Andor Review

Andor treats the Star Wars setting as a place where bureaucracies function, prisons are run on quotas and revolutions are financed by people who will not survive them, and the result is the most adult thing the franchise has attempted. Gilroy writes it like a political thriller, with long stretches of procedure and conversation that build to explosions of consequence, and the cast, Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgard, Genevieve O'Reilly, Andy Serkis, Denise Gough, deliver some of the finest work in any recent drama.

The prison arc in the first season and the Ghorman massacre in the second are television of the first rank. The production is grounded and tactile in a way the films long ago stopped being. The monologues, Luthen's especially, are already quoted. Its only limitation is that it exists inside a franchise whose other entries it makes look childish, and that some viewers came for something faster. It is the best thing Lucasfilm has made in forty years.