Andor: welcome to the rebellion

For obvious reasons this post contains spoilers for all the episodes in Andor season 2.

I wrote about season one of Andor back in April 2023, and wrote about whether a capitalist corporation like Disney could really do an anti-capitalist show in October the same year. This post builds on these two earlier posts, and may address issues that would otherwise seem to be absent below. That said, you can easily read this post without having read the two earlier posts.

I keep wondering why season two of Andor doesn’t get the front page coverage in the likes of the Guardian and the BBC News website that the Netflix TV series Adolescence (rightly) did. I mean, just about every journalist—and plenty of politicians—have written an opinion piece about Adolescence, dissecting it from every angle to extol their pet theory.

The absence of a similar level of mainstream commentary about Andor may well partly be a snobbery against the genre of science fiction—an inability to parse metaphor—but I suspect it’s more about those scenes showing the press parroting the Empire’s narrative about terrorists while the imperial forces carry out a genocide on Ghorman - so eerily reminiscent of the Israeli government and military’s ongoing genocide in Gaza that holds up a very uncomfortable mirror to the usual opinion columnists?

In the interests of fairness I should note that there are two good exceptions so far in the Guardian that fall outside the inclusion of lists of “great things to watch on TV this week” - In Andor, the real world political parallels are impossible to ignore, by Radheyan Simonpillai and By calling a genocide a genocide, Andor just made its most political point yet by Walter Marsh - but neither reached the front page like the numerous thinkpieces about Adolescence did.

Given that the episodes in question were written and filmed before October 2023 (as far as I can ascertain from various media interviews with cast and crew) we know that the genocide scenes in Andor are not written specifically about the current round of genocide in Gaza. Instead they reveal that the show’s writer has identified the common modus operandi that states use to excuse attacks on civilians: the excuse of fighting terrorism with the connivance of a complicit and compliant press.

However we do know from an interview with Andor’s creator/writer Tony Gilroy that he did draw his inspiration from the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people and other similar incidents and conflicts, because, as we know, the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza didn’t suddenly start as a reaction to the kidnappings on 7^th October 2023.

One specific example, unrelated to Gaza, of Gilroy’s understanding of how states use deliberately escalating tactics and a compliant press comes from episode eight, in the lead up to the Ghorman massacre.

In this episode we see the imperial forces police a Ghorman demonstration first by kettling the protestors within Palmo Plaza, and then sending troops—looking very much like contemporary riot police with their truncheons and shields—into the kettled crowd with the explicit intention to deliberately provoke panic in order to justify ramping up the violence against the protestors. Anyone who has seen the UK police tackle a demonstration has seen these deliberate tactics at work in the real world.

Another interesting feature of season two of Andor is the way in which the characters from both the imperial forces and the rebellion all have some very different reasons for their affiliations with the two sides.

On the imperial side, we have the character of Dedra Meero of the Imperial Security Bureau, ruthless and probably a bit of a psychopath, but who is complex enough not to be played as a one-dimensional villain, and her later partner, the methodical and meticulous Syril Karn (up until his realisation in episode eight). Interestingly both characters see themselves as the heroes of their own journeys compared to the more typical Star Wars cardboard-cut-out villains.

For the rebellion—putting to one side Cassian Andor, the other veterans from Ferrix and Aldhani, and the Luthen/Kleya organising partnership—we have the incompetent squabbling Maya Pei brigade, the mad Saw Gerrera’s Partisans (the revolution is not for the sane), the Ghorman Front (infiltrated/controlled by the Empire in order to exacerbate the situation: in Dedra’s words You need a radical insurgency you can count on…You need Ghorman rebels you can depend on to do the wrong thing.), Senator Mon Mothma who finally realises that her centrist approach is ineffectual against the fascism of the Empire, and the more military side of the rebellion being built up by Generals Draven and Dodonna. All have very different approaches and attitudes to the rebellion.

Some of the more minor characters on the side of the rebellion are equally interesting and important to the success of the rebellion, though. There’s Niya at the test facility who, in episode one of season two, gives Cassian the password to steal the prototype imperial fighter ship. And then there’s Thela, the clerk and bellboy who works at the hotel on Palmo Plaza on Ghorman, who is not a signed-up card-carrying member of the rebellion, but helps Cassian, after recognising him as a rebel agent, by not logging his visit in the records.

What is also shown is the growing contrast between Cassian Andor’s more anarchist approach (I want to make my own decisions) and the increasingly hierarchical rebel power structure being overseen by General Dodonna and General Draven where everyone takes orders from the top and is assigned a military rank—Cassian is eventually assigned the rank of Captain—and then later, of course, extended to hereditary titles such as “Princess”.

All of which probably explains why the New Republic established by the Rebellion after the defeat of the Empire was such a centrist bureaucratic mess that was rapidly defeated by fascism again - but that’s not part of the Andor series, and anyway I would say that, wouldn’t I.