Andor is a Star Wars story in which the Emperor plays no role

There aren’t many stormtroopers in there Andor. They’re not absent – they occasionally patrol the streets of Ferrix, appearing just enough times to make it seem like they could always appear – but they’re never the focus. There’s an odd thing about a story so heavily focused on the Empire, whose iconography is part of the very fabric of Star Wars. Can you imagine a Star Wars story without a helmeted soldier?

Andor stands against. His primary representation of empire is not through soldiers in nondescript armor or their weapons of war—images that meant something before they became aspects of brand identity—but by giving a face to empire. This face is decided Not The emperor. Ironically, Sheev Palpatine couldn’t have been less important to the Empire he founded. His power to rule the galaxy doesn’t come from being a Sith mastermind. It comes from desk workers and corporate aspirants, in boardrooms and economic incentives, with every stimulus people need to turn against each other instead of building community and solidarity.

That makes the Imperial Security Board one of the most compelling things ever Andor. Bureaucratic meetings see people vying for power and position under Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser), a well-mannered and astute official who knows how to run a meeting: As quickly as possible. Various strategies emerge under his influence to deal with the rising rebellion, and good little workers of the ISB try to improve their position by making him happy by any means necessary.

Photo: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Under this frame, the emperor would even show his face, completely subverting the story Andor told by the Imperials. Since this is a character that is referenced but never shown, there is no way for the viewers or the characters to know if it is of a specific mandate Yes, really the will of the emperor or a character’s superior actually Just had a conversation with Palpatine. That’s the point: it doesn’t matter. Oppression trickles down.

Anyone willing to get their hands dirty is also given the tools to expand that oppression in hopes of avoiding their pain. The most devastating weapon in so far Andor is not a space station or weapon, but the resumption of public order policy issued by the ISB. Under this new law, passed following the rebels’ successful raid on Aldhani in The Eye, heavier penalties are imposed on acts classified as “acts against the Empire,” and the definition of those acts is broad in the person enforcing it law.

In Narkina 5, for example, Andor is arrested and sent to a working prison to serve a six-year sentence simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It gives ISB Officer Dedra Meero the incentive to bypass Imperial code to track down Andor’s few remaining friends on Ferrix. It indirectly encourages series bootlicker Syril Karn to feel his ambition is worthwhile and to constantly try his luck with Meero in order to impose his sense of order and decency on everyone around him.

Photo: Lucasfilm Ltd.

This is a marked shift in the depiction of Empire, which previously focused primarily on scale and the war machine. But the kind of power the Empire wields in the original trilogy comes at a price, and that price is one Andor emphasizes emphatically: The empire is few and far between. It can’t be everywhere at once. And so she uses the fascist’s most powerful weapon: to get formerly free people to police themselves.

Syril Karn exemplifies this. Karen stays Andorhis sharpest tool, a pernicious character who doesn’t even profess his admiration for the Emperor. He just loves Rules, and sees empire as the platonic ideal of an orderly society where rule-breakers are made pariahs, as he was for being such an advocate for them. He is also the source of Andor‘s most devastating visual storytelling at his mother’s house, where he constantly eats breakfast cereal: there, on a shelf in his bedroom, are small Stormtrooper figurines. They wear masks that he can’t, but he’s convinced he can wage their war in his own stubborn way. For him, the world is full of people who break the rules and get away with it, and stopping them is as brave as any stormtrooper fighting for the Empire.

With men like Karn, the Emperor never has to show up to bring order to his fascist little kingdom. He has soldiers everywhere.