Let’s begin with a confession: The Hub is best known for tackling the issues that matter in politics and public life. And yet, here I am—somehow entrusted with launching a regular column about film and television. It may seem like a diversion, but it’s not. Pop culture is upstream from politics. The stories we consume shape the values we hold, the assumptions we absorb, and the way we see power, identity, and meaning in the world around us.
Which brings us to Andor—a show that, against all odds, may be the most intelligent political drama on television right now. And yes, it just happens to be set in a galaxy far, far away. The second season of Andor, Disney’s prequel to Rogue One, arrives not with the pomp of lightsabers or the moral clarity of Jedi councils, but with something rarer in contemporary entertainment: grown-up politics. This is Star Wars for the bureaucratically oppressed, for the marginally hopeful, for those who know that resistance isn’t launched by prophecy but by prison labour, double agents, and exhausted politicians trapped in a collapsing system.
Unlike its franchise cousins, Andor doesn’t rely on nostalgia or Force mysticism. Instead, it leans into the machinery of power: the banality of evil, the cynicism of institutions, the psychological toll of authoritarianism. It’s less “space opera” than Orwell in space. And with Tony Gilroy at the helm—a man who speaks more like a Brookings fellow than a Comic-Con veteran—it’s no surprise the show is interested in systems as much as characters.
That focus on systems is what makes Andor stand apart from the hollow parade that so much recent Star Wars content has become. Over the past decade, the franchise has lurched from fan service to fan backlash, from bland nostalgia to incoherent spectacle. For every creative success like The Mandalorian’s first season, there have been duds—clumsy spin-offs, inert characters, and CGI set pieces in search of meaning. Andor breaks that pattern. It doesn’t try to “restore the magic.” It makes something new—and better.
What’s remarkable is that Andor still feels like Star Wars. It just reimagines what that can mean. The show uses familiar genre staples—heists, prison breaks, spycraft, grand action sequences—and elevates them with tight writing, moral complexity, and political weight. It’s as thrilling as it is thoughtful. This is a show where a tense shootout is followed by a whispered conspiracy. Where a prison escape is both exhilarating and tragic. Where even the climactic monologue in the penultimate episode—delivered with revolutionary fury—lands not as a theatrical flourish but as a hard-won cry for meaning in a world engineered to crush it.
The true villain of Andor isn’t Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine. It’s paperwork. It’s a thousand middle managers tightening their grip, one committee hearing at a time. The show doesn’t treat the Empire as an abstraction or an aesthetic—it treats it as a deeply competent, horrifyingly efficient administrative state. This is where Andor becomes particularly relevant for a Canadian audience watching its own institutions creak under the weight of slow decay and procedural drift. The show’s vision of tyranny isn’t flashy—it’s procedural. Surveillance is normalized. Trials are hasty. Everything operates with the quiet confidence of a self-replicating system.
Andor understands that authoritarianism rarely arrives all at once. It arrives in the name of stability. It cloaks itself in competence and necessity. And it thrives when citizens are tired, distracted, or desperate. It’s hard not to see echoes in our own world, where government overreach increasingly wears a technocratic mask. The show doesn’t hammer home these comparisons—they’re just there, quietly unsettling, in the background of every grey corridor and listening device.
But Andor isn’t just bleak. Its genius lies in showing how resistance is born, not out of heroism, but from accumulated indignities. A daughter watching her mother die for nothing. A spy who starts believing his own lies. A bureaucrat who realizes, too late, that order without justice is just violence in uniform. These are not mythic figures. They’re ordinary people trying not to be crushed by the gears of a faceless machine.
One of the most unsettling arcs in the series follows Syril Karn, a low-level functionary obsessed with control. He’s not evil. He’s earnest. He believes in the system. And that’s what makes him dangerous. In him, the show channels Hannah Arendt’s famous observation about the “banality of evil”—the idea that authoritarianism often thrives not on grand villainy but on small-minded obedience. Syril doesn’t cackle or conspire; he fills out reports, memorizes regulations, and yearns for promotion.
Just as chilling, in a quieter register, is the journey of Mon Mothma—the lone senator trying to navigate a dying democracy from within. Trapped in a surveillance state, abandoned by her husband, and increasingly alienated from her own daughter, she is forced into uneasy alliances with financiers and power brokers to funnel money to the nascent rebellion. When faced with the choice between preserving her ideals and advancing the cause, she sacrifices personal and moral ground inch by inch. Her arc is a study in political realism—how power demands compromise, how corruption seeps through even principled resistance, and how, sometimes, revolutions are built on bargains that no one wants to make.
For The Hub’s readers—those interested in policy, governance, and democratic resilience—Andor offers more than escapism. It’s a compelling meditation on how systems break people, and how people, sometimes, break systems back. It reminds us that freedom isn’t won by manifestos. It’s built piece by piece, often by those who don’t live to see the result.
It’s strange to say this about a Star Wars show, but Andor might be the most serious thing on television. And somehow, also one of the most fun.
