Four years before the destruction of the Death Star…

Andor has returned. At a time when one could look at the world around us and perhaps hold up ones hands and ask if we need a story about the rise of fascism because, well.

Disney has not covered itself in glory in its response to fascism – in the real world it has quickly kowtowed in advance to ideological fault lines despite not being asked to, not that it’s ever been particularly progressive as its failure to truly represent the LGBTQ community even now demonstrates.

Yet Andor apparently give a fig for these concerns. Picking up a little while after the events of season 1, it slides right into Cassian Andor’s life as well as the lives of those who intersected in his journey to this point.

To say we see more fascism and resistance to its spreading tentacles could be the entire review, because that’s what we getting. Yet this would be a huge disservice to the care with which the nature of resistance to fascism takes shape in the show. It would also be to miss the creeping dread with which the show’s writers, led by Tony Gilroy, have put onto screen how fascism (and the colonial project more generally) build their own stories, their own narratives about their inevitable righteousness but also how they are, inescapably, bureaucratic death cults.

What I mean by that is that there is a single figure head, the emperor in Star Wars’ case, whose aims are unknown to the majority but whose wishes are actively anticipated in action and whose primary ideology is one of sectarianism – that is a clear demarcation between those who are acceptable and those who aren’t.

From that exclusionary figure head and their anticipatory acolytes you see persecution mechanised with the unspoken reality that, in the end, it will eat itself through malice, incompetence and by design while harming and consuming everyone and everything it encounters, again, by design. All in the name of a plan that precious few actually understand or can even articulate.

Gilroy never lets go of the idea that there’s incompetence in equal parts to the malice and ideology. Nor does he relieve us of the notion that it’s ordinary people who facilitate, collaborate and take part in the machinery that allow it to function at all. The petty officer, the miserable bureaucrat, the desperate snitch.

Empire and fascists alike require ordinary people like you to remain silent (at best) or actively collaborate (at worst) in order to succeed. Without you they crumble.

But Andor shows what it means to not collaborate because collaboration costs your soul but it provides you with food and an extra day’s peace (because tomorrow they will come for you but perhaps you’ll be able to put it off another day by feeding them someone else).

What resistance does is make you dirty. It makes something you won’t recognise because you become defined in large part by the thing you’re resisting.

If this first part shows us anything it’s that no matter where you’re resisting, you’ll be pressed into desperate actions which are grim and horrible and where people you know and are friends with get hurt in the moment, despite your grander plans to resist the actual enemy.

This first arc tells three different stories of resistance and the juxtaposition of each set of characters is heartbreaking because none of them are the people they want to be. They’re people who’ve found themselves unwillingly in a war for the future when all they really wanted, was to live their lives in peace. None of the fools, flawed and compromised people we encounter are neat heroes, none of them are ‘good’.

All of which is appropriate, but I can see people who’ve been fed on simple narratives of morally pure heroes struggling against evil finding the protagonists unattractive. Well, guess what, those people you see resisting, and the people they’re fighting against? They’re us. There are no heroes. Andor reminds us that if we want to live in peace then we must fight for it, ill equipped as we are, full of contradictions as we are.

Gilroy builds to a wedding in which the celebrations mask dire decisions and a wedding dance that takes place while, across the galaxy, our other characters are facing the bleakest of threats. The sumptuous Weimar vibes contrasting starkly with the world facing a migrant worker being challenged by the Empire’s equivalent to ICE. Summary disappearances, sexual assault and other kinds of violence being worn by these goons as casually as they wear their uniforms.

It is a truly remarkable sequence with music that becomes not a celebration in anticipation of life built together but sinister with threat and pressure and outright horror.

Verdict: Andor remains one of the best things on television and for it to emerge now, teeth bared, bloody knuckles shining and ready to talk about fascism and the cost of resisting it gives me hope.

10 unexpected test pilots out of 10

Stewart Hotston