In an earlier post, I talked about how the Federalist Papers argued that a standing army, the size of the United States, and the nature of Freedom made the imposition of a dictatorship impossible. And Andor makes that point in a very compelling way. As it tries to enforce its dictates, the overstretched Empire cannot because it lacks the controls.
However, Andor’s real contribution is to make Star Wars relevant to a new generation. The Vietnam War was about a colonial power, the United States, using overwhelming force to attempt to impose order on a population.
The Vietnam War is almost 50 years old. And the people who cared and fought and protested that war are slowly dying off. It is no longer a meaningful touchstone.
The Death Star, in many ways, was the manifest expression of those Americans who wanted us to Nuke the North.
It was viewed as a terror weapon, not a legitimate tool—an extravagance.
A large part of the Star Wars canon involves a debate within the Imperial Fleet represented by Grand Admiral Thrawn, who argued against the Death Star in favor of more advanced tie-fighters. And we are led to believe that Thrawn was right. That the Death Star is ridiculous.
And the problem is that because the Death Star is ridiculous, it makes the plot of Star Wars and later episodes 7-9 stupid.
Andor makes this problematic plot device a logical necessity given the nature of Freedom and the Empire. And it does, perhaps unintentionally, demonstrate why the Federalists were right to argue that a standing army was not a threat to the Union.
A standing army can not rule a large country because it is too big. And so either you have the consent of the governed, or your government falls apart.
The Emperor conceived that the ability to instantaneously destroy a planet and the ruthlessness to destroy a world was the solution. He didn’t need a standing army; he needed a gun that could blow up an entire planet. Why? Because he guessed, probably correctly, that the number of people willing to sacrifice their whole world is small.
We would like to believe otherwise, but look at what’s going on in Ukraine. Folks like Elon Musk used their platform to argue that we should sacrifice Ukrainians’ lives to save ourselves. In short, the loss of some freedom is seen as a reasonable tradeoff when confronted with annihilation.
So combine the army with a gun-killing planet, and you have enough power to rule the galaxy.
He learned the hard way that a single gun isn’t good enough. And that’s why he built a fleet of planet-killing guns. A single weapon can be destroyed by luck or misfortune. A fleet cannot. And a fleet can destroy planets depriving any rebellion of the resources they need to build their armies.
In short, the plot device of a death star, then a second death star, then a star killer base, and then a fleet of planet-killing star destroyers isn’t some cheap plot, but the logical conclusion of the nature of imperial power in the galaxy when the populations have had a history of freedom.
What Andor did was reframe the Death Star from the weapon of colonial power to the necessary weapon of a galaxy-spanning empire with insufficient resources to rule every corner of it ruthlessly. In short, like Rogue One, Andor’s writers made Star Wars intellectually rigorous and, in the process, fixed what was, in my mind, just lousy script writing.