IN ANDOR, TONY GILROY SHOWED US THE EMOTIONAL POWER OF STAR WARS:

None of the previous Star Wars entries have worked in this fashion. There are no Jedi. There is no Skywalker family drama. The Force is only present on the edges, as a ludicrous old fable of a lost religion, not an abiding faith. This is a story about rebels becoming soldiers becoming a revolution, not a plucky fantasy where all the Stormtroopers miss and no one ever gets just straight-up murdered. The casting, particularly of Imperials Denise Gough and Kyle Soller, injects a resonance into the series for understanding the true nature of evil and how it overtakes its human cogs and collapses their misgivings. And Gilroy’s choice to use as many physical settings as possible – casting aside the Unreal Engine Volume for Britain as the cold emotionless Coruscant and Spain as the gorgeous but decaying Republic – makes the whole series feel more grounded, a human drama where otherworldly things exist, but are not the focus of the plot.

There’s always an inclination to assign current politics to Star Wars, whether in the context of the George W. Bush years or the current anti-Trump moment. But what Gilroy manages in this series is to show this clash instead as one between elites. This is no Occupy Wall Street rebellion. Instead, it is an authoritarian empire which creates nothing that must lie, steal and disrupt peaceful people in order to grasp the wealth and political freedom of a capitalist class of traders and merchants. It is a militarist state that takes from those who grow, build and create by force of arms, because that is all they have. Yes, they are stronger – but their hubris leaves the villains vulnerable to the machinations of those who actually know how to build, how to create, and how to hide the key to the Empire’s destruction in plain sight.

Whatever comes next for this saga, if the cost of three increasingly ridiculous sequel movies was getting the Gilroy vision of Star Wars, it was absolutely worth it.

I watched the last two episodes of Andor last night, and they were pretty good. They were a combination of Cold War thriller and an episode of SWAT blended with a smattering of Star Wars technology. The same complaints I made after seeing Rogue One on the big screen apply: Diego Luna isn’t the most charismatic actor, and the machinations of the baddies are far more interesting than those of the Rebellion. But just imagine how astonishing Andor would have been if it had been the live-action series that ran on network TV in the late 1970s in-between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Or if it had immediately followed The Mandalorian on the Disney+ streaming platform. Instead, it really feels like the last gasp of an utterly bankrupt franchise: