The New Yorker:

Beneath all the laser blasters and X-wing spaceships, Tony Gilroy’s miniseries spinoff is a twisting tale of radicalization.

By Kyle Chayka

It’s rare to hear the word “genocide” uttered unequivocally on television, let alone on the streaming service Disney+. So it was a bit of a shock to encounter the term in a late episode of the second season of “Andor,” a “Star Wars”-spinoff miniseries that has become something like the “Game of Thrones” of George Lucas’s space-opera expanded universe: grittier, grungier, and more political than its predecessors. In the scene in question, a liberal, idealistic senator of the imperial government that controls much of the galaxy speaks out against a vengeful attack on the protesting residents of Ghorman, a planet that the empire is attempting to subjugate and militarize. The senator, named Mon Mothma, risks her political career and her life to make an emergency speech addressing the incident. “What happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide,” Mothma says. The other senators are immediately abuzz, and Mothma has to be smuggled out of the spherical senate chamber to avoid abduction by a turncoat.

“Andor” has extremely elaborate set dressing. A viewer could easily get lost in the various planet names, revolutionary factions, alien races, and ancillary robots (I particularly liked a party paparazzi droid). There are entire subplots involving an upscale gallery, a sort of Gagosian that deals in alien artifacts, some perhaps forged. But the show—which was created by the screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote the ethically agonized legal thriller “Michael Clayton” as well as several screenplays in the Jason Bourne film series—is better if you can get past the most obvious signaling of the “Star Wars” canon and appreciate the twisting political-conversion arc that the show’s two seasons trace. (According to Gilroy, the story was planned for five seasons but was later pared back, making it a welcome exception to pervasive streaming bloat.) Fables, after all, work in part by defamiliarization, casting archetypal conflict in a world that we recognize even if we don’t live in it—the persistent absence of princesses and fairies in our own lives doesn’t undermine the symbolism of Cinderella. In the case of “Andor,” beneath all the laser blasters and X-wing spaceships, you’ll find some of the most trenchant mainstream critique of contemporary political gridlock on TV.

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