Andor season two review – the excellent Star Wars for grownups is as thrilling as ever (and funnier too)

Comedy spacecraft thefts, passive-aggressive in-laws and a planet being fracked to death – the revolution just got playful, comrades!Comrades! Welcome back to the revolution. Andor is the Star Wars TV show with the sharpest political acumen: yes, like everything in the franchise, it’s about an underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space, and it has plenty of thrilling battle sequences, but here there are no Jedi mind powers or cute green backwards-talking psychics. Under the hard-nosed stewardship of writer Tony Gilroy, Andor bins the magic and myth and replaces it with the reality of anti-fascist struggle, where the good guys are ready to risk their lives for freedom. It’s the Star Wars spin-off with the strongest claim to being a proper drama – but, in season two’s opening triple bill, it shows it can do sly, wry comedy too.We’re a year on from where we left off, which is four years before the Death Star blows up at the end of the original movie – the point at which all the work done by our hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), pays off. We pick him up in an imperial military facility, where he’s posing as a test pilot for a spacecraft he intends to nick. There’s a classic Andor moment where Cassian meets the rebellion’s woman on the inside, a junior technician who has gathered her courage to make her contribution, and knows the rage of her superiors will be directed at her once Cassian has flown off. “If I die tonight, was it worth it?” she asks him, and gets a rousing speech in response, urgently whispered. Continue reading...

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