I Have Friends Everywhere: an Andor Discussion Group
Disney+ might not be the first place you’d expect to be provided with razor-sharp political drama drawing on real-life revolutionary history. But the release of Andor: A Star Wars Story in 2022, with the second and concluding season coming out earlier this year, took everyone by surprise.
The original Star Wars trilogy (1977–83) depicted a ragtag army of rebels fighting a civil war against a fascist Empire dominating “a galaxy far, far away”. Now, over 24 episodes, Andor has told the story of the emergence of that rebel movement from disparate cells of guerillas and resistance agents drawn from oppressed and colonised communities. If you’ve not seen the show, it’s hard to convey just how extraordinary and grounded its depictions of working-class communities, indigenous peoples and a fascist bureaucracy are for a piece of Star Wars media.
The show features locations such as the planet Ferrix, a tight-knit working-class community based on breaking down the great ships that are shown in space combat elsewhere in the franchise. This world is realised in red brick with a grimy and used aesthetic, making it incredibly evocative of the former mining communities of South Wales or the North of England.
Or Aldhani, a world of green landscapes and cold skies, filmed on location in Glen Tilt and Argyllshire. We’re told that the indigenous people of this planet (whose leader is portrayed by legendary Scottish actor David Hayman) have been cleared from their former sacred sites and sent to work “in the industrial zones of the lowlands”.
Then there’s Ghorman, where the economy is based on centuries of artisanal textile production, and whose cities and constructed language evoke the rich history of France or Central Europe. When the Empire decides this planet has resources they want to strip mine, agent provocateurs instigate a crisis in order to justify massacre and genocide of the population, in scenes that are redolent of real-life historical situations like Bloody Sunday, the Tlatelolco massacre or the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv in 2014.
Although written before the current genocide in Gaza reached its current heights of barbarism, when released in 2025 it’s impossible not to see chilling parallels between the fictional treatment of Ghorman and the brutal real-life circumstances facing Palestinians. Senator Mon Mothma being booed for denouncing these events as “genocide” is all too familiar to anyone who has followed real life events in the last two years.
Showrunner Tony Gilroy has drawn on a lifetime of reading about real-world revolutionary history to produce what is nothing short of a masterpiece of antifascist art. The show is full of iconic speeches that far transcend any dialogue elsewhere in Star Wars, such as the astonishing monologue of Luthen Rael describing what he sacrifices to undertake revolutionary activity:
“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a saviour against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet…
I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.
So what do I sacrifice?
Everything!”
The show has made such an impression on its politicised viewers, that some of us have decided to come together to organise “I Have Friends Everywhere: An ‘Andor’ Radical Discussion Group” on the themes it has raised.
Starting on 18th September, we’ll gather for six sessions over Zoom, organised around key issues raised by the story, ranging from fascism to colonialism, class, revolution and gender relations among others. We’ll be providing an extensive optional additional reading/watching list of films, books and other media that have influenced Andor or that shed further light on the topics under discussion. And we’ll be recording all sessions, as well as providing a message board for participants to share longer reflections and allow people to take part if they can’t make a particular call. We’re even planning to come together for a hillwalk and visit to Cruachan Dam in Argyllshire, which was transformed into an Imperial garrison for the show.
We’d greatly welcome the participation of radicals, left-wingers, socialists, greens and activists who share our love for this extraordinary story. Sign up before the 18th September and join us to share your reaction to Andor. Rebellions are built on hope!
Click here to sign-up: Buy tickets – I Have Friends Everywhere: An ‘Andor’ Radical Discussion Group – Zoom
I’ve just watched the final episodes of Season 2 of Andor and pretty much agree with this assessment. There are indeed many resonances between the show and living under increasingly militarised imperial rule, despite the initial semblance of a minimum of parliamentary democracy, privileges for the rich, and peace at first for many (hideous oppression and violence for others out of sight). It’s a familiar if galactic human politics (nonhumans tend to be minor characters), and perhaps without the ecological sensibilities of a few other Star Wars productions, but also largely without the sometimes cumbersome mysticism and often empty light-sabre battles.
You could also have highlighted Maarva Andor’s speech. Chris Kempshall’s fictionalised academic account of Star Wars: the Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire (2024) has a lot of relevant political analysis and connects a lot of the dots between the disparate accounts of the canon.
But also Andor is more honest in presenting some of the rebels as jerks, and others as unnecessarily unpleasant in other ways. Some of the imperials are more rounded characters than you get in other stories. That doesn’t take away from the potential for real heroism, although I see it more like the paths that the pre-revolutionary theatrical canon of playwrights like Shakespeare produced, in the interrogation of valour, in the employment of violent means to political ends, and the justifications for overthrowing not just monarchs but monarchy itself. And how regimes facing the prospect of irrefutable criticism and spreading resistance resort to the worst methods to counter these.
I won’t be signing up, but I hope your discussion group goes well.
The paths taken could have been followed by multiple participants, but the Andor series is particularly keen to show agency, cause and effect, the relationship between human decisions and wider political events over a duration of a few years while the plot ties together and foreshadows some of the more explosive later narratives. A very serious political-historical-social addition to the Star Wars universe, with a lot of detail and punch in its observations and settings, inside imperial bureaucracy as well as outside, while remaining highly watchable with relatable characters.