Review | Andor, Season 2
Caliban's Revenge •Rebellion grows as an empire orchestrates a genocide. A senator condemns a ruling administration that holds the truth in contempt. This, in a spin-off from Star Wars, now a Disney brand. Caliban’s Revenge addresses the complexities of Andor.
| Contains spoilers |
There is nothing on our screens like Andor. This may seem like an absurd claim. Perilous adventure across a speculative setting with lasers and xenoforms and nostalgic references to suit several generations; surely there are hundreds of things very much like it on every platform. Off the top of my head, I can think of 12 other Star Wars series on Disney+ alone, not to mention at least 14 feature length films, including Rogue One– the spin off movie from which Andor span off.
Theodor Adorno said that ‘under monopoly all mass culture is identical’, an undifferentiated extrusion of product that comforts the public with familiar gestures while it trains the masses in further conformity and quiessence. The true significance of Andor for me, is the way in which it fulfills Adorno’s prophecy for the ‘culture industry’, and at the same time overturns it.
Star Wars is a powerful artefact. When the franchise returned to cinemas with The Force Awakens, I was sincerely alarmed by the strength of emotion I felt as the score swelled over a field of stars. They got us good, and through us our children and their friends, and their parents, and now we can’t move for baby Yodas. Andor isn’t free of the gestures that make Star Wars commercially and culturally effective. An iconic hero with a trademark silhouette, a signature weapon in his handgun, a unique ship that does a cool thing with its wings, a questing knight with desperado swagger. The show doesn’t defy the characteristics of its franchise, but even when embracing these tropes it is frequently inverting them in ingenious ways.
Although the series pivots around its titular character, he’s often not the most interesting thing on screen – and this goes double for the second season in which the intricate narrative of rebellion is spun across multiple perspectives, including that of its antagonists. Humanising evil can be a risky choice, but Andor manages to do this in a way that, far from creating the sense of false equivalency our media frequently deploys around imperialist conflicts, sharpens the violence of the oppressor through their relatability. But the real gut punch of this device is delivered, not through the portrayal of the story’s villains, but its heroes.
Star Wars, at its core, is not science fiction in the traditional sense. Its success is based on blending iconic images of heroism from across a wide range of cinematic influences – samurai, western, space adventure, war movie, swashbuckler… But the way it harmonizes these images is through an idea of mythic heroism that is, essentially, epic high fantasy – characterised by a struggle between elemental ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Frequently, instances of the franchise use this to explore temptations of power, ideas of violence, rebellion, freedom and dominance. The scion of light mirrors the dark tyrant and must overcome that identification to be, ultimately, liberated from the struggle. Andor offers us no such relief.
The light/dark dichotomy is just as central to the show’s narrative, and it employs the visual language of the franchise to communicate it – shadowy silhouettes in dark capes, soft robes and art deco dresses, minimalist spaces lit with natural pastels, industrial hallways and half lit bunkers. But these poles are not used to separate the empire and the rebellion, but to dramatise the conflicts within them. The show demystifies the idea of ‘light’ and ‘dark’, and plays on them as representations of what is exposed on the surface and the shadowy machinations that lie beneath.
In the light, Mon Mothma presents an image of legitimacy and virtue while Luthan Rael stalks the darkness like a Sith lord, assassinating potential traitors and manipulating revolutionaries. But, in a very literal sense, the story demonstrates that without a Rael there is no Mothma. Every act of heroism, every victory for the liberators, is stained by some hard, bad choice, some evil of accident or design. The show leaves you in no doubt about the necessity of revolt, but never excuses you from its brutal contingencies. Rather than liberating its hero from the dark, it implicates liberation in that darkness.
In this sense the show is anti-heroic, and counterposes itself to the entire franchise – but it never separates itself from it. It remains a commercial product the success of which relies on its ability to be narratively and aesthetically tied to the larger phenomenon. This is emphasised in the second season by the countdown to the battle of Yavin represented at the end of Rogue One, and more subtly by the return of ‘Force’ mysticism to the narrative.
A characteristic of the first season was how completely absent space magic and its ‘hokey religion’ was from the plot. It is referenced in the second through the idea of Cassian as its instrument, touching on the Star Wars meta-narrative of a universal drive towards balance. But even in satisfying fans with that gesture, the show uses it as a device to explore its own themes – of the revolutionary, not as a superhuman individual, but just a person who surrenders themselves to a larger purpose, a cause for which there is no true hero, just many anonymous faces lost in a chain of sacrifice and struggle. When the force healer who introduces this connection reappears briefly at the end, the wordless look shared between her and Cassian is one of, not just knowing, but terror.
As much as the show is submerged in this mythos, it is always reaching out into reality, and it is its ability to do this that really undermines the claim that artifacts of pop culture are innately counter revolutionary. Andor excels at rhetoric, and among the many dialects it adopts is that of political speech. The phrase ‘one way out’ from season one, still electrifies me every time I think about it. It distills, in a slogan, the moment of revolution as that at which the only possible direction is forward. There are many times when Andor self consciously speaks to its audience in this register; Saw’s ‘revolution is not for the sane’ in episode 5, the return of Nemik’s manifesto as it spreads unstoppably across the galaxy. Adopting the aesthetics of politics, the show begs its audience to read it politically – but this is secondary to the fact that it has an audience that begs to do so.
Tony Gilroy, the series showrunner, has claimed that the Andor is not intended to be political, and the real life influences on its world building are said to have their basis in historical research rather than in the news of the day. But, whatever the intentions of the authors, there was never any possibility that when the show spoke of the massacre on Ghorman that a very substantial portion of its audience would not hear ‘Gaza’. When Mon Mothma shouts the word ‘genocide’ across a legion of senators determined to drown her out, what else are we to think?
Well, for an answer to that question we could ask the Reddit Zionists who huddle around their forums and console eachother with the fact that the precise phrase she uses is ‘unprovoked genocide’. Ghorman is a bad genocide, they say, it was ‘unprovoked’. Not like ours, not like Gaza. History began on October the 7th. Clearly, that’s unhinged, but it’s real. That reading is available, and it’s one that was made possible by the equivocating language. How does one ‘provoke’ a genocide? Why the caveat? We can’t know, but there are many forces operating on an artefact of the culture industry that are likely to produce such an absurdity – both within the writer and without.
Any Marxist media critic must see writing as an intervention in public discourse, whether conscious or not. But what I think is more important, is that we understand that reading – in the sense of interpretation – is a site of political struggle. We tend to think of reading as an intimate, private experience – and it is, but it’s also social and collective and with the revolution in communications technology it is more obviously social and collective than ever before. The significance of any text is going to be determined less by the processes involved in its creation and more by its means of distribution and the context in which it is received. But we can intervene in that reception.
There are already countless video essays, commentaries, articles, blogposts, social media threads all discussing Andor and that is only possible because it is an artifact of the culture industry. It achieves this by adopting the form, not just of its franchise, but of its genre – and sometimes to its discredit. Whatever else, it’s still an action adventure full of conventionally attractive people, its earnest vision of rebellion is in many respects petty bourgeois and for all its complex, kinetic female characters the show still makes a lazy device of feminine vulnerability. I could write at length about any of these aspects, but the most important observation about Andor is that it speaks to its audience about resilience and revolution in the midst of fascism and imperialist violence and that the audience is responding ‘yes’. That’s a voice we should listen to, seek out, and amplify.
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