What Does It Say About Star Wars When Its Best Story Is Created by a Non-Fan?

We must unlearn what we have learned

Disney+

Happy May the 4th! In honor of that occasion, please enjoy this Star Wars article.

Before we get into it, I should briefly address the title of this post.

We can quibble about where to draw lines and even whether or not Andor should be considered “Star Wars” when it's missing all the core ingredients—those being tenets such as plucky heroes, laser swords, space magic, gentle incest, reluctant mentors speaking half-truths, Tatooine, good vs evil, and Palpatine, somehow.

There also would be no Star Wars without the first film, if not the entire original trilogy. Andor can't be the best Star Wars without Star Wars first existing. At bare minimum, A New Hope is foundational, the sacred text from which everything else has sprung. Andor is a prequel to a prequel to A New Hope. Sounds like a terrible idea, which only underscores just how good Andor must be to merit its own existence, much less rise above its station.

Despite the somewhat intentionally loaded title of this piece, I wasn’t actually claiming Andor is better than The Empire Strikes Back, heretofore the greatest Star Wars ever. Comparing Andor to any of the films is apples and oranges (or astromechs and protocol droids, if you'd rather). But Andor might be the best. In fact, I'll just go ahead and toss the damn gauntlet.

Andor is the best Star Wars.

Chances are I've gone down a path you can't follow. That's fine; I'm not going to accuse you of being in league with

Jeff K

while I use the Force to asphyxiate you. Sith may deal in absolutes; I'd rather rely on facts:

1. Andor deserves mention alongside the best Prestige TV, which can't be said about any other Star Wars show.

2. Andor has developed characters more fully than any other Star Wars.

3. Andor is the best-written Star Wars, full of nuance, subtext, and fucking incredible monologues.

4. The Aldhani heist and the prison break are top tier Star Wars action scenes.

5. Space capes are always a good look.

Just based on the facts, Andor must be considered the best along some metric. If not the best Star Wars, then certainly the best Star Wars TV series? Who will give me the best Star Wars since Empire? Where are my Mon Mothma stans?

If you don't recognize Andor’s genius, you may as well turn back now. Everything else I have to say is couched in the understanding that Andor is a singular achievement, one that should be celebrated and likely won't be seen again. In fact, I can promise Andor is the exception to the rule. More on that in a bit.

The absolute craziest part of Andor—apart that it exists, and works—is that creator Tony Gilroy is not a Star Wars fan. It's actually worse than that: he’s completely ambivalent about Star Wars. Even now, after working on Rogue One and developing 2 seasons of Andor. Couldn't care less.

“Rogue One… was my point of entry. It wasn’t that I didn’t like [Star Wars]. It just wasn’t on my radar.” Tony Gilroy, via The Hollywood Reporter

Gilroy also talks about his superpower being that he isn’t a lifelong fan. He’s leaned into this “whatevs” vibe, encouraging Andor collaborators to unlearn what they’ve learned about Star Wars. In his opinion—and based on loads of evidence, he’s not wrong—preconceived knowledge of Star Wars is a hindrance to the craft of storytelling.

“An actor will come in, they’ll put on a Star Wars [costume], and all of a sudden, this great actor, who auditioned for you and didn’t know what it really was, starts acting differently. And you go, ‘Wait, no. Do your thing. You’re here because we want you to be real.’ So it’s a testament to the potent power of Star Wars. It really gets into people’s heads, but to change the lane and do it this way, it takes a little effort.” ~ Gilroy via THR

This is so interesting.

An actor’s idea of what Star Wars is gets in the way. “We want you to be real,” is a sweeping and damning indictment of the acting in most Star Wars projects. Unknowingly and without conscious thought, actors dial into the Star Wars aesthetic. I’ve heard stories of actors making pew-pew noises and lightsaber sounds during shooting. That’s what happens when several generations have grown up on these stories. Inside, we’re all still kids playing make-believe.

Star Wars is a genre unto itself. But that can also make it a self-referential ghetto if the drama isn't treated as real.

This tendency toward a preset artificiality doesn’t just plague actors. Gilroy considers it endemic to all departments working on Star Wars. Familiarity and reverence to Star Wars is obviously a net advantage in most cases—institutional knowledge is generally an asset—but Gilroy’s argument is it restricts what Star Wars can be because people are beholden to what it’s always been. And there’s no way to watch Andor without realizing he’s 100% right.

Which would be great, if Andor was a vanguard of a new tomorrow. But it seems fated to be a wonderful one-off.

Most of the projects Lucasfilm has in development are defined by their relationship to something that came before. Those closest to fruition are the Mando-Verse projects: The Mandalorian & Grogu film and Ahsoka: S2, both of which will tee-up an Endgame style big screen climax in which our heroes vanquish Thrawn, once and for all, or at least until the writers realize they need another suitably menacing villain (aka, the Palpatine Corollary).

The Mandalorian: Season 3 and Ahsoka are largely listless exercises, story scaffolding meant to hold up the climax Lucasfilm has in mind. They're action figure plots, as in: The kinds of stories I played out with my toys when I was 12. I still enjoy them—internally, I’m largely still 12-years-old and enjoy when things go boom—but you cannot escape just how childish these shows are compared to Andor.

I appreciate that Star Wars accommodates both sides of the tastes great /less filling divide. I love thrilling heroics, especially given everything happening in America today; meanwhile, Andor is a little too real. But Andor has raised my expectations of what Star Wars can be, and it’s going to be disappointing when newer projects aim for lower targets.

At some point Kathleen Kennedy will retire from Lucasfilm. I expect Dave Filoni will be named her successor. Filoni is the opposite of Gilroy. In Filoni’s work, everything must relate to everything that came before. Being self-referential is the goal, and fan service is an end unto itself. Which is why Ahsoka seemed completely lost on her own show—Ahsoka wasn’t actually about the titular character. It was just a stepping stone on the way to the Thrawn Throw Down.

Star Wars needs to serve multiple audiences today, and the galaxy is big enough for several voices. But Andor is the first time Star Wars met me where I lived: an adult who yearns for adventure but has been hardened by life and knows that it’s actually not all Ewoks and rainbows. Shit sucks. The bad guys win. You keep fighting anyway.

Fascism and oppression have always been part of the Star Wars DNA, but never before have we been forced to sit with it, reckon with it, understand it. I like that we can be honest about what life under the Empire would look like. Especially now, with everything happening in America. It’s parallels all the way down.

Andor isn’t perfect. Season 1 takes some time finding its footing. Season 2 is also deliberately patient. It’s an anti-Star Wars project in basically every way imaginable. And that’s part of what makes it great. (The bigger part: proficient storytellers at the top of their game.)

I love the original films. They are foundational to my life. They made me who I am, in a very real way. They got me through some dark times. But if Star Wars is going to continue to matter, it can’t keep blindly regurgitating the same old story beats.

The creators who’ve taken the baton from George Lucas are Star Wars fans, which means their projects—The Mandalorian, the Sequel Trilogy, Ahsoka, etc—are officially sanctioned fan-fiction. That’s not to say they’re amateurish, just that their existence is predicated on something that was created by someone else. The new finds its first stirrings of life in the creator’s love for the old. That's natural, and beautiful. But the past is also a gravity well, pulling everything inward; if the creator isn't mindful, if they don’t come to the work with a goal other than “tell a Star War,” the new will only ever be a faint mimicry of the original.

Andor exhibits none of those limitations. Because Gilroy isn’t a fan, his lack of brand investment allows him to be loyal to the business of storytelling. That’s the business Lucasfilm should be in; the Star Wars business is limited, and will only be lucrative for so long. Even lifelong fans eventually get tired of eating the same meal.

Once upon a time, George Lucas wanted to tell a Flash Gordon story because he’d grown up on them. He couldn’t get the rights, so he created something similar but very different. That’s my hope for Star Wars. Similar, but different.