Andor and the Problem With Jedi 

Basically, the showrunners remembered that this is the dark times. There are no Jedi to bring hope to the galaxy, they were branded traitors and exterminated, that's why this period of the setting is called THE DARK TIMES! Too many star wars writers forget that because they desperately want to tell stories that include the people the setting is most known for. But while Luke may have become the Hero of the Rebellion, and he may have brought the Alliance victory, he did not _start_ the rebellion, the Jedi did not start the rebellion, people did, people with dreams of a brighter future, they gave themselves hope, and that's what Andor is about.

Andor is basically a stand-alone Star Wars novel manifested LITERALLY.

I'm loving the nittier and gritter star wars universe, great review!

Its sad that many people say "Andor isn't Star Wars" just because there are no Jedi or Lightsabers. Its such a simple-minded way of looking at it, and shows a complete misunderstanding of what makes Star Wars _really_ Star Wars.

i like your analysis! some things id like to add about andor himself and his arc that i think are potentially interesting: i don't think Cassian at the beginning of the show steals from the Empire only because they're an easy mark. This is someone who was of the subaltern even before the Empire came into being. Cassians birth planet of Kenari was strip-mined and reportedly made toxic by Republic operations. He's looking for his sister, but their separation wasn’t random. The Republic was, according to Maarva, going to react to the killing of an officer in self-defense with extreme violence. The details of the community Cassian was living in with his sister, particularly there being no adults around, plus the scene of a massive, hollowed out quarry strongly suggests that there was a genocide on Kenari and that even if not, Kenari was subjected to extractive colonialism. Whether or not Cassian would relate what was done to Kenari to the Empire, this isn’t someone who’s likely to have much love for the powers that be in the galaxy. For definite anti-Imperial stuff specifically for Cassian, Maarva’s reason for rebellion, the death of Clem, also affects Cassian, as that was his adoptive father whom he was shown to have positive memories of and a front row seat to his arrest and execution. Cassian was also shown attacking clone troopers as a teenager after Clem’s death, and for that he was incarcerated and then conscripted to fight at Mimban. I guess by my interpretation, Cassian wasn’t necessarily just someone who was in it for himself and then found a new lease on life. Rather, he always had intense anger and reason to oppose the Empire/late Republic (see conversations with Luthen on the way to Aldhani and convos with the Aldhani crew), but he didn’t have to tools to be effective or organized about it, nor much experience suggesting the Empire might therefore be worth fighting to overthrow both because of the seeming impossibility and because other options weren’t much better in his experience (see Kenari and the Republic). hence, to start out, he resembles a classic Star Wars scoundrel, but id argue that's because hes self*preserving*, not self*serving* in a different way than say, a Han Solo, because of his background. Then, the events of Andor (the show lol) show 1) there are ways to “put a real stick in the eye of the Empire” (Aldhani) 2) the Empire is truly heinous and needs to be opposed even if the future is uncertain, and the stakes are life and death (PORD and Narkina 5) 3) there are, if not governments, people worth fighting for and with such that resisting the Empire can possibly be about making something better in addition to resisting annihilation TLDR i think Cassian's arc starts even before the show because it's his entire life, not just the events of the show that makes him Luthen's ideal recruit and Nemik's ideal reader all this to say. This is why Cassian Andor is such a good candidate to explore a story about why and how a rebellion comes into being and the moral complications around that process, and it's especially well-suited for one without the Jedi because a Cassian Andor not only lacks the extraordinary moral convictions of the jedi, but also the extraordinary abilities. This is a story of how the *galaxy* came to be involved in the Galactic Civil war, not just the Jedi and Sith. I think it also strengthens the importance of the Force users, because their contributions are all the more extraordinary in light of how evident it is that what Luke Skywalker did was just not available to most people, and that while the evil of the Empire can be perpetrated without everyone being a Sith, the terror that one Sith can inflict is so great that you need a Jedi or an entire army to oppose one. I don't think the Force and other more mystical elements are left out because they would take away from the complication of the story about rebellion (or because the production crew hate fun LOL). The absence of the Force and its users in this one show reinforces why it is so important in the mainline movies, and why the re-emergence of the Jedi in the form of Luke is "A New Hope"

You're wrong about Palpatine not being in the show. After Aldhani, ALL of the ISB operatives assemble to hear what the Imperial response is going to be. Admiral Wullf Yularen informs them ... "I contacted Emperor Palpatine last night ..." ... so, apparently, P.O.R.D was Palpatine's idea - it came from on high However, there's no mention of The Force or the Jedi or Sith ... so if they had called him King Joe Bloggs, it would have had the same effect, so I'm not surprised you missed it. My reason for liking Andor's apparent omission of the Jedi is that it fits with Han Solo, and Moff Tarkin's observations from A New Hope SOLO: "I've been from one side of this galaxy to other, and never seen any sign of a 'Force' ..." TARKIN (to Vader): "The Jedi are all but extinct. You, my friend, are the last of their religion" So - in this period just before the Battle of Yavin - NOBODY (with extremely few exceptions) even thought there was such a thing as The Force, or a Jedi Knight ... although, "May the Force be with you" was a common saying ... As it would be nice if it was real [little did they know!] Luthen has something "Force-ish" going on - how did he manage to acquire all those trinkets for his shop? And why does he sometimes appear subservient to his mysterious assistant Kleya? He has a retractable walking stick that retracts like a light sabre. His own spaceship is rigged with massive light sabres on each side! [I think that's the giveaway] I'll allow him the Khyber crystal - he could have taken that from the shelf in his shop - or there's one other possibility..... Anyway. By NOT making the Force an overt part of the show, you're right ... we focus completely on the brutal struggle between the fledgling rebelllion and the Empire, and it's a much better show for it.

This is a really cool video, surprised it doesn't have more views!

Andor is a piece of art and anyone who says otherwise is willfully shooting themselves in the foot. SW isn't a genre, it’s a universe and many different genres, themes, characters, and stories have yet to be discovered in that universe. If someone wants the 'feel' of the old movies there is good news, the old movies still exist, so literally go watch them again. As horrendous as some of the Last Jedi was I have grown to appreciate that Rian was also trying to make something new, his execution in some of that 'newness' was very questionable but the stuff that worked really worked. This misguided unconscious consensus of SW fans that we need to ‘recapture’ those feelings from the first films has led to an over saturation of bad SW trying to live up to something it shouldn’t even need to. Every SW project doesn’t need the same themes, characters, and feeling as the OG trilogy, that'd get repetitive and very boring. Most new projects have virtually become parodies of the source material where nothing is left but references cameos, and generic mic-drop lines that fit in any situation. I love Andor not just because it is full of heart, nuance, and complex storytelling in a thematically dark setting but also because of what it represents: innovation of SW and a new hope that future SW projects don't have to be self referential, sloppily written, poorly executed, mass produced projects rather than pieces of art that stand on their own merit. Disneys and the fans problem has been thinking that SW is a genre and everything must fit into very confined rules. If someone thinks Andor is too boring they need to consider spending less time feeding their dopamine receptors with stuff like Tik Tok and take the time to pay attention to what’s happening between action sequences. They’ll realize that that there is a lot of nuance and character work happening, it is a masterclass of writing and direction. If someone thinks Andor doesn't feel like SW they need to reframe how they understand the IP, it is not a genre of itself. The themes, characters, settings, sounds, textures, virtually everything is straight out of the Lucas doctrine and what story he was trying to tell. If someone thinks it stands shoulder to shoulder on equal footing as Obi Wan, Ahsoka, or Boba Fett they need to try and summarize one of those shows and try to summarize Andor, the difficulty to do so for Andor succinctly is indicative of the complex level of detail and care. Andor is lightyears ahead of those shows in virtually every cinema or storytelling criteria. Anyone who loves this show should be promoting it and recommending it to everyone they know. Systems either change or die and there is only one way out of this SW slump of bad media.

It always struck me as weird for Han Solo to find the concept of the Force, and Jedi as "superstition". The way we today would talk about like jinxing, or karma when you're not a buddhist. Like bro you're living in the Star Wars galaxy, how could you be so dense? This idea was never explored in the movie explicitly, but of course the reason for that is the Empire's totalitarian crackdown on anything referencing the Jedi or the Force. And Han was just a product of that crackdown. It worked. He grew up during the peak of those crackdowns. So I was a bit sad that it was never explored upon in the subsequent movies. And Andor finally gave that side. The inner mechanisms of the Imperial thought machine is in full display. Though the show itself never mentions Jedi or anything like that, it gave a crystal clear explanation as to why Han would find it superstitious talking about Jedi. That's what makes this show great. It added depths, upon depths to existing Star Wars media, without even mentioning them. Just by acknowledging certain ideas and concepts just makes the Star Wars universe that rich and storied. It is unreal how much it is doing to Star Wars without even realizing it. 10/10 across the board.

They tried to get both Anakin and Shmi but they couldn't. First Qui-Gon, but Watto wasnt going to bet 2 slaves for 1 pod race, and Anakin did talk to Obi-Wan but Obi-Wan was all "it is, what it is". Im paraphrasing for hyperbole, but still. If they did get involved it would have only sped up the disputes in the Senate about the Jedi (a religious order of psychic knights) working as possible insurgents without any form of accountability Im sure they tried to do it the legal way but unfortunately Palpatine was made Chancellor at the end of TPM, and made have even killed the idea. Its not like Tattoine is in Republic space. Its not them being arrogant just the consequences of ineffectual bureaucracy

The force is in Andor, it's just not called that. Nemek's journal mention that the Empire's oppression is against the natural law of the universe, which in Star Wars is The Force. AMCA really did a great job talking about this during their Andor run of episodes.

Great essay, absolutely nailed it! *and also they are really good friends** One could say, they are roommates!

Luthen’s slice of Imperial pursuers using kyber-crystal empowered light-saber like weapons on the outside of his modified transport ship is another overt use of “The Force” and space-wizardry in Andor. It is generally muted and remote, but the third pillar is present.

"Also, they're really good friends. They even share a blanket!"

That's not what any version of the Categorical Imperative says. It doesn't say that X is wrong if it is wrong even some times. That would require a way of figuring out whether an action is right or wrong in a set of cases without appeal to the Categorical Imperative (because you would have to figure out first whether it is always right before you could apply the Categorical Imperative), which Kant would deny. There are several versions of the Categorical Imperative, but probably the one you were going for there is the Formula of Universal Law, which says that some action X, done for some principle Y, is permissible if and only if it is possible to will that everyone acts on principle Y in similar circumstances. It is possible for you to will that if and only if is coherent to imagine everyone acting on that principle in similar circumstances, and it being psychologically possible for you to want them to do so. In general you don't want to present what are supposed to be fundamental moral principles that are supposed to say what makes something morally right or morally wrong while having terms like 'morally right' and 'morally wrong' appearing in the definition of the principle. It either leads to circularity or is a sign the principle is not the whole story.

I like your essay. But for me personally it's the jedi and sith that make Star Wars for me. Scoundrel and wars side can pretty much be any sci-fi show. Yet I gotta admit I would love to get on a ship and just go to any planet out there

Good job, man,

Andor is the closest we've got to the original movie Star Wars: A New Hope. The film became a sensation by telling the story of a small group of people who, quite like in Andor, find themselves embroiled in a fight against an empire for one reason or another. The actions of the Jedi play a marginal/decorative role in that movie. Unfortunately, over the years creators and audiences alike lost the forest (the story) for the trees (flashy lightsaber fights, space battles, force abilities...), to the point that today some fans can say without a hint of irony that Andor is not Star Wars.

This is really good

👏👏👏 Thorough analysis... I'll give this an A++

Very deep analysis 👍

Andor is something Lucas would’ve done, but it likely would’ve been more inspired by a different type of media like the OG 6 films. I could see it being spy film inspired

Those memes are so stupid. Wookiepedia lists 53 Jedi survivors, a handful of those by becoming inquisitors. Out of ~10,000 Jedi that still means Order 66 was around 99.5% successful. And also it was in pre-prequel material that Vader hunted down Jedi for many years. The notion that Order 66 definitely should have killed every single Jedi is just asinine.

Looks like I am watching Andor soon

The empire works pretty much like the german fascism in the 30s and 40s. Deeply rooted in occultism this quasi religious, mystical inner working of the Reich wasn't remotly a a factor in the daily life of the people living under it. Many had no knowledge about it whatsoever. Same in SW and that's why it works so well to tell any story without the mystical force/jedi part.

Nice video analysis. You have to stop saying Lucasfilm, because it's really Disney. I was surprised we got a show like Andor and like you it got me interested in the SW universe again. For me, if you go by what was set up in ANH, Jedi are all but gone, to me maybe 100 years. It seems like there aren't even people have heard of Jedi, but there must have been some sort of religion built up around The Force as people do say it. For me, all the most powerful Force users are gone and we have Force adept people left that have some link to it in a small way. I don't want to see any Kanan or Ezra or Inquisitors around in Andor. It's showing us what everyone else was doing that didn't have a lightsaber. And that is refreshing in itself, because there are good stories that can be told in the SWU without it. IMO, SOLO had some really good stuff with Enfys Nest and the Black Sun. If they left SOLO out of it it may have been even more intriguing.

Kreia in KOTOR II isn't morally ambiguous, though. She's a commentary on the selfishness of enlightened centrism. When she stops disguising her force alignment, she turns bright red when you use force detection. This shows she was a dark side user the whole time just hiding it behind some paper-thin moral ambiguity.

I see a lot of people taking ‘Saw is an Anarchist’ at face value and I really want to push back on it. Saw is explicitly the leader of a resistance cell and he has a near religious certainty in his own ideas of morality which can not be questioned. Non of that is compatible with anarchic practice. You can’t have an anarchist cell with an unquestionable leader and any beliefs or decisions about moral clarity would have to be collectively held by the group to have any meaning or effect. Anarchists don’t all subscribe to the same ideas but the main through line that defines it is an opposition to hierarchical power structures. You can’t have a ‘leader’ when you don’t believe leaders should exist! Luthen is a much more creditable anarchist than Saw is. He’s trying to create consensus for action between groups and individuals and explicitly doesn’t think his answers are the only workable ones. He doesn’t stand up and say he is one but that doesn’t make him not an anarchist any more than Saw shouting that he is makes him one.

Grey Jedi make so sense, To be powerful in the light side you cannot be powerful in the dark and vice versa. If you were balanced in the light and dark side you would have no force abilities at all.

I am 22min in, when do the Jedis come into this as per the title??? He s just recounted Andor characters and plot?

Three types of Disney fans Those who hate all of Disney content no matter what Those who defend Disney and eat everything up Then there is the smarter group that judges things on a case by case basis and are able to enjoy things like daredevil or andor without being a shill

Chirriut didnt have the force

problem man own by Disney the story is all ready over so does not matter lol sorry but true say the movie rogue one and even that did have to happen really, also the did the mistake that Star Trek did J.J. Abrams he destroyed two sci fi franchises the og sci fi so lol it damn nothing can dude tell there out disney hand that never happen Avatar is safe tell director leave that way it so good

My problem with Rogue One is that they messed up the ending. Tantive IV was NOT at Scarif after all that identified them as a vessel involved in a terrorist attack and despite what people think Darth Vader wouldn't have problems boarding and seizing that vessel as its a clear threat to the Empire. Also just because we expected the cast to get killed sending the Death Star plans out that doesn't mean they HAVE to! Instead have say Cassian and Jyn survive because they wake up in that lift in the bowels of a hardened imperial research base that is badly damaged but survives a near miss from the Death Star remember it didn't blow up the world! So him surviving make the Andor series much more interesting and more of a reason to watch it! One day I'll watch Andor it still feels the only such series worth watching so far.

You want the Star Wars franchise to drop the Jedi altogether? Fine. Then consider me a fan who will end up dropping the franchise. Jesus! I've never come across such an overrated production in my life.

The "Grey" Jedi absolutely works as part of the issue with the Jedi is this wanting to shoe horn every Jedi into thier hypocritical ways.

Problem is our obsession and attraction to the backstory is letting too many fans rationalize and ignore the mediocre story telling and writing. Andor is the best of the recent series. Mandalorian was good, Andor was even better. But still the payroll heist was trully groan worthy. "We" haven't done physical money payrolls for decades for exactly the reasons in the movie. Why would something as sophisticated as a galactic empire use money? Major miss-steps like this undercut and take you completely out of your suspension of belief. Still looking forward to more of this story line and character until the inevitable............

Only problem with jedi is Disney woke bs

Can’t really stand that there are no Jedi or force or lightsabers in andor. They’re the themes I watch Star Wars for. I can’t sit through andor knowing there is none of that. It just feels like side character syndrome, and it’s not Star Wars to me… it’s just generic sci fi…

You liked the sequel trilogy? That's a deal breaker, bud. Ya can't be trusted.