Why Andor’s Grown-Up Heroes Matter to Faithful Adults
Does “mature” have to mean “nihilistic”?
This essay contains spoilers for the first season of Andor.
For a Latter-day Saint, I’m unusually interested in alcohol.
I’ve rarely felt tempted to drink it; I know myself well enough to know it wouldn’t end well—when the Word of Wisdom speaks to “the weak and the weakest of all saints,” I smile and say thankfully, “That’s me.” And yet the names of unfamiliar spirits can send me down Wikipedia rabbit holes, seeking strange knowledge like the difference between “liquors” and “liqueurs,” or ales and lagers, and why James Bond drinks his martinis shaken, not stirred.
It’s the culture of the thing that attracts me: the history, the creativity; the vineyards from the Renaissance still run by the same families and the beers hand-brewed by monks; it’s the way a beverage (Scotch, bourbon, absinthe) can represent a place or a people or an era; it’s all the bottles in all the cellars of the world, filled decades ago by men now dead, waiting to be opened and emptied in an evening.
And we teetotalers get… Sprite? No, thanks. I’ll just have water.
This essay isn’t about alcohol. It’s about stories, and specifically about Star Wars’ Andor, which recently finished its second season on Disney Plus.
In the opening minutes of Andor‘s first episode, the title character kills two security guards who are trying to rob him. It’s all very gritty—ugly weather, dirty cops, nasty red-light district—and on my first uncareful watch, I rolled my eyes. Few pop culture tropes are as tiring as “that show you love, but dark.”
And then, a bit later, I realized something interesting was going on.
If you haven’t watched Andor, ask yourself: how would Hollywood usually treat these deaths? The guards were bad guys. They worked for the Empire, if only indirectly, and they were telling the protagonist at gunpoint that he had to give them money or go to jail. If they were in the original Star Wars trilogy, the movie would make sure you forgot them immediately—their dialogue would be limited to “Stop right there!” or “You rebel scum,” they’d be wearing helmets to cover their faces, and their voices would be distorted to help you pretend they’re not human. For allegedly antifascist art like Star Wars, it’s an awfully fascist way to treat people.
In Andor, these guys have faces, and their deaths have consequences.
While our protagonist anxiously builds a false alibi, we learn there are detectives on the case—two of them, the inspector and his deputy. The deputy has stayed up all night gathering evidence and thinks he can find the killer in a matter of days, but his boss is about to leave for a performance review where he’ll have to report his crime statistics to the Empire. He knows what will happen if he ends his report with, “And by the way, two of my own were bumped off last night.”
The inspectors’ dialogue deserves an essay of its own. It’s an argument between youth and age, zeal and world-wisdom, between an Imperial true believer and a very mild sort of Rebellion—it’s even a philosophical contest between deontology and consequentialism—and it’s all carried off with a mixture of wit and realism that I can’t remember Star Wars ever achieving before. Both inspectors make good points; each is self-serving in ways he won’t admit, and if you think it’s obvious which decision they should make, then you probably haven’t thought the thing through.
And remember, these are the bad guys—low-ranking bad guys, no less, invested with agency, intelligence, and humanity. And they’re not the only ones.
