How “Andor” Injects Contemporary Politics Into “Star Wars” I.P.

It’s rare to hear the word “genocide” uttered unequivocally on television, let alone on the streaming service Disney+. So it was a bit of a shock to encounter the term in a late episode of the second season of “Andor,” a “Star Wars”-spinoff miniseries that has become something like the “Game of Thrones” of George Lucas’s space-opera expanded universe: grittier, grungier, and more political than its predecessors. In the scene in question, a liberal, idealistic senator of the imperial government that controls much of the galaxy speaks out against a vengeful attack on the protesting residents of Ghorman, a planet that the empire is attempting to subjugate and militarize. The senator, named Mon Mothma, risks her political career and her life to make an emergency speech addressing the incident. “What happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide,” Mothma says. The other senators are immediately abuzz, and Mothma has to be smuggled out of the spherical senate chamber to avoid abduction by a turncoat.

“Andor” has extremely elaborate set dressing. A viewer could easily get lost in the various planet names, revolutionary factions, alien races, and ancillary robots (I particularly liked a party paparazzi droid). There are entire subplots involving an upscale gallery, a sort of Gagosian that deals in alien artifacts, some perhaps forged. But the show—which was created by the screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote the ethically agonized legal thriller “Michael Clayton” as well as several screenplays in the Jason Bourne film series—is better if you can get past the most obvious signaling of the “Star Wars” canon and appreciate the twisting political-conversion arc that the show’s two seasons trace. (According to Gilroy, the story was planned for five seasons but was later pared back, making it a welcome exception to pervasive streaming bloat.) Fables, after all, work in part by defamiliarization, casting archetypal conflict in a world that we recognize even if we don’t live in it—the persistent absence of princesses and fairies in our own lives doesn’t undermine the symbolism of Cinderella. In the case of “Andor,” beneath all the laser blasters and X-wing spaceships, you’ll find some of the most trenchant mainstream critique of contemporary political gridlock on TV.

The show’s namesake character is Cassian Andor, a pilot, played by Diego Luna, who was taken from his home planet as an orphan by sympathetic smugglers. Andor is charming and rough-edged, a solo space cowboy accustomed to hustling his own way. But in an attempt to find his long-lost sister, Andor gets caught up in a branch of the incipient Rebel Alliance, a guerrilla operation against the Galactic Empire, which is a fascistic regime headed by Emperor Sheev Palpatine. Andor’s Rebel guru is Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård, a grizzled spymaster who sends his charge on various mysterious errands to help stoke or carry out Rebel attacks on the Empire. The paternal-ish bond that forms between Rael and Andor is the heart of the story. Rael radicalizes Andor, as he has been radicalized himself, into working for a revolution that he is unlikely to see come to fruition, one requiring no small amount of dirty work in the present. “I burn my decency for someone else’s future,” Rael at one point growls. His all-or-nothing strategy of wildcat provocations that often sacrifice his pawns increasingly conflicts with Andor’s desire for stability, and with the requirements of the Rebellion’s growing ranks, who are in need of hierarchy and management—bureaucrats, not assassins.

“Andor” dramatizes shades of political difference: Everyone is an extremist to someone else. As an Imperial military director says, “My rebel is your terrorist.” (The director happens to be building the Death Star, but it’s hard to imagine Mark Hamill’s moralistic Luke Skywalker in the same murky universe.) Syril Karn, an Imperial bureaucrat played by Kyle Soller, undergoes a radicalization parallel to Andor’s, enthusiastically perpetrating Imperial oppression; egged on by his own superiors, until it’s too late to stop. Mon Mothma, the senator played by Genevieve O’Reilly, is liberal compared to her colleagues, but she is also an asset of Rael’s and a secret supporter of the Rebellion. Extremism might make things happen in “Andor,” but it usually makes its adherents vulnerable. To act out is to become a target.

The pivotal plotline of the new season concerns Ghorman, a Swiss-French-esque planet of fabric weavers who wear jaunty berets and cultivate silk-spinning arachnids. The normally staid Ghormans are inflamed when the Empire begins building a massive geometric edifice in the center of their elegantly Art Nouveau-ish capital city of Palmo. The new tower overlooks a plaza in which hundreds of Ghormans had already been massacred in a past Imperial incident. The planet holds minerals that the Empire desperately needs, but it will have to be strip-mined and the inhabitants resettled. To justify the destruction of Ghorman, the Empire seeds anti-Ghorman media headlines, promoting a sense that its people deserve retribution. At the same time, Rael pulls strings to encourage Ghorman dissidents to attack the Empire. The result is a string of revolts and a system of tightening oppression that make conflict inevitable, setting the stage for what the senator labels genocide. Though this plotline by no means maps precisely onto current events in our world, the story can’t help but call to mind the war in Gaza–and it treads further in its denunciation of violent occupation than most news coverage dares to.

“Andor” is both well served by and held back by its careful slotting into a larger multiverse of lucrative intellectual property. The “Star Wars” setting gives the show built-in vocabulary and scenery as well as stock characters to deepen. The “Star Wars” universe’s well-known, preëxisting stakes—bad Empire versus good Rebellion—allow the “Andor” screenwriters to jump into a complex story mid-action. But by the finale of Season 2, dutiful dot-connecting takes over. “Andor” ends at the starting point of “Rogue One,” the 2016 film that, in turn, ends just before the original 1977 “Star Wars” film, and various characters in the show have to make their way on the narrative chessboard to their predestined places. Cassian Andor is now an experienced Rebel captain; Mon Mothma, the outspoken senator, is safely ensconced on the Rebel home-base planet of Yavin 4 as a leader. “Star Wars” devotees knew the end before it started. Even K-2SO, a goofily butler-like killer robot from “Rogue One,” who seemed designed to sell action figures, has here been given an elaborate backstory: he was part of the force perpetrating genocide on Ghorman—a bloody scene that is given significant weight on camera—but is salvaged and reprogrammed by the Rebels. The clash between the character’s cartoonish old identity and new, hardboiled origin story feels jarringly incongruous, as if E.T. had showed up in “Mad Men.” The droid suggests the predominance of Disney’s commercial priorities over Gilroy’s yearning for adult drama. Still, if we must live in an era of regurgitated intellectual property, when most new meals are made from leftovers, a writer of Gilroy’s calibre at least proves it’s still possible to make something largely satisfying. ♦