Andor (season 2) ★★★★★

It’s impossible to overstate just how good the second and final season of Andor is. This is simultaneously a Star Wars show for the fans and a rollicking ride for the don’t-give-a-damns, utterly satisfying whether you’re steeped in canon or have avoided it like the plague until now.

Andor feels complete, though it is, in fact, the backstory to a backstory. Chancer-turned-revolutionary Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) played a key part in securing the plans to the Death Star in the 2016 film Rogue One, and those plans allowed the Rebels to target the planet killer’s weak spot in the original 1977 Star Wars (yes, the chronology is confusing).

But across its two-season arc (a condensed take on what creator Tony Gilroy originally conceived as a five-season series), it has given the franchise something it has never had before — a sense of being grounded in the real.

Of course, there are still hovering vehicles, fantastical creatures, the mumbo-jumbo pseudo-spiritualism of The Force, but they are largely peripheral, and used sparingly. Andor isn’t completely averse to fan service, but it offers it only when it works for the story and the complex world building.

Gilroy’s approach — and it’s radical and invigorating — has been to treat the universe created by George Lucas far more seriously than Lucas or any of his inheritors have before. It’s a materialist rendering, almost Marxist, that lays bare the machinery of the fascist state that is the Empire in order to critique it.

The strip-mining of planets for their mineral resources; the enslavement of indigenous peoples; the deployment of propaganda and complicit media to sway populist sentiment (a particularly strong theme this season); the use of surveillance to sniff out and suppress opposition; the brutal turning upon its own as the ultimate tool of intimidation. In all of this we can see echoes historical and contemporary. And in none of it, sadly, does it feel as if Andor is straying even a little from the realm of fact.

But it’s not just the Empire that gets the laser-eyed treatment (and a big shoutout to Ben Mendelsohn, who is superb as Orson Krennic, the officer in charge of bringing the Death Star into being). The Rebel side chews through people, too.