Who would have thought that Andor, a series about a nobody character from a film I previously thought mediocre in the detritus of nostalgia, would be the one to upset the status quo and resurrect its long-dead corpse?

Before Andor, Star Wars was, as a franchise, comparable to the final seasons of Game of Thrones: a dead horse so beaten into the dirt that your revulsion transformed into a sort of pity for the loss of an old friend. Sure, the junk Disney has pumped out after the Sequel Trilogy travesty still makes a ridiculous amount of money, but like the endless array of superhero slop we’ve seen coming out of Marvel and DC, Disney’s work is artistically empty, and thus incapable of being thoughtfully interrogated. The franchise is stuck in an endless loop of recycled zombie cameos (e.g., The Mandalorian seasons 2 and 3 or Ahsoka), or it regurgitates agendas so nakedly didactic that all we can do is groan scene after scene (see The Acolyte). The output is so bad, as many have said before, that the Prequels seem innovative by comparison.

But here comes along Andor, and it’s saying to us: hey, Star Wars is about something. Maybe the original films were too hokey to really ruminate on that thing Star Wars is about, but it’s still there, buried beneath all the trash Disney has piled on top of it. There’s something meaningful and nuanced to be said about tyranny and rebellion that will forever be timely, even if unexpectedly or unintentionally.

Andor is a watershed moment in Star Wars: it’s doing to the franchise what Batman Begins did for superhero movies and Lord of the Rings did for fantasy movies—making us take it seriously. Prior to LOTR, what did we have besides goofy ’80s flicks primarily centered around a pantsless Tom Cruise or a cackling Satanic Tim Curry? And prior to Batman Begins, we had George Clooney’s well-sculpted Batsuit nipples. In short: the genres were just camp, punchlines in the public consciousness, unworthy of intellectual criticism.

Never more than 12.

Andor does something infuriatingly simple. It asks basic questions about the world in which Star Wars operates.

What does it mean to live in an empire? What does rebellion actually require? What is the personal cost of fighting fascism?

The answer, apparently, is bureaucracy. Surveillance. Paranoia. Compromise.

These aren’t new or revolutionary questions. But they’re new for Star Wars. And Andor doesn’t shy away from the answers. It builds a world where rebellion isn’t about lightsaber battles, but a slow moral grind whereupon holding to your principles has fatal consequences. And yet Andor doesn’t have to discard genre tropes to make its point. We still have the hallmark hijinks of the titular hero flailing about in a TIE Avenger prototype he doesn’t know how to pilot in a throwback to Han banging on a malfunctioning Millennium Falcon, but Andor knows when to place these moments without compromising its integrity.

Dare I say: Andor deconstructs Star Wars and then puts it back together in a world that feels more real than the original films.

I can’t swim…

To this day I still have PTSD from quips like “They fly now” and “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” Such is the poison of Joss Whedonesque one-liners festering two decades too long in the blood of our culture.

In Andor’s re-imagining of Star Wars, however, language isn’t a breathless reaction to meaningless action on the big screen: here, language enacts. Andor doesn’t need its heroes to repeat “This is the way” 700 times to get you in the right frame of mind. Instead, its heroes deliver manifestos and monologues. Luthen’s monologue, for example, is one of my favorites. When he tells embedded Imperial informant Lonnie that “I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see,” there’s an enactment of rebellion that Star Wars has never been able to fully embody outside of turbolaser blasts and X-Wings, and it doesn’t involve anything but the violence of words.

Nemik’s manifesto does something similar. His character dies before he sees the impact of his words, but those words echo through Andor’s moral architecture. “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks.”

This manifesto is almost completely absent in Season 2, until the erudite Major Partagaz listens to it near the end. A perfect bookend to the series, and an encapsulation of the thesis of empire in Star Wars as a whole. The words do the work, not the knife in Luthen’s heart nor the failed espionage of overly ambitious ISB agents.

In fact, we see rebellion itself leaking into our own imaginations as Saw Gerrara recounts the misadventure that created him:

Then one day, everyone started to itch. Everyone, all at once. Even the guards. You could feel your skin coming alive. It was the rhydo. They had a leak … We’re the rhydo, kid. We’re the fuel. We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air. Let it in, boy! That’s freedom calling! Let it in! Let it run! Let it run wild!

Again, presented as words. Not one thousand Star Destroyers or loosed space horses thundering toward freedom. Saw Gerrera, who in earlier iterations of Star Wars was more caricature than character, becomes a credible manifestation of the madness of war in a single speech.

“You think I’m crazy? Yes, I am,” he says, “Revolution is not for the sane,” after all.

I’ve made my mind a sunless space.

Add to this: Andor doesn’t play games. There are no winks to the camera. No memes. No cheap reveals or nostalgia bait (though the easter eggs are there). It tells you everything you need to know, if only you pay attention.

The show removes Jedi from the equation entirely, not out of spite (see The Acolyte), but out of focus. In doing so, it re-centers the franchise around the kinds of people most stories skip over: factory workers, prisoners, smugglers, politicians, spies. It’s the Star Wars equivalent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but played straight and with enormous narrative ambition.

We see the mechanics of rebellion: how money gets moved, how recruitment happens, how moral compromises are weighed and rationalized.

And crucially, it takes its time.

I show you the stone in my hand, you’ll miss the knife at your throat.

The first season is almost flawless in this regard. It tells a tight, thematically layered story in three arcs: Ferrix, Aldhani, and Narkina 5. Each is self-contained, but each builds toward the same conclusion: rebellion is not about destiny. It’s about decisions.

Season 2, though, faces a tougher challenge. Because we need to span a number of years to get to Rogue One, Season 2’s structure, where each three-episode arc skips forward an entire year, means the pace drags in strange places. The Mon Mothma storyline suffers because of this. What begins as a compelling look into bureaucratic maneuvering gradually becomes needlessly esoteric (turn the subtitles on or you might miss a name that hasn’t been mentioned since Season 1!). The urgency of bridging the gap between Rogue One and the events of Season 2 is at odds with its slow pacing here.

There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy.

And yet, even this flaw is hardly worth mentioning. Maybe I should have paid more attention? Because we didn’t deserve Andor to begin with, having given our hard earned dollars to Disney over and over again while their conveyor belt of mediocrity produces an endless array of insults to our intelligence. Andor achieves something that nothing else in the franchise has come close to since the original trilogy: it mythologizes.

And I’m not talking about the mythology of the Jedi: that of dynasties and destiny, where the hope is that a Chosen One will set things right. That’s something in the future, uncertain, hoped for, perhaps naively. The mythologizing Andor does is much older (and fearful and dormant in the face of the current political moment): that of resistance to evil. The belief that ordinary people—flawed, frightened, and compromised—matter in what they do. That rebellion isn’t ordained by prophecy or superpower, but forged in prisons, in scuttled bank accounts, in speeches uttered on rooftops under the specter of fascist oppression and acts of genocide.

Let it run! Let it run! Let it run wild!