Tony Gilroy, the Hollywood script doctor behind Michael Clayton and the Jason Bourne series, is known for writing taut, realistic, intelligent political thrillers. Incongruously, he’s also the mind behind Andor, the Star Wars spinoff series that debuted in 2022 and whose second and final season launches today on Disney+. Addressing skeptics of the latter, he recently told The Wall Street Journal, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s the biggest thing I’ll ever do.”
You have to stan yourself in this life, but Gilroy backs it up. When I reviewed the first season of Andor for TNR, I wrote that it represented “something new and astonishing: a Star Wars series written and filmed entirely for discerning grown-ups. It’s accurate but faint praise to call this the smartest Star Wars ever made; it’s one of the smartest shows anyone has made in recent years.” Having now watched the entire 24-episode run, I’ll go further and say that Andor is quite simply an all-time series—one as informed by classic international cinema about war, espionage, and revolutionary politics as by George Lucas’s source material. That Disney granted Gilroy the creative freedom to realize his vision under the umbrella of a billion-dollar space-fantasy franchise for kids feels miraculous; that it turns out to be all too relevant to the real-life politics of 2025 feels both surreal and chilling.
Andor draws inspiration from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and from the many films adapted from John le Carré’s spy novels, but perhaps above all from Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 suspense thriller about the French Resistance. Melville’s influence is particularly apparent in a major season 2 arc set on the Imperial-occupied planet of Ghorman, where the fashionable, Gallic-accented natives are drawn into an underground resistance within their elegant, medieval-walled capital. But the allusion is more than aesthetic; Gilroy borrows extensively from Melville’s depiction of revolutionary lives as lonely, stressful, anxious, and punctuated by morally dubious violence. Melville’s protagonists risk not just capture, torture, and death but also their very souls—in the service of an ideal they may never see realized. This is the reality of armed struggle against tyranny, Melville and Gilroy both seem to say: It’s not fun, it’s not glamorous, the odds are long, and the rewards are seldom if ever forthcoming. It takes a rare kind of temperament to accept this burden on faith.
“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts,” says Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), the revolutionary mastermind who drives much of Andor’s action, in an iconic season 1 monologue penned by Beau Willimon. “I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” Luthen is describing not only himself but everyone he recruits to the Rebel cause. That includes the titular Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), the guerrilla commando who fans know will die at the end of the 2016 film Rogue One (co-written by Gilroy, in his first Star Wars foray), just after successfully transmitting the Empire’s secret Death Star plans to Princess Leia and setting off the events of the original Star Wars. Everyone knows Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance will subsequently blow up the Death Star and eventually defeat the Empire; everyone who saw Rogue One knows that this was made possible by the sacrifices of a small group of Rebels led by Cassian. Now, with the completion of the Andor series, we have a sense of how many lives it cost to build a rebellion capable of pulling that off.
The second season of Andor bridges the chronological gap between the show’s first season and Rogue One. Its 12 episodes are divided into four cycles of three episodes apiece, with each cycle spaced a year apart in-universe and released a week apart in real time. While this format was improvised to compress what was originally intended to be a longer series run into a single season, it makes for effective storytelling, balancing methodically paced procedural action with longer story arcs that advance over months or years. No corners have been cut, no punches have been pulled, and nothing has been dumbed down; if anything, season 2 reaches a higher level of sophistication now that all the main characters and themes are established.
As with the first season, Andor pushes the envelope for what Star Wars, which is to say Disney, is able to portray. This is not a kids’ show: Cassian’s romantic interest and fellow Rebel, Bix (Adria Arjona), who is still processing having been tortured last season, this time survives an attempted rape and copes with the aftermath of both traumas through what is essentially painkiller addiction. Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), the icy intelligence officer introduced last season, is more fleshed out this time, recounting her own backstory as an orphan raised entirely in the service of the Empire’s new order. An obsessive control freak, she is as comfortable manipulating her beta-male partner, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), and his meddling mother (Kathryn Hunter) as she is the fledgling resistance movement of Ghorman, which she has engineered as an elaborate psyop. Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), the aristocratic liberal senator and a lonely voice of resistance, wrestles with marrying off her young daughter to cement an alliance with a white-collar criminal so that she can funnel monetary support to armed insurgents. And as the leader of a conspiratorial rebel network, Luthen is both directly and indirectly responsible for murdering innocents and allies in the service of the larger cause; he and his assistant Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) can reasonably be called terrorists, and we are invited to sympathize with them. From what we see of Imperial rule, it’s clear that high-minded speeches and nonviolent demonstrations are not going to cut it.
What it takes to defy a tyrannical government is not an abstract question to American audiences in 2025. Though Gilroy has downplayed specific contemporary political resonances, in interviews surrounding the show, his Star Wars scripts have been remarkably prescient. Rogue One came out the same year Donald Trump first won the presidency, and its portrayal of Rebels struggling against terrifying odds dovetailed well with the emergent (if perhaps retrospectively cringe) “Resistance” movement of Trump’s first term. Andor is now concluding against the backdrop of Trump’s return to power, this time in a position to make good on his dictatorial threats.
The second Trump administration has been marked by the arbitrary arrest, deportation, and dehumanizing incarceration of innocent people without a shred of due process, an experience Cassian himself is subjected to in the show’s first season. It has seen an autocratic executive branch reduce the legislative one to a rubber-stamp body with scattered, impotent dissenting voices, much like the Imperial Senate on Coruscant under Emperor Palpatine, whose abuses can be named but not prevented by a handful of idealistic senators like Mothma and Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits). And the further entrenchment of U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians eerily parallels the brutal Imperial crackdown on Ghorman that Mothma alone is willing to call a “genocide” (a step no U.S. senator has yet been willing to take), in a speech before the Senate, warning that objective truth has become a casualty of Palpatine’s regime.
What makes Andor not just timely but genuinely subversive is its unflinching portrayal of terroristic violence as legitimate and necessary when the legal avenues of political resistance fail.
What makes Andor not just timely but genuinely subversive is its unflinching portrayal of terroristic violence as legitimate and necessary when the legal avenues of political resistance fail. We see, for instance, a flashback to Luthen and a young Kleya sitting calmly in a café and detonating explosives on a nearby bridge, to the horror of the civilians around them. We see Mothma similarly horrified when the separation between her privileged lifestyle and the unsentimental bloodletting she’s been covertly supporting comes crashing down before her eyes and she realizes she can never return to her old life.
Violence is still violence, after all, even in service of a righteous cause. Andor doesn’t celebrate it and is keenly aware of what it does to those who help carry it out. A running theme of the show is that the unified Rebel Alliance we know from the original Star Wars trilogy has not yet taken shape; instead there are a number of nascent, competing factions with their own often questionable tactics, from the barely coherent gang Cassian encounters early this season to the band of chaotic nihilists led by Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), the mercurial warlord first introduced in Rogue One. “You think I’m crazy? Yes I am. Revolution is not for the sane,” Gerrera tells an ally of Cassian’s at one point in season 2. I was reminded in that moment of Luigi Mangione—the radicalized and possibly unwell young man whose killing of a health insurance executive in cold blood just weeks after Trump’s victory rendered him a much-memed icon to many Americans who no longer believe our political system is capable of addressing systemic injustices. Trump’s attorney general is calling for Mangione’s execution, while Mangione’s image is now regularly displayed at rallies against the administration. Rebellions, Andor suggests with more than a little ambivalence, depend in part on dangerous people who feel they have nothing to lose.
Compared to most other entries in the Star Wars canon, Andor is notable for eschewing the supernatural almost entirely. Notwithstanding the standard trappings of sci-fi—sentient droids, alien species, a galactic empire facilitated by hyperspace travel—gritty realism is the norm here. The only significant reference to the Force comes late in the series, when Bix, indulging in a bit of woo-woo spirituality, introduces Cassian to a Force-sensitive healer. In a moment of dramatic irony decades in the making, Cassian is dismissive of the healer’s whole deal. The most casual Star Wars fan knows what he never will: All his struggles and sacrifices will posthumously pay off when Luke Skywalker, heir to a Jedi dynasty, switches off his targeting computer and relies on the guidance of the Force to take out the Death Star. Gilroy has built out the story of an all-too-human, materially grounded rebellion, but it’s in the service of the superhuman, metaphysical triumph of good over evil foregrounded in Lucas’s original films. In our world, no such triumph is coming. The Force won’t be with us; our short, desperate lives are all we have.
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