There’s something about Andor, the Star Wars TV show that just finished its second and final season, that feels almost impossible. My first reaction watching it was a kind of delighted surprise that a show could be this good, this exciting and engaging while at the same time being a part of the Disney Empire, known for cranking out the bland franchise gruel that has dominated the cultural landscape for the past decade or longer. Initially it might appear that Andor is just the latest example—the Disney catalogue is full of them—of television shows that exist to perpetuate a franchise rather than because there is an interesting story to be told. Think of shows like The Book of Boba Fett, Moon Knight, or the deeply tedious Secret Invasion. The relentless commodification of art and culture means that so much of what gets presented as mass culture simply exists to bolster the profit and loss of a studio or retain IP rights. Indeed, studios will often go so far as to not release finished films and simply take the tax break instead. That’s how little they care about the art itself. 

It would have been easy for Andor to fall into this category—yet another Disney show produced simply to fill space in the production schedule and add a few new lines of merchandise to the Star Wars commercial Empire. After all, Andor is a prequel to a prequel. It leads into the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,which itself was designed to function as a prequel to the very beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope from 1977. For those who haven’t seen the show, itfollows the experiences of its titular character, a petty thief named Cassian Andor, who spends his time in a minor backwater of the Empire looking for his missing sister. From what may sound like an unpromising premise, the creative team behind the show, led by director and writer Tony Gilroy, have crafted one of the most critically acclaimed limited series of the last decade. 

Over the course of two seasons of exciting television, Andor, played by Diego Luna, comes to political consciousness and becomes a leader within the revolutionary struggle against an authoritarian and genocidal galactic Empire. There are no lightsabers, no talk of Jedi or Sith, and no expectation on the audience that to understand this TV show they need to have sat through several films and read a tie-in comic series. Critics talk about the show being more mature than other Disney offerings—“Star Wars for grownups”—and while it doesn’t bear the signs of being tailored to be watched on a second screen like so much of the streaming ecosystem, what feels most important about the show is not so much its audience but its content. 

Andor gives a detailed and deeply sympathetic portrayal of how a revolutionary movement develops—from initial riots, to larger insurrections, to a movement equipped with squadrons of X-wing fighters and well-equipped secret military bases. It follows multiple characters, all with different perspectives, commitments and aims, from unpredictable guerilla fighter Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) to the more liberal politician Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), who hosts diplomatic parties in public while privately funneling her family money into financing revolutions. There isn’t one best or correct way to rebel and revolt, and the show is honest about the inherent contradictions and tensions that emerge over issues of strategy, theory and practice. Is it better to work slowly from the background in order to keep people safe, or is violent direct action better even if—or especially if—it provokes a reactionary response from your oppressor? Is it better to use violence in isolated direct strikes, or should revolutionary cadres work together in order to achieve a larger aim—and who decides what that aim is? 

There’s a moment in the opening of the second season which makes these questions central to the narrative. After a daring incursion to an Imperial base, Cassian steals some military hardware. Taking it back to an isolated rendezvous point on a forest planet, he finds his contact dead and is captured by a squad of guerillas, ostensibly on his side. The Maya Pei brigade are so riven with squabbling about leadership, and the right way to handle Cassian, that the situation turns violent, and it's only when they turn their guns on one another that Cassian is able to escape. Ultimately these debates about strategy and tactics are not simply hand-waved away, but are an essential part of the show’s narrative. In other words, revolutionary struggle is one of those things you learn by doing.  

In terms of its plot, Andor provides a grim depiction of the power and allure of fascism, the development of a prison industrial complex, and the rise of authoritarian politics. In this way, the series resonates with the myriad political crises of our current era. The Empire introduces harsh and arbitrary imprisonment for large swathes of the population, echoing the Trump administration’s ongoing round-up of dissidents. Those imprisoned by the Empire are placed into centers of constant work and surveillance, where they are used as a labor force to build military equipment. The prison escape arc (a personal highlight from the first season) is a clear fictional response to the exploitative and unjust prison industrial complex of contemporary capitalism. In the second season the Empire needs a resource from a planet called Ghorman, and their ecological destruction and authoritarian violence combine into genocide, just as we’ve seen with the violence inflicted in Palestine. This commentary on current events restores the political edge that ran through George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy, with its rebel movement explicitly inspired by the Vietcong. That political edge is part of what makes those films so engaging, and something missing from much of the Disney Star Wars media until this point. 

In short, Andor shows us what popular or mass culture can do at its best. It doesn’t just show the extent and scale of political problems, but gives an example of what a hopeful response to these problems might be. For a Left sorely in need of material to spark the political imagination, it is one of the most interesting and useful pieces of mass media of the last decade. In giving so much time and space to the development of the Empire’s fascist politics and the organization of rebellion, the show perpetuates and renews the utopian impulse within science fiction as a form. This kind of popular culture has an inextinguishable spark of promise: a presentation of a future that could be otherwise, whether it’s Star Trek’s post-capitalist Federation or Andor’s revolutionary movement. 

Talking about a hope for a different future can often generate two responses: either cynical dismissal that anything better is even imaginable on the one hand, or a kind of complacent settling for liberal optimism on the other. A lot of media dodges the harder questions of systemic change, in the same way that liberal politicians do. The prime culprits here are other Disney products, which present a vision of a beneficent status quo that’s always restored through the work of a hero (often aided and abetted by either the U.S. Army or the U.S. intelligence services, or both). It's not a coincidence that the big cultural figures of the last decade have been Chris Evans’s super-soldier Captain America and Robert Downey Junior as the weapons dealer and billionaire Tony Stark. What’s truly striking is that Andor refuses the liberal complacency of that kind of mainstream popular culture, and is a show explicitly dedicated to ideas of rebellion and, ultimately, revolution.

This does a couple of important things. Firstly, it raises important questions around the nature of revolutionary politics. The show doesn’t shy away from the role of violence, showcasing the ways in which violent armed resistance is an entirely legitimate tactic for community self-defense and the beginnings of political agency. Take the culmination of season one. The backwater planet of Ferrix, on which Cassian grew up, is placed under the direct control of the Empire, which clamps down on the last freedoms of its people. At the funeral for Cassian’s adoptive mother, Maarva, she gives a pre-recorded speech encouraging the population to rebel. Previous episodes have already shown the community as organized, with a low-tech warning system of bells and signals to spread the word when soldiers enter their streets. At the funeral, which is surrounded on all sides by armed soldiers, the event turns from a protest to a riot. Maarva’s funeral, far from being a moment of defeat for the idea of a rebellion, becomes a catalyzing event for it. Later in the show, after Cassian’s lover, Bix, is captured and subjected to a new form of torture, she and Cassian track down the doctor responsible and bomb his office, not just getting revenge but ensuring that torture can’t be used on others. When confronted with fascist violence, Andor shows that armed resistance is not only politically essential but correct (even if the show can’t quite resist the fantasy of a liberal politician who is willing to publicly speak out and organize to try and stop a genocide). 

Andor shows us an ordinary person who experiences firsthand the criminalization and oppression produced by authoritarianism, who comes to political consciousness, and who becomes willing to engage in illegal, violent activity that is justified as an act of insurrection against a fascistic oppressor. There is no sense for Cassian that things will just work out for the best, or that he’ll be able to find a planet far enough away from the Empire that he’ll get to see out his days in peace and quiet. Indeed, Andor shows that he tries to do just that, but ends up being thrown in jail for the crime of catching the attention of the wrong soldier. You can try and run, but oppression comes for us all in the end. There is no easy optimism in the show—there is no hero coming to save the day, and plenty of characters die, tragically and suddenly. Given that it's a prequel to a prequel, the audience can’t help but know that Cassian is a dead man walking—we’ve already seen his death in Rogue One. Many other characters are destined to die, too, and yet this doesn’t make what they are doing any less meaningful. If anything, quite the opposite. The show presents revolutionary struggle as not just necessary but a natural response to the conditions of existence. In short, Andor dramatises a simple philosophical principle: it is right to rebel against fascists and oppressors. Not just right in the sense of being morally correct, but in the sense of being natural and inevitable too.

There’s one character, Nemik, a sweet-natured soul who is introduced as one of the team involved in a complex heist designed to help finance this nascent revolutionary movement by robbing the Empire. He’s also—like many a left-wing idealist—working on a manifesto. Nemik doesn’t survive the heist. His death is something of a tragic accident, but his own impact is colossal. The show ends with his manifesto being spread across the entire galaxy, to the panic and consternation of Imperial apparatchiks. There are lines from the manifesto that sum up well the idea that rebellion is not something that has to be made from nothing, but will occur inevitably: 

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this, freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

In other words, people (and aliens, in this particular universe) naturally hate being oppressed, so every act of fascism and oppression creates more resistance, more backlash. By contrast, “tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks”—until, one day, “one single thing will break the siege.”

Yet what’s important here is that Andor’s theory of revolution doesn’t just rely on spontaneity. Yes, freedom is a pure idea, but the work towards realizing freedom is hard and needs organization, requiring immense sacrifice and a willingness to get one’s hands dirty. There’s a repeated line throughout the series: “rebellions are built on hope.” But the context and presentation of the show underscores that hope is not simply a feeling, but rather the exercise of agency towards a distinct political goal. In contrast to the liberal optimism of other Disney products, where a hero will always swoop in to save the day, Andor understands that hope is hard and that trying to build a better world comes at a very high price. 

There’s another important character in the show, Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård. Rael is an underground organizer and recruiter who spends time gathering intelligence and accelerating the development of a revolutionary movement. He’s asked by one of his many undercover agents what he’s had to sacrifice. His answer comes in a long monologue, a standout moment for the whole show, and a good thesis for what the writing communicates about the cost of working for a better future:

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 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. And 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!

Revolutionary struggle demands a commitment—a willingness to fight and suffer for a future that you may not get to see. Rael’s words resonate with the real-life example of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, particularly his concept of “revolutionary suicide.” The point for Newton wasn’t wanting to die, but that life under present conditions was intolerable and that living with dignity and hope necessarily meant revolutionary change from the status quo. As he put it in his 1973 autobiography, in language that closely tracks Rael’s own words: 

Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all—black and white alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill. But, before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning...

Rael and Newton alike point to the fact that revolutionary struggle is both a utopian cry for a better world and at the same, a struggle against the forces preventing that better world from coming into being. Hope is something that has to be passed on, pressed into the hand of someone else willing to work for a world that they, too, may not live to see.

All of this isn’t to say that Andor is a perfect model of political strategy to follow, or that watching and appreciating Andor is somehow a substitute for genuine political action. After all, art alone won’t save us. One of the show’s directors might draw inspiration from The Battle Of Algiers, but their job isn’t to start revolutions; it’s to generate a decent return on investment for Disney’s outlay. Yet despite that limitation—one that impacts all pop culture generally—Andor is a powerful, effective piece of media that can spark the imagination and serve as a spur to the creation of a politically engaged mass culture. If there’s one thing that the show repeats again and again, it's that things won’t just work out for the best, and even passive spectators won’t be safe for long. In this moment, marked by interlocking crises—from ecological disaster, to war, genocide, poverty and economic inequality—there is someting deeply refreshing about pop culture that refuses banal optimism. Andor insists that the hope for a better world is a material thing—not an ephemeral feeling, but something that is made, built and carried forward collectively. To make a better world is not to try and reach an endpoint, or a neat resolution but is, as Marx knew, to engage and sustain “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Even in our current moment, Marx knew that “the conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” Perhaps Nemik’s manifesto is a message for us all. Remember this: even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.