Here I am again: early-praising something that I’m sure will turn out to be heartily disappointing, or incomplete, or about Luke Skywalker, or will reach its endgame to reveal that it was actually the detailed backstory of Grand Moff Jerjerrod all along. (Looking at you, Karn.) But I cannot help it: as someone on the A More Civilized Age podcast opened an episode with last week, Andor “is a real fucking TV show!!” Highest possible praise, and if Andor has a single mechanical fault at the moment, it’s only in how mercilessly it’s showing us that everything Star Wars has done in the last five years could have been this good, and wasn’t, for no reason.
There are a million factors that make this so (A Dickensian tapestry of characters! Writing with clarity, nuance, and subtext! No more Volume!) but I want to center one throwaway detail that doesn’t just solidify Andor‘s creative intent; it single-handedly improves the last 25 years of Star Wars storytelling. And it’s as simple as: the flashback sequences of young Kassa finding his way into a derelict freighter, and everything that comes of that, happened during the age of the Republic, not the Empire.
You have to be paying attention to a couple pieces of dialogue and/or (Andor!) know your way around various coalition insignia to notice, but the StarWars.com trivia gallery further confirmed that the Kenari crash predates Order 66. This is all kinds of the sort of thoughtful writing that drives stupid Star Wars fans, the ones who need everything spelled out and connected for them in no uncertain terms, absolutely insane — I’ve heard it referred to as a continuity error or, in the clapping monkeys’ favourite sobriquet for anything that requires a small point of audience effort, a “plot hole” — but the choice to set Andor’s backstory in the Republic era is integral to the concept of Andor as a character, and to Andor as a show. It also course-corrects a persistent misinterpretation of nearly everything about the Prequel Trilogy, without changing a single element of text. I betcha George Lucas loves it; or would love it, if he ever watched these shows.
The persistent misinterpretation is this: as an audience and a fan base, we’re (still) wired to believe that the Republic was fundamentally good. It was a democracy; the hero characters of the Prequel era defended it; and it was presented as far back as the original Star Wars as the ideal state which preceded the Empire’s dark times, and to which (ideally) the galaxy would therefore return if the Empire were overthrown.
That isn’t actually the story George Lucas was telling in the Prequels, however. As early as the opening crawl of The Phantom Menace, Lucas is already laying bare the reality that by this era of the Old Republic, the Republic doesn’t really work anymore. The governmental bureaucracy is in such a state of malfunction that the Supreme Chancellor is privately sending warrior knights on secret missions to break trade embargos, rather than waiting for due process to correct misuses of the system. Lucas is showing us a system that has been gamed, not unlike the Western political landscape we find ourselves in now: political constructs work fine as long as all sides within the system are playing by the same generalized set of rules, but as soon as one party steps out of the rule set, the base assumptions that run the system come crashing down. Importantly, by the time we reach the Republic as presented in The Phantom Menace, both sides are misusing the system to achieve their own objectives. Valorum and Padmé are both, at separate points in the narrative, right — extra-legal action is required to free Naboo from the Trade Federation, because due process will fail and has failed — but the nasty trick is that their solutions are, in their way, as much representative of the problem as the blockade was in the first place.
This thread continues through the next two films, but the placement of key characters obfuscates it. Padmé is a Senator in Attack of the Clones, trying to do what’s right from within the failed system; and as a hero character, we’re wired to believe she can (at least theoretically) do it. (I bet audiences would have loved more scenes of fatuous Senators enjoying their wealth in Episodes II and III to underscore how wrong Padmé is, but, alas, everyone wanted the pew-pew. In lieu of this, look at Mon Monthma’s dining room.) When discussing the political allegory of the Prequels we tend to focus on Palpatine’s Machiavellian conjuration of the circumstances that a) start a war between a Separatist alliance and the Republic government proper, that then b) create an arena in which he (a Sith Lord) can wipe out the Jedi and seize control of the galaxy. But that’s plot, not politics. The political dimension of the Prequel Trilogy is provided by how the democracy falls apart — “this is how liberty dies” — and the fact that in the case of a) at least, Palpatine was operating legally, within the system; and by the point of b), he no longer needed to.
Ok, back to Andor. A key attribute of that collapse of democracy are the cabals introduced in The Phantom Menace that no one was particularly interested in hearing about at the time, because they sound boring (and they kinda are): the Trade Federation, the Banking Clan, the Mining Guild, and so forth. These aren’t the black and white (literally) space-villains of the Empire, who are fun to shoot at and steal stuff from. They’re the Byzantine layers of red tape that stand between (even the best-intentioned) Senators and the actual citizenry; they are the monied super-PACs that keep (the less-than-best-intentioned) Senators from doing anything besides argue in circles.
What Andor resuscitates is the idea of how hopelessly, hopelessly broken the Republic would have been under those conditions. The ship that crashes on Kenari isn’t a Jedi cruiser or a ruby-red Republic flagship; it’s a transport corsair, a sub-contractor. It’s probably run by one of the above-mentioned federations, clans, or guilds. What oversight would the Republic have of how the mining sub-contract is being run on Kenari? What’s the methodology for bringing rights’ abuses to the attention of the Senate, and what are the outcomes if such a course is taken? Pretty much as useful as complaining about a Trade Federation blockade of Naboo in the Galactic Senate, I’m guessing. In fact, likely nowhere near as visible or central as that: there’s a line from one of the corporate security dudes in Andor about a once-monthly meeting to raise concerns about that selfsame security contractor; one can imagine a similar level of pointlessness to any effort to police the Mining Guild.
And this is where the political becomes personal on Andor. We meet a very disillusioned and apathetic Cassian in the first trio of episodes, a man with no interest in resistance (very much like Jyn, when Cassian recruits her in Rogue One). The flag that flies over his head doesn’t matter; he’s oppressed and has been all his life. We’re shown this, in the flashbacks to Kenari; and the mention of the Republic forces showing up and killing everybody, whether true or not, is telling. Kassa’s entire lived experience — the point Tony Gilroy is trying to make, I think — would make it pretty generally irrelevant to someone like Kassa, later Cassian, who’s in charge of the galaxy. Republic? Empire? What’s the difference?
This is not to say: “The Republic was just as bad as the Empire.” For one thing, the Republic doesn’t blow up your planet when you refuse to toe the line; although, if Republic security forces really do go on kill-crazy rampages against indigenous tribes, the margin may be thin indeed. It’s critical political nuance to suggest that the on-the-ground reality at the end of the Republic’s life was so awful for the people on that ground that the transition to Empire didn’t really change anything, besides add more cops. And because most Mid-Rim planets don’t even rate expensive Stormtroopers, they’re going to be the shitty mall cops with delusions of Jan 6 that we see in the first trio of episodes. (The security sub-contractor entities in Andor are, without fail, the element of the Star Wars legandarium I didn’t know I needed, until I had them.)
What do we do when the entire system has failed? What happens next? This, I think, is what Lucas was actually studying when he wrote the Prequels; his interest was less in the (forthcoming) fall of America, than in outlining in a kid-friendly way that throughout the history of civilizations, there comes a point at which the dissonance between what a society thinks it is and the reality of what it actually is simply becomes too great for the operating rules of that society to bear. Again, we’re seeing a hefty dose of that, right now, in the United States and elsewhere in the world. But Lucas’ point would probably more have been: this is also how Rome fell. This is why the sun set on the British Empire. This is how civilizations whither, predictably, over the history of the human race. The bureaucracy overtakes the intent, the story we tell ourselves about who we are becomes too obviously at odds with what we see in front of us every day, and then something or someone flushes the whole thing down the drain.
All of this, incidentally, does a wonderful job of painting the Jedi, and Anakin Skywalker in particular, in a much less favourable light than the gee-whiz sugar rush of something like, say, The Clone Wars. (To be fair to The Clone Wars, Ahsoka figures all of this out, and concludes her arc having broken ties with both Anakin and the Jedi.) Anakin has been warmly repatriated as a softboi by fans of the animated series, but as a character who believes that the Republic is a fundamentally good thing and also thinks a little fascism would go a long way towards fixing the things that aren’t working, he’s as dangerous a burgeoning right-winger as you’re gonna find — and this too was part of Lucas’ intent. (To quote Rian Johnson’s lauded single-line take on the Prequels, “Lucas made a gorgeous 7 hour long movie for children about how entitlement and fear of loss turns good people into fascists.” The personal was political there too, even before Anakin’s fall.) And the Jedi, as an entire organization, must now be treated as equally, if nor more so, corrupt than the Senate they serve, if only out of their willing blindness to all of the aforementioned dissonance, which — one imagines — their missions would have put them in touch with every single day.
I am finding it intriguing to realize that Cassian Andor is a rare Star Wars protagonist who comes with none of the pre-programmed dogma or systematized worldviews that have guided so many prior heroes. He doesn’t have a faith (religious, personal, or otherwise) in need of shattering (like Luke did, and Rey did, and Mando does, and so forth). He doesn’t really have a worldview beyond “yeah, shit’s bad and therefore I’m in it for myself.” The idea of a series that might now focus on the shaping of this man’s political understanding into one that can imagine something better than “shit’s bad” is intrinsically compelling.
There’s a line in the first episode, after Cassian has asked Brasso to be his alibi (for an offworld murder!) when Brasso calls out “make yourself useful!” to his departing friend. That, I think, could be the mission statement of the whole show. This one isn’t going to be about blowing up Death Stars (at least, until it is). It’s given us a view of what the Republic, and now Empire, means for the people on the ground. Perhaps the tale from here can be: what small, useful actions can those people take, to leave things better than they found them, and how do those actions connect together? If nothing works from the top down, can a world be built from the bottom up?