The year is 2025 and, ten years since I first picked it up, I’ve found myself compelled to reinstall EA/DICE’s 2015 re-boot of Star Wars: Battlefront. After a couple minutes refamiliarizing myself with the controls and interface, I click the “Multiplayer” button and hold my breath as the game searches for an active server. Within minutes I’m loading into a game of Supremacy on the map Twilight on Hoth. The game is ten years old, and the server is full.

I’m not the only one who’s experienced something like this. In the last two months, Battlefront’s 2017 sequel has been experiencing a seeming second lease on life, culminating in the feat of breaking its lifetime concurrent player count on Steam. People just can’t get enough of Star Wars in 2025, and to anyone paying attention, there can only be one reason why.

Right before the mass return to Battlefront 2 began to pick up speed, on 13 May 2025, the series finale of Andor: A Star Wars Story went live on Disney+.

In a vacuum, this is perhaps not that remarkable—dead games get reanimated all the time, from high-profile cases like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky to quieter, niche undertakings like the efforts of a dedicated community to preserve the playability of Team Fortress 2. 

Battlefront’s resurrection superficially resembles something akin to that of Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky—a sudden, massive cultural re-evaluation of its merits following some efforts by its developers to make it slightly less…well, shit. Battlefront is something like the ur-flop of the flop era of gaming, the litmus test for the state in which increasing numbers of so-called “AAA games" would release over the next decade.

To say its launch was a failure might not be strictly accurate by sales metrics: despite missing EA’s sales target of 10 million units by January 2018, Battlefront was the second best-selling PlayStation game in the United States, second only to that year’s installment of Call of Duty. However, despite moving 9 million units across all formats in 2017, Battlefront 2’s launch was remembered for a combination of corporate cash-grabbing and gameplay jank that have become fixtures of the multiplayer market in current year.

The fact that it was the sequel to a game only two years old at the time, which had been receiving active content updates as recently as December 2016, and that Battlefront’s 2 arcade-y, third-person gameplay felt like a regression to many fond of the 2015 game’s focused, first-person skirmishing likely didn’t help its lukewarm reception. No small part of it can, of course, also be attributed to a massive scandal regarding the game’s loot boxes whose fallout indelibly reshaped the industry’s approach to in-game microtransactions.

In the wake of that controversy, publisher EA were forced to significantly tone down the degree to which microtransactions were integrated into the game—not least because the European Union was threatening to ban it under the pretense it constituted gambling for children—and there we have a nice tidy narrative of Battlefront’s revival: DICE listened to gamers; they fixed Battlefront 2.

I, for one, am skeptical of all the claims that “Battlefront 2 is good now, actually.” Hell, I played it the night before I wrote this article. Under the hood it’s still a pretty janky—if often fun—arcade shooter, mired in some of the same issues that turned longtime fans off DICE’s other shooter from that time, Battlefield V.

If anything, I think these claims belie a more fundamental and simple truth: a lot of people just really want to enjoy Star Wars. After all, I never played either Battlefront because they represented the best sample of the multiplayer shooter genre. Compared to games like Titanfall, Call of Duty, and even their sister franchise Battlefield, their gameplay is fundamentally lacking in many ways; their mechanics dull, their gunplay loose and floaty, their skill ceiling shallow.

The reason I play Battlefront is ultimately because it has one thing none of those games has: it’s Star Wars. 

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a closet Star Wars fan. For all its admitted stupidity (and the fact it got me bullied in elementary school) this little franchise about space wizards is quite simply one of my favourite things of all time. 

Star Wars is the first movie I remember watching. As a kid, I devoured The Clone Wars TV series, and as an adolescent, I tore through the Extended Universe novels. I devoured all the Star Wars I could get my hands on. I played its tabletop roleplaying game. I even had a tackle box full of X-Wing Miniatures.

Of course, after Disney purchased the franchise and the sequel trilogy telegraphed their intent to suck copious amounts of dong, my love of Star Wars tempered, and it became a significantly lesser part of my personality than it had been. I still kept up with the movies, mostly; was vaguely aware of whatever Star Wars thing was on TV; read a handful of the novels to see what this new Disney timeline had to offer; and, of course, played a couple hundred hours of Battlefront; though mostly I was content to keep my Star Wars fandom on the DL.

Cause here’s the thing—and any dyed-in-the-wool Star Wars cocksucker is going to hate me for saying this—most of Star Wars is not very good. My brother’s tried to get me to watch The Bad Batch, Ahsoka, the Obi-Wan show, and some of the other slop Disney has spent millions of dollars on to populate the “Star Wars” tab on their in-house streaming service, and I’m sorry to say that they’re all appallingly, viscerally cringe-worthingly bad.

It’s not just that some of these shows are written for children—things can still be written for children and be enjoyable, if not great pieces of entertainment—it’s that Star Wars in the Disney era is written for stupid people.

I mean that sincerely: look up the definition of an idiot plot and you get the basic premise of most Star Wars made since 2015. You can count the amount of good Star Wars that’s been made—not just since the Disney acquisition, but ever—on one hand.

I’ll note that when I say “good Star Wars,” I am excluding the novels and videogames and other tie-in properties. To the overwhelming majority of people, Star Wars is a thing you see at the movie theatre or on television. Star Wars is a popular medium. Novels—especially out-of-print tie-in paperbacks published in the mid-90s—realistically are not. 

And that’s a problem to me, because I wish more people were able to engage with the world of Star Wars in a popular medium, without having to hunt through Reddit threads for ePubs of Michael A. Stackpole’s X-Wing: Rogue Squadron series and then, by extension, having to engage with the type of people that read them.

That’s ultimately why it’s telling that the resurrection of Battlefront 2 should coincide not with the release of—I don’t know—the Mace Windu book or The Acolyte tie-ins, but with Andor, because not only is Andor good Star Wars in a popular medium, it’s the best Star Wars has been in years.

This is the bit where I eat my words. When I wrote a Cinevangelism about Star Wars, I was outright dismissive of the notion that the spin-off about the “I have been in this fight since I was six years old” guy from Rogue One could ever be good. I would even say that was a sound assumption, based purely on the quality of that film and its successors, and yet against all odds, Andor really is incredibly good.

It’s to the point where Andor is not just the best Star Wars has been in the last decade. It’s not even that it’s the best Star Wars since The Clone Wars, the Prequels, or even the end of the original trilogy. Andor might just be the best thing Star Wars has produced since 1980 and the release of Empire. 

It’s that fucking good.

But why is it good? We’ll get to that. A better question to start with is “What is Andor?” Good question, reader! Let’s define our terms.

Andor is a television series created by Tony Gilroy set in the Star Wars galaxy which comprises two seasons of twelve episodes apiece. The show does star Diego Luna as Cassian Andor, though it’s debatable the extent to which the show named after his character (in keeping with the abysmal convention of the Disney+ eponymous naming scheme) is actually about…well, Andor.

You see, Andor is less interested in being The Cassian Show™ than it is in chronicling the formation of the Rebel Alliance—otherwise known as “the guys who blow up the Death Star in the first movie,” or the Space Viet Kong. It’s an ensemble piece, with characters like Denise Gough’s Dedra Meero, Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn, and Genevieve O’Reilly as Senator-cum-Rebel Leader Mon Mothma being given as much if not more time than the show’s namesake in any given episode.

There’s a good reason for this too, as the story of the Rebellion is not just the story of one dirtbag-turned militant. It is the story of countless people’s collective sacrifice to a cause greater than any of them alone. 

Andor is set in the tail end of the period between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars, at the height of the Galactic Empire. The first episode finds Cassian five years before the pivotal Battle of Yavin (the one where they blow up the Death Star), where a run-in with corporate police on the planet Morlana One leaves him wanted for murder. 

From here, it follows Cassian as he gets swept up by spymaster Luthen Rael (played by a scenery-chewing Stellan Skarsgård), who enlists him to train a Rebel cell on the Imperial-occupied planet Aldhani to steal the payroll for the entire planetary sector from a heavily-fortified Imperial garrison.

The show continues this style of semi-episodic storytelling over its remaining 18 episodes, with each season roughly divided into short, multi-episode arcs exploring various genre tropes (e.g. heist, prison break, noir thriller, protest film) which each connect into the overarching story of the emerging Rebellion. 

This summary is all well and good, and might even sound cool enough on its face to convince you to watch, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of why Andor is great. 

What makes it different from Star Wars Rebels, a show set at around the same time with the same basic premise of showing the early days of the Rebellion? What makes it different from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which takes similar inspiration from the adventure serials that originally informed Star Wars to tell multi-episode stories in an anthology series exploring various genre tropes? What makes it better than any other Disney+ series about the tragic backstory of Glup Shitto, your favourite background character from The Star Wars Holiday Special?

Well for one, it’s really well made. I mean, compare the first episode of Andor to the scene in the first episode of the Obi-Wan Kenobi show where child Princess Leia gets chased around by men in rubber suits.

At the expense of any subtlety here, it’s quite literally night and day.

I admittedly feel a bit bad ragging on the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, a project mired in no small number of production issues and with largely untested talent behind the camera; giving a brand-new director Ewan Macgregor and Disney money and expecting them to somehow produce gold on that basis alone is a somewhat ludicrous ask. 

By contrast, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy has the experience of having written the Bourne movies and, crucially, having worked on Star Wars before—he co-wrote and directed (uncredited) reshoots for 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. 

Oh, and his brother (who wrote six episodes of Andor) is literally the Nightcrawler guy. That movie’s pretty good, even if 4chan likes it just a little too much! Put aside even the Gilroys and it’s clear there’s just a lot of raw talent on the team making Andor. 

It’s easy to credit the cast because, yeah, Skarsgård, O’Reilly, and Anton Lesser are all on fire—but then, they’re all proven talent who would hardly be expected to deliver anything less.

The supporting cast are great. Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Andy Serkis’ characters are both incredibly memorable in spite of their scant screen time. Ben Mendelsohn and Forest Whitaker are both doing the absolute most.

It's remarkable the difference it makes to a project when the actors actually want to be there. The chasm between Oscar Isaac's declaration that he will never do a Star Wars project again—WHILE ON THE RISE OF SKYWALKER PRESS CIRCUIT—and Ben Mendelsohn gleefully telling interviewers that he got to play Krennic "fruitier" this time is a mile wide.

But it’s the people behind the camera that really shine, to me. Toby Haynes, who’s previously worked on Doctor Who and Sherlock, directs most of season 1, and it’s clear he’s very comfortable with the series’ sci-fi aesthetic and finding clever ways to shoot on an admittedly limited soundstage which still manages to convincingly evoke the feeling of an exoplanetary city on Ferrix.

Another well-deserved shoutout must go to Janus Metz, who came to season 2 of Andor off prior work on True Detective and as a documentary filmmaker during the war in Afghanistan. His episodes in particular stand out as visual triumphs of the season, the influence of war photography evident in the way he blocks a truly visceral sequence where the Imperial garrison on an occupied planet ruthlessly executes a group of civilian protesters.

This segues nicely into another reason why Andor is so phenomenally good: for once, the Galactic Empire feels like a legitimate threat. When I say that Andor is the best thing since Empire, this is perhaps what I mean. This is a story in which the Empire are unequivocally evil, not the Scooby-Doo villains of Rebels or the grandstanding high-school theatre rejects of the sequel trilogy’s First Order, but proper, ireedeemable fascists who zealously seek to prop up their authoritarian rule over the Galaxy.

This is an Empire who kills indiscriminately and is more than happy to use torture to achieve its ends. The Empire displays a general intolerance towards difference and an indifference towards life—all that is secondary to its guiding maxim that might makes right.

And while this capital-E evil Empire—planet-destroying superweapons program and all—is a Star Wars concept which has long threatened to tip over into the outright absurd, what’s most chilling about Andor is the steps the show takes to humanize it.

Any given episode of Andor spends, on average, as much time with its handful of recurring Imperials as it does those Rebels fighting them. Gough and Soller’s characters, Deedra and Syrril, serve as audience surrogates of sorts.

Both are young and ambitious. Meero, an up-and-coming agent in the Imperial Security Bureau, wants recognition from her superiors and seeks to climb the Imperial ladder. Karn wants to remedy what he sees to be a “wrong”—Cassian’s murder of those space cops in episode one—hoping that he, in turn, will be rewarded for doing the right thing. 

Their aims are straightforward—understandable, even—and all told, they are just as integral to the narrative as any of the heroes of the Rebellion who they spend the series trying to exterminate.

Through the characters of Dedra and Syrril, Andor shows that the real horror of the Empire is not its figureheads in Palpatine or Vader (who never appear outright, instead haunting the narrative by mention only) or the spectacle of the Death Star program. Instead, what makes the Empire terrifying is people’s willingness to submit to its status quo.

The Imperial lackeys of Andor are all too willing to commit atrocities for depressingly banal reasons: because they want a well-paying government job, because they'd rather tow the line than cause trouble, because they want their mothers to be proud of them. That, Gilroy seems to conclude, is what makes the Empire Evil. The mundicides and Jedi pogroms are just the most visible expressions of that fact.

This serves the purpose of making the Rebellion not only righteous, but demonstrably necessary. In Star Wars (1977) there’s initially this tension within Luke when he first meets C-3PO and R2-D2 and is told about their mission to help the Rebel Alliance. Luke knows the Empire isn’t all sunshine and fucking rainbows, but he’s reluctant to aid and abbet the Rebels because, well, so long as he’s kept his head down the Empire’s left him alone. 

What it takes to radicalize him is the Empire killing his aunt and uncle in their search for 3PO and R2. This anger is later cemented into legitimate political belief when he witnesses the Empire’s willingness to obliterate Alderaan for the purpose of controlling the Galaxy—and there we have it: a tight little character arc.

What Andor does with Cassian and his various acquaintances is effectively the same thing over a longer period of time, and with a greater scope. If Star Wars is mostly about Luke and Han’s radicalization through Leia—who is already a militant at the start of the movie—Andor uses its eponymous hero to show how swathes of people come to the same conclusion, and, crucially, organize.

The Rebels we meet in Star Wars are already a well-trained militia, but as of the start of Andor they’ve yet to build any of that infrastructure. Not only does Cassian play an integral part in transforming the Rebel Alliance from a smattering of extremist cells into something resembling a legitimate political force, as he becomes increasingly swept up in the revolutionary mindset, we see the continued expansion of the Rebels’ infrastructure and the ongoing construction of their Yavin IV base.

Holy shit. Is that like some kind of metaphor? What Star Wars property am I watching?

It makes sense that Yavin is effectively a mirror to Cassian—his experience over the two seasons of the show is a stand-in for the things which brought all the others to the Rebellion. In this sense he’s a true everyman, a literal embodiment of the fact that this could happen to anyone.

Cassian starts the very first episode as a smuggler and a thief, happy to keep his head down and scrape by off less-than-legal means on the frontiers of the Galaxy, where the Empire’s influence on everyday life is negligible compared to the richer worlds in the Galactic Core. The thing that transforms him is not that he wakes up one day and thinks to himself “Man, the Empire’s kind of shitty, eh? Maybe I should go martyr myself”—it’s that he is confronted with a level of institutional cruelty from the Empire that forces him to conclude that it’s his only choice.

In the first season, Cassian is hunted by the government and tossed in a prison which employs ruthless corporal punishment and leverages inmates for slave labour, only to be subjected to the subjugation of his home planet when he finally escapes. The only people who have welcomed him along the way have been those weird, idealistic Rebels whom he meets on Aldhani, who share their dreams for a better Galaxy.

His is the story of a man transformed through suffering, made empathetic through an understanding of the cruelty of the world. Cassian Andor is not a Rebel because it’s the right thing to do. He rebels because the Rebellion is the only thing he has left.

Crucially, though, it’s not just that the Rebel Alliance are righteous, or necessary. It’s that for the first time in some 40 years, they’re actually fucking cool.

You see, I think the Rebel Alliance has long had a branding problem. Despite being the goodies in the original Star Wars trilogy, theirs is the unglamorous status of underdogs. They have good and righteousness on their side, but at the end of the day it’s Stormtroopers and Darth Vader on your bath towels.

The Empire has iconography. It has vibes. It has Star Destroyers and Tie Fighters and the Imperial March. In a list of Star Wars iconography the bulk of it belongs to the Empire. Even the best Star Wars spin-off material of the last ten years—the new Thrawn trilogy, the Darth Vader Marvel run, and Battlefront II: Inferno Squadron—are about the Empire.

And that’s shitty, because fascism is for losers. 

It is a loser ideology, an opiate of the closed-minded and weak of will. The Empire is insubstantial, a devouring, ur-fascist death cult which views its adherents not as people so much as potential bodies for the pile.

And yet, in a world where Star Wars merchandising is so predicated on the marketing of fascist iconography, it’s easy to forget that. Because, coolness is largely apolotical and yes, in a vacuum, Stormtroopers are kind of cool. Space brutalism is an interesting aesthetic. Certainly the Empire is more iconic than the Rebels ever have been, even if a Starbird is dead easy to draw.

To this end, Star Wars has been fighting a losing battle with itself since the end of Jedi—how do you reconcile the essential fact that yes, the Rebels are good, with the fact that they’re portrayed alternately as dopey do-gooders or canon fodder?

The answer is you make Andor.

Andor is the best P.R. the Rebellion has ever gotten—better than Luke Skywalker, better than Han Solo, better than Rogue One, either Battlefront game, or even the (excellent) 2015 Marvel comics runs.

Our heroes are scrappy underdogs, fighting against unfathomable odds with nothing but their wits and blasters about them. This makes them cool, because underdogs generally are. They’re cool in the same way a D&D party is, fitting considering I think Star Wars is the most D&D film of all time.

The Rebellion is cool in Andor because, despite how grim and grimy its vision of the Star Wars Galaxy is, the Rebellion is right, and the Rebellion is winning. Maybe not right away, maybe not in spectacular ways, but in ways which are nonetheless meaningful. This band of oddball freedom fighters are making in-roads, fighting the good fight, laying the groundwork for a better tomorrow.

If there’s one criticism you could leverage at Andor, it’s that it’s a bit of a monologue show. Sure, this has been a thing on television in recent years. You could argue that Steven Moffat’s work on Doctor Who and Sherlock was patient zero, and it’s a common criticism of Mike Flanagan’s horror anthology series.

Monologues are an easy way to signal that something is prestige TV—it’s why all the clips on YouTube from FX’s The Bear are called things like “Carmy’s 7-Minute Monologue”: that’s how you know they’re important.

To be clear, I don’t think monologues are intrinsically bad, or even cheap storytelling. Sure, some people are sick of them, and I’ve seen people dismiss monologues as “hype moments and aura,”—which, well, they’re not wrong—but at the end of the day, it all comes down to how you use them.

Remember, reader, that William Shakespeare is perhaps the most famous author to notoriously deploy monologues ad nauseum. “Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” Hype moments and aura.

But what has Star Wars ever been but the Scottish Play in space? In appropriating the monologue as a storytelling device, Andor is merely cementing itself as belonging to a certain tradition of epic storytelling.

And boy, reader, are these monologues good. It helps that the actors delivering them are obviously great, but man have they written the shit out of them. Sometimes, I’ll watch an episode of Andor and find myself up on my feet, pacing, as Skarsgård delivers a downright gutting soliloquy.

Andor deploys these asides deftly, as tactical verbal barrage, as the culmination of the themes on which it’s been meditating for episodes at a time. It’s the show’s commitment to its own sincerity which sells them; not the ironic detachment of Palpatine’s Darth Plagueis aside in Episode III, but the heartfelt convictions of Rebels fighting for something they believe in. This is a show which is able to sell Forest Whitaker’s character spinning huffing space gasoline into a metaphor for revolution.

Crucially, these moments are always given to the Rebels. The Imperials posture—they threaten, and menace, but none of them muster the same stirring conviction that makes up the series’ emotional highs. Because, Andor posits, if the power of fascism is that of symbols and iconography, the triumph of rebellion lies in rhetoric.

The Rebellion is cool in Andor because they are right—because they speak truth to power; because they lay waste to tyrants. The words of Rebels resound because they imagine a world in which tyranny no longer reigns. In imagining that possibility, they construct it, render it inevitable. The words of Andor’s Rebels manifest the impulse of revolution.

Herein lies the series’ greatest trick: it renders itself essential. I and others, when Andor was first announced, were quick to dismiss the idea of such a series outright. Who cared about what happened to Cassian Andor—a side character in a side story in his own film—before the events of Rogue One?

Rogue One had already proven itself inessential—a multimillion dollar roller coaster ride which added little to Star Wars’ cultural cache. How then was Andor, a pigeonhole within a pigeonhole most assuredly, going to justify its own existence?

The answer is that it makes something poetic of the cynical task of slotting pieces into place. In a word: teleology. 

You see Star Wars has always been about predestination. It’s a story about prophecy, for goodness’ sake—about Force and destiny, and the inevitability of good’s triumph over evil.

In the original trilogy this is mostly subtext—vague allusions to the universality of the Force tied up with pieces of Eastern spiritual tradition which were influencing Lucas at the time. The Prequels retroactively formalize this through the prophecy of the Chosen One, who will bring balance to the two sides of the Force.

The Prequels attempt to slot the pieces for this in place—as Lucas’ famous quote goes, “It’s like poetry…it rhymes”—though they don’t necessarily succeed at illustrating the strokes of a narrative so grand and simultaneously intricate it would seem to benefit better from something longform and serial…put a pin in that.

The great narrative failing of the Sequel trilogy is of course that they’re forced to exist after the definitive conclusion of said prophecy, leaving them struggling to figure out how to tell a similarly important story as their predecessors. Their solution—which, to be clear, is a bad one—is the violent reassertion of the old status quo. Your space parents are divorced, their kid is an asshole, the government is fucked again, and Luke is acting a bit like your one uncle who moved to rural BC.

This last one is the problem a lot of the ancillary Disney+ Star Wars content has encountered. How do you tell a story about Obi-Wan Kenobi between Episodes III and IV? You don’t, but you have to because you want to make that sweet, sweet Ewan MacGregor money, so you write something that basically becomes a circular narrative designed to ensure all its pieces ultimately end up in the same place they started. 

It’s fundamentally lazy storytelling which both pisses off the hardcore fans by making swiss cheese of their beloved canon, and frustrates people just looking for a good story, because it isn’t one.

Andor’s magic trick is that it manages to make a story fundamentally oriented towards an attempt to set everything up in Rogue One work, narratively, while making it feel like the incremental gains of its constituent arcs are building piecemeal towards the inevitable victory of the Rebellion at Yavin. It’s no small feat.

Each of the series’ mini setpieces nevertheless contribute to deepening Cassian’s resentment of the Empire, building the infrastructure of the Rebellion and sketching out the impression of the Death Star project such that when the full scale of Project Stardust—the Empire’s so-called “energy project” which serves as official cover for the Death Star construction—is revealed in the final episodes, it all comes together like the conclusion of a mystery procedural.

It’s the kind of storytelling magic you can only pull off over the course of some nearly 24 hours of television. 

Magic. Yeah, that’s as good a word for it as any. It floors me even thinking about it right now.

What floors me even more is simply that this show exists. Not just because it seems an unlikely thing for a Star Wars spin-off property given the marginal screen time of its eponymous lead. Not just because of the obscene amount of money it's rumoured to have cost to make. Not just because it is, admittedly, a fucking excellent bit of television, but because it’s a show that seems to believe in something, and something radical at that.

It’s hard to understate the eerieness of watching the final season of Andor at this moment in time. Watch it and you’ll know what I mean—though it entered production in 2022, this season-long dissection of fascism, genocide, and the military industrial complex feels oddly prescient for this political moment.

This is one of those rare pieces of Star Wars media which takes it upon itself to wrangle with the question of the Galactic Empire. In the Original Trilogy, the Empire largely serves the function of generic antagonists. They are explicitly evocative of fascist iconography, sure, but their narrative purpose is not to be fascistic so much as it is to fill the role of “bad guys.”

This isn’t a criticism, mind—those movies have a considerably more restrained focus than the one a TV show can permit, but it’s a good starting point to understand what makes Andor special. Most Star Wars shows, given the screen time that Andor has to work with, seem to squander their episodes in needless side plots (à la Bad Batch), or try to work backwards from the one episode of eight for which they actually had a plan (à la Kenobi).

Andor devotes its time instead to fleshing out its world, chief of which it devotes to the Empire. This is a show about the mechanics of fascism—how a fascist government operates, how it predates, how it maintains its grip on a populace.

While the spectre of fascism that haunts the body of Star Wars is aesthetically derivative of the Third Reich, its text has always channeled contemporary expressions of authoritarian anxiety. “___ piece of Star Wars media is an allegory for the Vietnam War” is so common an observation as to be practically cliché.

The Iraq War is written all over the Prequel Trilogy, and Andor, with its clandestine Imperial Security Bureau meetings and obsession with transmission and broadcast, is wrapped up in the modern paranoias of information security and propaganda. Despite their conspicuous lack of visible planet-killing superweapons, or even Star Destroyers, the Empire of Andor is infinitely more threatening in its peripheral status as occupying power.

This is a show about living under Empire. If you’re watching it, you may well be living under Empire today.

Now, someone who was as into Theodor Adorno as I was in the twelfth grade may express some degree of skepticism about the ability of a show about space blorbos to tell an affecting story about the anatomy of fascism.

Even as I write this, the Slavoj Zizek in my head is nagging me, saying that ruling ideas have a unique propensity to repackage their antitheses and dissenting beliefs for consumption as entertainment, but even still, there’s a part of me that wants to believe Andor is important, or at the very least noteworthy.

We have seen the Disney era of Star Wars try and shed its political baggage in the name of selling stormtrooper beach towels. Considering the reception of the Sequel Trilogy, it might be fair to brand that a failed venture.

Andor owes its success and near-universal critical praise not just to the fact that it’s Star Wars. Plenty of other things markedly less beloved have borne that name in recent years and failed to inspire the same adulation.

The things that make it exceptional—writing, directing, and politics—are the things that have catapulted Andor towards it. It’s why people talk about this show, why people who don’t give a shit about Star Wars (and haven’t in years) will tell you “hey that new Andor show is actually pretty good.”

It’s not just “pretty good,” Andrew. It’s fucking great.

Unbeknownst to me, Andor is the thing I was evangelizing when I wrote that Cinevangelism two summers ago: a self-serious, lore-agnostic, heartfelt story with actual fucking teeth. A story which places emphasis on its own quality before its onus to be Star Wars. Paradoxically, this is the very thing that renders it such a good Star Wars story. It cares.

Because yes, deep down, I want to care about Star Wars. I talk a big game about how much I hate it, but I would honestly rather it just be good.

Star Wars is a thing I grew up on, a thing that made me dream. It taught me to hope against impossible odds, and that no person is undeserving of care. If there’s one thing Star Wars is about, it’s hope. The hope that things will get better—perhaps not immediately, nor on their own, but that through collective effort and political will, we can tear the fascists down.

For as much as people comment on how “gritty” and “dark” Andor is, it’s surprisingly steadfast in its conviction to hope. 

Tragic though some of its stories might be, no matter the sacrifices its characters make, nor the suffering which they endure, they never lose sight of the reason they do it. It’s the driving force underpinning the whole show, the thing which makes Luthen’s Season 1 monologue so brutally resonant: the belief that rebellions are nothing without hope. 

As a matter of fact, they’re built on it.

That’s the moment I started writing this; in Season 2 Episode 8, when a bellhop who previously abetted him assures Cassian, in response to the latter’s hope that things will turn out for him, that “Rebellions are built on hope.”

It’s a simple moment, understated compared to the grander setpieces of the season, but it’s one that’s seemingly stuck with people, myself included. It’s one of the ways in which Andor rhymes with its predecessor Rogue One (from which the phrase is lifted), but more than anything, it’s a thesis statement for the show.

It’s the rhetorical equivalent of John William’s iconic piece “Binary Sunset” from the Original Trilogy, a small motif taken on a life of its own. A thing which stirs, which inspires, which reminds of what exactly Star Wars can be. What we can be.

Because for all my cynicism about Star Wars’ potential as radical political exegesis, one is hard pressed to deny that it’s popular media. Few other franchises could resurrect a notionally dead videogame off the quality of a single TV show. The people yearn for space fights.

The thing about popular media is that it’s a barometer. It provides a certain insight into the Overton window. While Andor might not be a text capable of genuinely compelling the public into insurrectionary guerilla warfare, it is nevertheless an indication of certain feelings within the zeitgeist.

I think it’s a good sign that a show like this can be made, can be popular, can be beloved. It’s symptomatic, I hope, of a desire to be better. A desire to see change. 

Andor doesn’t have to be the thing that lights fuse. It’s enough for it to simply reflect certain intrinsic tensions that seem ever-more present in society. As looking-glasses go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Andor is a Star War for the ages—invested in something and genuinely in touch with its time. It’s enough that it got me feeling the Star Wars bug again. As I write this, I’m about an hour deep in the audiobook for Claudia Grey’s Lost Stars. It’s not nearly as good by any means, but I have to confess I felt a little bit giddy when I heard the title fanfare.

It reminds me of the person I was in 2015, when the book came out. Younger, more outspoken, still filled with hope. I believed at the time that the stories we tell could resonate in ways politically profound. Maybe Andor made me think that they still could.

The revolution may not be being televised, but the Rebellion is.