When Andor ended its second and final season in May 2025, it closed the book on Cassian Andor’s road to Rogue One. And it left Lucasfilm with an awkward question: what do you make after the best thing Star Wars has done in decades? Critics, awards voters and fans mostly agreed on how good the show was. It won five Emmys, including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for Dan Gilroy’s “Welcome to the Rebellion”. However, the trophies are the least interesting thing Andor left behind.
AStar Warsshow that names its enemy
The franchise has always had an empire to topple, but for most of its history that empire was a backdrop for lightsabers and space wizards. Andor moved the machinery of authoritarianism to the front of the frame. The forced labor of Narkina 5, the Imperial Security Bureau paperwork, the slow squeeze on Ferrix and the manufactured crisis on Ghorman. The danger isn’t a man in a black helmet. It’s ambitious officers like Dedra Meero and eager functionaries like Syril Karn, doing their jobs well.
Showrunner Tony Gilroy has stopped being coy about what he was depicting. In a February 2026 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he described the writers’ approach plainly: “You get out your Fascism For Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could.” He was also vocal about his understandable reticence to be up-front before. Selling the show on its craft was “a very, very safe and legitimate place for us…without ever having to say what I’m free to say now.” He added that the parallels audiences saw weren’t prophecy so much as “the sad familiarity of fascism.”
What makes Andor iconoclastic is its defense of democracy, but it refuses to be boxed in as partisan. When the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked Gilroy whether the show was a “left-wing work of art”, he pushed back: “I never think about it that way.” He then turned the question around, asking Douthat whether he identified with the Empire. Wiser than previous Star Wars productions, wiser than party politics, Andor is people power itself. A fable—the time-honoured conduit through which the Overton window travels.
From Disney+ to the streets
Mon Mothma’s Senate speech, in which Genevieve O’Reilly’s senator condemns the Ghorman massacre as “unprovoked genocide,” sent Andor’s reach soaring. Its sharpest line, “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” quickly turned up on placards at the No Kings protests across the US in June 2025.
It wasn’t the only one. At rallies from Austin to New York, protesters carried lines from Karis Nemik’s manifesto and from the show’s resistance fighters: “I have friends everywhere,” “Freedom is a pure idea” and “Oppression is the mask of fear.” That’s the quiet achievement here. A fandom that arrived for X-wings and stormtroopers ended up passing around a fictional student’s political pamphlet. People who would never pick up a book on authoritarianism learned its warning signs from a streaming series.
Why it still lands in Europe
A year on, the show’s lessons feel less like science fiction. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has led the government since 2022. The party grew out of the Italian Social Movement, founded in 1946 by a former official in Mussolini’s last government, and it still carries that party’s tricolor flame in its logo.
Elsewhere, far-right populists have topped national polls in Germany, France and the UK. That includes Germany’s AfD, which the country’s own intelligence services have placed under surveillance over suspected extremism.
Andor never mentions any of this, and it doesn’t need to. Its point is that democracies rarely fall overnight. They’re worn down by emergency measures, convenient scapegoats and ordinary people cheated of recognising their problem. Diego Luna put it bluntly on the Golden Globes red carpet this January: “I do believe that we are living in very dangerous times.”
Andor doesn’t tell its audience who to vote for. It tells them to pay attention: to the language of those in power, to who is being blamed and to what is quietly being taken away. That’s why, more than a year after Cassian walked toward Scarif, the show’s lines are still being painted on cardboard and carried through city streets. Few series of any genre manage that. For a Star Wars show, it remains remarkable.
All 24 episodes of Andor are streaming on Disney+.
