Andor’s Galaxy of Greebles

Tony Gilroy’s Andor feels like Star Wars as you remember it. When I was little, my mom took us to see the original trilogy re-released in theaters, even though I was still recovering from a stomach bug. She wasn’t a hardcore sci-fi aficionado, but some things required respect. “You can’t see the jump to lightspeed for the first time on a TV,” she told me sternly. Star Wars told an old story with sincere awe. 

Andor retains that spirit, despite being a prequel to a prequel (not a promising start). The two-season TV show is sandwiched in between the prequel trilogy and the film Rogue One. It follows Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) choice to join the Rebellion and his work as a spy, assassin, and technical advisor to aspiring rebels. It’s a ground-level look at the Empire and the Rebellion (no lightsabers here), with a world-weary spymaster (Stellan Skarsgård) willing to sacrifice his agents for tactical gain. 

What makes it most intensely Star Wars, and the best Star Wars since the original trilogy, isn’t the alien worlds, charismatic leads, and tense, focused action. It’s showrunner Gilroy’s gift for working at multiple scales, where the fate of the entire galaxy depends on both the industrial design of planet-killing superweapons and the quietest movements of the human heart. It’s Gilroy’s attention to the individuality of even brief background characters that makes the anti-totalitarian story so galvanizing. 

The Empire in Star Wars is marked by masks and uniforms. The Stormtroopers are anonymous in their armor; when Darth Vader executes one admiral and promotes another into his place, it’s easy to imagine he sees them as interchangeable parts. In Gilroy’s Andor, even a briefly-seen agent of the Empire has clear marks of individuality. When one Imperial tech is a little too rapturous in explaining the brilliance of a rebel radio array they’ve found, another agent quietly signals her to stop before their supervisor makes her. With just a quick shake of the head, Gilroy strongly establishes relationships between all three. 

The ordinary people pass like bright comets through the background of the story. Each minor character—some perhaps allowing actors to earn their SAG cards—seems to have a full life outside the single scene he or she appears in. It’s a welcome counterpoint to the errors of the most recent Star Wars trilogy, which made an entire galaxy small with multiple characters turning out to be descendants of other major characters, as though the many planets were barely peopled.

The original Star Wars offered a technologically advanced but worn world. There was faster-than-light travel, but also smugglers’ starships that seemed to be held together by duct tape (and maybe the Force). The matte paintings and detailed miniatures suggested there was always more beyond the camera’s lens, and brief throwaway boasts—“It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs!”—weren’t explained to the audience. Andor displays a similar trust of the viewer, taking time jumps of a year between each set of three episodes in the second season, and not belaboring explanations. While Netflix tells creators to repeat exposition so that viewers half-watching the show won’t feel left behind, Andor is happy to establish that a character will die with an elliptical line. We don’t even see the body. 

The show has real sets, in contrast to The Mandalorian’s Volume (a room of curved screens, capable of projecting whatever background is needed). Working with the real blends freedom and constraint. To tell the story, you need to decide what is necessary, what you can afford. You need to determine how quickly human fingers can glue on the greebles (small pieces of irregular plastic) that give sci-fi props their detailed, lived-in look. 

It’s the greebles that gave the Empire’s ships their sense of enormity, even though they were really miniatures. A smooth-textured ship has trouble communicating its scale, especially against a field of distant stars. The greebles, stuck on all over, create a sense of expansiveness and activity. A few greebles may have a clear function in the plot (this protuberance is an anti-aircraft gun, that dimple a shield generator), but the overall effect is one of possibility. The ship (and the world) has riches that our story will not plumb. 

For Gilroy, it’s the trust that every individual is infinitely interesting that both allows an actor to do his job and guarantees that the Empire cannot prevail. The Empire is less fascinated by the stubborn set of Dedra Meero’s jaw than is actress Denise Gough, who plays the Imperial Security Bureau agent on the rise. The Empire sees Syril Karn’s faith in regularity and order as a currency to spend, but only actor Kyle Soller understands the depth of Karn’s love of fair play. 

The Empire asks its people to be less than they are, to sand off their greebles and become featureless and frictionless. In so doing, it makes every eruption of individuality an act of destabilizing rebellion. As Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), a philosophical rebel, puts it in Andor’s first season, “The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.” One of the Imperial leaders listens again and again to Nemik’s manifesto in the final moments of the second season. Finally someone is acknowledging the near-impossibility of his work—to digest so much of the world without choking on it.

A political theory or a work of art that begins with a false image of the human person has its own death within it. Every new success accelerates its failure. Andor finds human beings, every single one of them, interesting. It’s a sharp contrast to the rising wave of AI slop, or other franchises’ (Star Wars included) determination to begin by planning CGI effects and backfilling the plot later. 

In Gilroy’s world, and in ours, rebellion against totalitarian ideologies is both necessary and inevitable. Even those who hope to be collaborators will find that they can’t file off enough of themselves to fit the Empire’s demand they be mere cogs. In Star Wars, there’s always a galaxy to save, but each person within it is a world entire.