Two seasons. That was all it needed. Andor refused the indulgence of open-ended lore-milking, endless cameos, or guitar solos. It told its story, sharply and completely, and left. In the age of content sprawl and diminishing returns, that felt almost revolutionary. Less was more. Far more.
But Andor wasn’t just good television. It was political event TV. Perfect for our current moment, a work of cultural resistance released into a world darkened by Trumpism, Starmerism, Le Penism. It refused comfort. It refused nostalgia. It refused the idea that rebellion is easy, or that fascism comes cloaked in obvious evil. Instead, it gave us bureaucracy1, complicity, slow violence, and the quiet horror of a world sliding further into authoritarianism. Sound familiar?
From a Marxist perspective, Andor is a triumph. Not because it preaches ideology, but because it dares to show how ideology works. The Galactic Empire is not just a fascist regime. It is an authoritarian capitalist state apparatus in full command of infrastructure, labour, and surveillance. Its rule is legal, logical, bureaucratically sound. This isn’t Darth Vader waving a red lightsaber. It’s a death certificate rubber-stamped in triplicate. It’s the Empire as technocratic neoliberalism with teeth.
Mon Mothma’s line from the Senate chamber speech2 stands out:
“The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.”
A line that could have come from Gramsci or from a speech opposing Project 2025.
The Rebellion, by contrast, is a coalition of contradictions: imperial defectors, exploited labourers, senatorial elites, committed militants. Not a workers’ party, but close enough to tell the truth about resistance. It’s fragmented, paranoid, and often compromised. But it learns. It adapts. And crucially, it organises. The prison break in Narkina 5 in series one is pure class struggle: atomised labourers, crushed by surveillance, the brutality of the guards and routine, suddenly discovering their shared power.
Luthen Rael is the revolution’s shadow:
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. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
What is… what is my sacrifice? 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. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?
Everything.
That’s not Hollywood bravado. That’s the truth of revolutionary sacrifice. You act not for victory now, but for the possibility of justice later. A commitment beyond ego.
(Lucasfilm Ltd.)
While Stellan Skarsgård will rightly take the plaudits, his monologues cold with purpose, eyes lit with fanaticism—I found the quieter performances of Elizabeth Dulau and Denise Gough just as compelling. Dulau’s Kleya, all precision and restraint, gave shape to the apparatus of underground rebellion, while Gough’s Dedra Meero offered a terrifying study in ambition weaponised by bureaucracy. These were not caricatures, but careful, layered portrayals of power’s banality and the small violences that uphold and resist empires.
Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) himself transforms from a cynical survivor into a political subject. His arc is dialectical. His choice, at the end of Season 2, to embrace the cause fully is not destiny, it’s awakening. He becomes the revolutionary the moment he sees that survival, without solidarity, is a form of collaboration in slow motion.
What makes Andor work is that it treats its audience as politically aware. It doesn’t spoon-feed; it sketches. It trusts you to draw the lines from the Ghorman massacre to Gaza3, from ISB databases to ICE raids, from imperial logistics to Amazon warehouses. And it does so with craft, with intelligence, with the kind of serious writing rarely seen in genre fiction.
“What took place yesterday… was unprovoked genocide.”
Mon Mothma describing the Gorman massacre
Watching Andor in 2025, under the second Trump presidency, was like reading The Wretched of the Earth during the Iraq War. It reminded you that stories can be weapons, and that not all resistance comes with a theme tune.
In the final moments, there are no speeches of triumph. No fireworks. Only movement. The beginnings of the Rebellion we will come to know in Rogue One
Two seasons. No spinoffs. No pandering. Just rebellion.
Oh, and if you need more Mon Mothma dancing…
Footnotes
- The banality of evil. ↩︎
- The full speech: “I believe we are in crisis, the distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.” ↩︎
- The planning meeting held by Director Orson Krennic was reminiscent of the Wannsee conference. ↩︎
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