The Star Wars universe isn’t in a great place at the moment. New films have been planned and canned about as quickly as new TV shows have been rolled out. Some of them have been brilliant, but there’s been a lot – too many, maybe, for the franchise to keep its sense of prestige. Andor returns as a sequel to a prequel to a spin-off, but it’s by far the best Star Wars has been in years.
You’ll want to catch up if you haven’t already. The first, excellent, season of Andor picked up a loose thread from Rogue One (itself a prequel to 1977’s A New Hope) and told the story of how a thief became a rebel. More gritty and grown-up than everything else in the franchise, Andor was pitched as a serious thriller about the rise of unchecked power. Three years later, in a real-world political climate that sometimes feels more like sci-fi than the movies, Andor returns to double down on everything that made the first season work so well.
“We all have our own rebellion, right?” says one character, framing the theme of the show as everyone struggles to work out what’s worth fighting for. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is now a rebel guerilla, stealing a prototype X-Wing in the opening and spending a few early episodes trying to steer it back to a small rebel base that’s growing stronger by the day.
Bix (Adria Arjona) is struggling on a deeper level – traumatised by her recent past and now turning to drugs after the threat of sexual violence looms over her again (yep, Star Wars goes there). Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is still trading her own family to try and bring the system down from the inside; Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) is back in deep cover; while Imperial supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is still stepping on everyone’s head to climb the corporate ladder, including her snivelling new boyfriend, Imperial simp Syril (Kyle Soller).
There are sizeable time skips across the whole season, but the main story rests on the Empire’s efforts to take control of an industrial nation so they can strip mine the rare minerals out of the ground (sound familiar?). Realising they can do it faster if a local “terrorist” opposition gets the right kind of bad press, everyone starts pointing fingers as tensions boil over across the galaxy.
Tony Gilroy’s meaty script gives us a smartened-up Star Wars here, and everything else drips with the same quality – from the taut, brutal action scenes and the detailed production design to a leading cast that excels beyond anything seen in the franchise. O’Reilly and Arjona, especially, give us such starkly grounded emotional performances that it sometimes feels a bit weird when you see a muppet walk past in the background.
Does it cover a bit too much ground? Maybe. Does it dip a bit in the middle? Perhaps. Is Forest Whitaker having a bit too much fun chewing the scenery as brash rebel leader Saw Gerrera? Definitely. But Andor season 2 wears a level of polish that nothing else in the galaxy comes close to matching. Confident, mature and exciting from the off, the last four or five episodes hit the same highs as Rogue One – enriching the bigger story arc instead of ever just feeling like an add-on.
Who knows where Star Wars is headed next, or if any of the many planned shows and films will ever put the franchise back on top, but Andor now feels like the new high-water mark.
‘Andor’ season two is available to watch on Disney+ from 23 April