with this, it is a familiar trope of these sorts of stories. However, this emphasis on blood purity and familial connection could distract from and even undermine the broader point that Lucas was making about the importance of solidarity and connection.

One of the most frequent criticisms of Andor focuses on Cassian himself, the argument that he is the show’s “least interesting character” who is occasionally reduced to “a passive prisoner.” In many ways, this feels like the point of the show. As much as Cassian occupies the narrative center of Andor, he does not suffer from “main character syndrome.” The entire universe does not revolve around him. Cassian is primarily notable because he is an ordinary person trying to do the right thing.

In The Return of the Jedi, the point at which Star Wars starts to turn in on itself, Luke essentially abandons his friends and their struggle to prioritize his own reconciliation with his father. In contrast, Andor builds off the original Star Wars and The Last Jedi by democratizing the Force and placing an emphasis on a character who comes from nowhere. Cassian uses his own pain and his own trauma to help others. He is never reunited with Kerri, but he channels his love for her into a greater purpose.

Andor is a sort of herald, an enabler, a guide. In the season premiere, he consoles the nervous Niya (Rachelle Diedericks). “If I die tonight, was it worth it?” she asks. Cassian replies, “This makes it worth it. This. Right now. Being with you, being here at the moment you step into the circle. Look at me, you made this decision long ago. The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself.” Niya is reclaiming her own story. In that moment, Cassian argues she is the most important person in the world, not him.

In this sense, Andor feels like a gnostic take on what the Force and Star Wars have become, evoking that early spiritual movement that “prioritized individual insight and spiritual freedom over institutional authority.” Central to Andor is the idea that there is not one single cohesive rebellion or narrative, but that “everyone has their own rebellion”, and that each person’s path to that awakening is their own, even if it is shaped by and in conversation with something more primal and universal that binds it all together. It is an incredibly spiritual idea.

In that sense, Andor has always understood the Force, and it has allowed Star Wars to come home to itself.