We come to the end of the six-episode arc about Ghorman, a wealthy planet at the heart of the empire that the imperium has decided needs to be strip mined for a mineral vital to its galactic interests. The results of the strip mining will render the entire place uninhabitable. On top of this, the ongoing tightening of speech, freedom and permitted opinions are usefully to be accelerated through the Ghorman project which will engineer an insurrection designed to render sympathy for its people non-existent but also to defang those who would oppose the Empire and its policies back in the capital where decisions are actually made. 

I don’t normally lay out the story – I’m more interested in what the story says – but in this case I think it’s worthwhile because the show is using these story elements to talk deeply about how fascism clutches at its victims and its targets and how power empties out the strength of its opponents.

We’ve seen this in the real world around immigration and trans rights where two powerless minorities have been chosen and then vilified, being spoken of as enemies and criminals, as people without morals who are dangerous and who need to be controlled, stripped of their rights and then, ultimately, erased.

Within Andor, the Ghor is this minority, a stand in for German Jews as the Nazis systematically erased them, stole their wealth and made them the enemy of the rest of German society. If there’s one lesson we find distasteful to learn that Andor reminds us of only too starkly: the tools of fascism remain the same throughout time – divide, alienate, pillage and murder.

There is no fascism lite, there is no sparkling authoritarianism that doesn’t come with mass murder, incarceration and erasure as part of its basis.

Andor also reminds us only too clearly that erasure doesn’t eradicate physical wealth. No, it steals it from those to be murdered and gives it as a reward to those who are willing to turn a blind eye or collaborate with these acts.

The other core element is centred around Syril, who is acting as an informant for the intelligence services, willing to lie to all those around him in return for feeling important. In the end though, it’s clear that he is nothing more than a human resource – to be consumed and discarded once his usefulness is done with, just like so many of the people who commit to the fascist cause thinking that they are critical to it rather than its fodder.

The Ghorman arc takes place over several years, showing how a willing media and propaganda go hand in hand in destroying a targeted minority. I don’t think Tony Gilroy could be any clearer about how this works; he is putting into a Disney show how fascism rises, what its hallmarks are and what we should be watching for.

It’s all here and its parallels to fascism and right-wing populism across the Western World are striking, intended and should be calling more of us to act.

This is just half the story though, in many ways the backdrop to the drama itself, which is how ordinary people respond to oppression. It’s interested in how those responses can be weaponised against them and how, in the end, resistance might well be a choice made knowing it can only end with defeat.

What we also see is how different people on the same side may disagree with what is necessary and how people on opposing sides may want the same things in the moment because they have other goals.

Both the rebellion and the Imperium want Ghorman to be incinerated. Their reasons differ but they are clearly aligned in the now despite their visions of the future being so divergent. For the Empire it’s a layered project allowing them to erase the Ghor, take their planet and all their wealth – think the East India Company’s explicit goal of shutting down India’s technology and textiles industries for the benefit of the British Empire. Killing millions of Indians over time, destroying their economy and setting back their culture for centuries for the simple goal of enriching a few important people back home.

By contrast, Luthen wants the Ghor to fail, to fall into fire because he knows it will bring people to the side of the rebellion. An atrocity will wake people, will make them see what the Empire really is. The worse the atrocity, the more people will stir. Both sides understand the importance of story, of narrative and how it motivates people to act, to collaborate or resist.

It’s a grim calculus that calls us to mourn those who suffer in its algorithm. Luthen has resigned himself to hell but on the road to that destination he plans to do all he can to stop others from joining him. His is a willing sacrifice but in choosing it, he makes his conscience clear to sacrifice others as if they, too, have consented to fight the war in the same way.

Yet Cassian understands that if we cannot weep for those who are lost, who will weep for us when it is our turn?

Again, Andor asks us to weep now, to act now, because by the time Mon Mothma gives her speech before the Senate, the genocide has begun and the Empire is moving to do what it wants without meaningful opposition that is not also violent.

By this point, violence only strengthens the empire’s hand. Resistance is dirty. Resistance is terrifying. Andor lays out why people shy away from it, from acknowledging what is wrong because then they’d have to act. It also brilliantly shows how resistance is a kind of trauma, how it breaks us, shapes us, remakes us into creatures our old selves wouldn’t recognise.

Back to the Imperial Senate though. If you watched the Jan 6 insurrection in the States that aimed to overturn the elections there and the lies that followed seeking to justify the murder of innocents and the overturning of democracy in the USA, then you’ll also be familiar with how the court system and the political system there failed to hold to account the only ones who mattered – the powerful.

Senators Organa and Mothma act too like the Democratic party, too like UK Labour’s strategists delaying drastic action until it’s too late – they assume they can make speeches and argue facts against lies and win, as if truth somehow can successfully shout down the thrilling frisson of conspiracy.

Even at the end when Mothma’s life is imperilled, she cannot see what it means to resist against those who would simply disappear her and carry on as if she never existed once she was gone. This failure of imagination endangers everyone because its failure is to be locked up in believing that control can be maintained, that negotiation is possible without violence.

Most people abhor violence and even with their talk of Yavin and getting ready, both Organa and Mothma refuse to understand what that really means, what is coming for everyone in its own time.

When we write of violence we too often write of it as something that can be deployed at our behest, something we can control. Andor episode 8 shows this for the nonsense it truly is. When violence breaks out, when it’s incited it is some kind of demon, its agenda as uncontrollable as a wildfire, consuming everyone involved without care for sides, without care for right and wrong. Those who rush towards it possibly relish that encounter with deadly chaos but even they must grapple with the cost of what they wish for.

I’m no fan of violence but the truth of it is this – the history of humanity is littered with it. That we’ve forgotten that here in the comfortable west is a boon, a blessing but also a blindness.

What’s wildest about Andor is Mothma’s speech in the final part of the Ghorman arc. For her and many in her position, there’s no greater power than speaking truth and, in some sense, the show displays the certainty of that conviction. The emotional connection we hope our words can invoke are too distant, too far from us to be compelling – they fail to elicit an existential response.

In many places and at many times, expressing the truth does nothing more than bring violence and, perhaps, it’s better to understand that violence might be the route those wishing to live must adopt if they’re to survive.

We live in a modern world with borders (forgetting that there were no universal passports in the UK until the first world war, 1915 in fact) and that before then such ideas as the nature of national boundaries perplexed the greatest political minds of Europe and beyond. Andor is less concerned with this truth than it is with the underlying challenge – who belongs, how do we decide and what does it mean for those who do not qualify?

In Star Wars’ Empire, there is no habeas corpus, there is no due process. There is only what the last imperial official decided. The rule of law is gone by the time Mothma makes her speech about the genocide of the Ghor. In other words, by the time she speaks out, the time for her to have done so has passed.

Yet if that sounds judgemental, remember the structure of the Ghorman arc – it is about fascists entrenching their power, and in that sense, it is never too late to speak out. It is never too late to resist. A friend of mine commented on how frightening it must be for people to be in the rebellion. I couldn’t agree more and that, finally, brings us to Cassian Andor himself.

Cassian’s been broken by his resistance, remade so many times that what he’s lost forms a bigger part of him than what he now is. It is deleterious to always be resisting – it’s something that those who have comfortable lives don’t understand; that those who have to fight for the world they live in exist in a permanent state of being remade by what they’ve lost. You might ask what they’ve lost, and Andor answers that question; the opportunity for a peaceful life, the opportunity to thrive, to prosper, to live quietly, to be at peace. It’s the loss of what might have been as well as the loss of the space to simply be.

It can be hard to grasp for those with privilege because they’ve always had these basics which are required for good living.

By the end of this arc, Cassian is a veteran, capable of doing what must be done to resist, but the cost has been the loss of his self. As Luthen points out, Luthen has made his peace in a way Cassian hasn’t – he fights now not for his own future but for a future he will not, cannot, ever see.

The tragedy of resistance is there on the screen in all its bleak glory. Whether it’s in the death of innocence, the experience of murder, of powerlessness in the face of injustice, the loss of what might have been, the breaking of their selves in the name of being free to be themselves the show reminds us that each of these are enough, on their own, to break someone let alone when combined.

People have said a lot of things about Andor but I think, for me, it comes down to this: Andor calls on us to weep for the now we’re losing because like all good science fiction it’s really talking about our world. Today. Now.

Verdict: Andor asks us what kind of world we want and what kind of actions we’ll be ready to undertake to make it. It asks whether you’ll be prepared to abnegate your self for the future of others.

There is no easy answer to that question, only a price tag we are probably not ready to see.

10 extractions out of 10

Stewart Hotston