Why You Should Watch 'Andor'

I don’t care if you’re a Star Wars fan or not. If you’re Catholic, you should be watching Andor. As the first three episodes of the second and final season of the show are dropping on Disney+ tomorrow, I would strongly recommend slipping in between your paschal celebrations and prayers the first season of the show.

Andor is set within the Star Wars universe, but is less about the aliens and lightsaber battles that the franchise is iconic for and more about saying something truly profound about government, revolution, and the common good that will stand the test of time with its top-tier acting, A-list set design, and showrunner Tony Gilroy’s mesmerizing writing (Gilroy previously was known for his writing for the Jason Bourne films). Diego Luna leads the show as the titular main character Cassian Andor, an inward-focused ruffian just trying to beg, borrow, and steal just to keep his life afloat in his nondescript, rough corner of the Galaxy. After a fateful decision that puts him on the run from law enforcement, he is forced to collaborate with a fledgling revolutionary movement of rebels seeking to overthrow the authoritarian Empire in order to stay free. This ultimately sets him on a path that ends in selfless sacrifice for the cause of freedom shown back in 2016’s second Disney-era Star Wars film, Rogue One, which, in its own right, was an instant hit among all sides of the fandom.

Without a doubt, the Disney-era of Star Wars has been plagued with hit and miss efforts to engage, placate, and perhaps even denigrate, the fan base. After a botched Sequel Trilogy of films, and several under-performing or divisive spin-off shows (Ahsoka, The Book of Boba Fett, Kenobi, and notoriously The Acolyte), or even great shows that seemed to diminish in quality as they went on (i.e. Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian), I completely understand why some fans or even non-fans of Star Wars would feel apprehensive about giving any Disney Star Wars content their money and time.

But Andor is truly worth it.

Like I said, the show is more about the emergence of political consciousness. And no, this isn’t some cringe abstraction, but the real sense of our existence as political creatures (according to Aristotle) that is born from nature by design and shaped in the bloody crucible of war, struggle, survival, and oppression.

I think we live in a time where Catholics, especially in America, find themselves homeless or on the sidelines watching a civic debate play out that “wasn’t written by us” so to speak. We witness power acquired and trading hands in ways that are not inspired by the perennial truths of Catholic social teaching, but spewing forth out of competing paradigms of authoritarianism that cloak themselves in the mantle of democracy while sacrificing any number of legitimate common goods in the process. The temptation all the while is to keep our heads down and weather the storm, hoping that someone else does something about it while we concern ourselves with our private goods and our distinct spheres of control.

What I love about Andor is that there truly a sense that good government is fundamentally bound up with the common good and human flourishing such that no one, no matter how indifferent they are to “political” affairs, can simply absolve themselves of participation in it without severe consequences for the individual goods they seek to focus on instead.

In the show, Cassian Andor learns that everyone he loves on the industrial world of Ferrix is not simply safe from creeping authoritarianism just because the powers that be left them alone for so long. In principle, they have never had a voice in a government that couldn't care less about what is in their best interest, and which is happy to leave Ferrix to its local autonomy insofar as it does not impede the Imperial government’s objectives.

As the show progresses, the consequences of abandoning the freedom-preserving and Catholic principle of subsidiarity become clearer and clearer: local police forces that largely did not bother the communities they operated in are eventually replaced by invasive military forces from the central government that harass, burden, and terrorize the populace. Planets such as Aldhani witness the slow erosion of their religious liberties and confiscation of their land through bureaucratic, manipulative redirection and intrusion by the Empire into their sacred festivals. Over ten years, the Empire corrupts the morals of the population by providing opportunities for drinking and carousing so that they become more pliant and less likely to notice or resist these subtle incursions into their traditional ways of life.

Even the trappings of wealth do nothing to guard against tyranny when an elite senator of the Imperial Senate sees her finances forensically analyzed at every step by the Imperial Security apparatus or when Cassian himself tries to escape political duties by numbing his mind on drugs, drinking, and women on a “vacation paradise” planet, only to be swept up by law enforcement for simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time and thrown (without due process) into sham court proceedings before a judge who hardly deserves the name, eventually doing time in a high security prison that violates human dignity with “cruel and unusual” forms of torture.

Meanwhile, the show allows us to see the side of those who work for the Empire: we follow the enforcers and the sycophants who idolize the “order,” “security,” and “power” the Empire provides without considering the means by which they accomplish those ends. How urgent is the need for Catholics to consider how they use power and not just their objectives for what they wish to do with it. The world of Andor is a political meditation on the interplay between ordinary citizens and the ways they reassert their rightful place in the political order when it is usurped against their interests.

When St. Paul in Romans 13 outlines submission for Christians to the Roman Empire in matters of taxation and law enforcement, it’s hard to envision how things like “revolution” could ever be entertained in the way Andor entertains it. As an American I also wrestle squaring this with the American Revolution itself.

But Andor is not a story about resisting government per se, but rather because authority rightfully constituted in any political system is not intended by God to be “a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” It is ordered to be “God’s servant for your good” and to not “bear the sword in vain” but rather to “execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” St. Paul concludes, “Pay to all what is due them–taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.” That is to say, if a government is acting honorably in service of the public good, the common good, that government is owed as a matter of justice, our submission.

But if the same government becomes a terror to good conduct instead of bad, operates against our good, and bears a sword to execute the righteous instead of the wrongdoer, does it act with God’s favor? Truly Christ Himself gave the roadmap to the Apostles in Acts who disregarded the command of the Council to abandon their faith by saying: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) when He taught them first: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar and to God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:15-22). That is to say, a telltale sign we are to resist and disregard government is when it steps out of its legitimate roles and into areas not given to it by God. When we see the government doing that which it ought to be doing by God’s command (Romans 13), and still resist its authority, we actually revolt against God. When we revolt against a government guilty of doing what God commands no government to do, we “obey God rather than men” and refuse to give Caesar what is not his.

The freedom fighter Cassian Andor’s journey towards realizing the seeds of this point is an important truth contained in this show. The Catholic conscience is served well by consuming thought-provoking television like Andor that trains us to consider whether the actions of the Caesars in our world truly wield the sword for our good… or against it.