Diego Luna in Disney+ Star Wars ‘Rogue One’ Prequel

In the second-season premiere of Disney+’s Andor, a small group of Imperial officers gather for a meeting. In delicate euphemisms, over a tasteful catered lunch, plans are hatched for the wholesale slaughter of Ghorman, a vaguely Continential-inspired planet whose only crime is being made of material the Empire wishes to mine.

That the ruling powers would be capable of such callousness is no surprise; their abject cruelty is as much a part of the Star Wars fabric as orphan heroes or neurotic droids or the Force. But this isn’t Tarkin casually wiping out Alderaan to prove a point. This massacre is being orchestrated with great consideration not just for the logistics of murder but its packaging for the public, by an overseer (Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic) who recognizes that the right narrative can be just as effective a weapon, in its own way, as a fleet of Star Destroyers or an army of K-2 units.

On this, Tony Gilroy’s Rogue One prequel agrees. That it would bother paying attention to Krennic’s propaganda campaign at all is proof enough of that. But if the new season serves as a devastating testament to the power of storytelling, both within the Star Wars reality and our own, it also doubles as a sharp reminder of its limitations.

Even by its own gritty standards, Andor’s sophomore season is an especially, purposefully bleak time. A gloomy fatalism hangs over much of the season, which speeds from BBY4 to BBY1 (Star Wars speak for “from four years before A New Hope to one year before”) in four three-episode chunks to be released over four consecutive weeks. With each one-year time jump, the plot inches closer to the events of Rogue One. And with each Rogue One reference, we’re made increasingly aware of how close we’re getting to the death, foretold by franchise canon rather by any Force prophecy, of our hero Cassian (Diego Luna).

That the first three-parter spends so much of his precious remaining time trapping him in a forest with sniping factions we don’t really know, for reasons I never could totally comprehend, makes for a somewhat exasperating start to the season — even as other major characters like Imperial officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) hit the ground running elsewhere. But rest assured those early installments are as slow as Andor gets in this go-round. Once the momentum begins to pick up in the next triplet, the rest fly by in chapters simultaneously too intense to binge, and too gripping not to.

The tragic inevitability that looms over Cassian is echoed in the despair embedded into the Ghorman storyline, which comprises the spine of this season’s plot. For all their vileness, the Empire are much more organized than the Rebels at this point in the timeline, and Imperial leadership have accounted for resistance to their plans well before their intended victims have realized there’s anything for them to be resisting against. Even as the Ghormans argue among themselves over if and how and when to fight back, we can see they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The dread of watching them slide toward that fate ends only when it finally explodes into full-blown horror, in a climactic eighth episode that’s one of the most distressing hours of television I’ve seen in recent memory.

As in season one, Andor draws much of its potency from its pointed and unsubtle parallels to events in our real world. It is impossible to watch news outlets mindlessly parroting the Empire line about “the continued and inexplicable Ghorman resistance to Imperial norms,” or the Galactic Senate avoiding calling a genocide a genocide, and not hear echoes of the destruction of Gaza, illegal mass deportation efforts or any of dozens of other shocking injustices currently being perpetrated before our eyes.

Yet it’s equally hard not to notice how depressingly necessary the fig leaf of sci-fi is for the revolutionary story Andor wants to tell. In a climate where No Other Land could not find U.S. distribution despite its Oscar win, where the histories of trans people or Black people or women are being erased from public discourse under a wave of anti-DEI sentiment, it’d be difficult to imagine Disney, or indeed any other major studio, releasing a comparable drama set in the real world.

In that light, Andor feels at once like a galvanizing statement and, through no particular fault of its own, still a sadly insufficient one. I don’t know what to do with that, but I don’t think Andor would claim to either.

This is a show that has always seemed most comfortable in the murk, down to a stony conspiracy-thriller aesthetic that feels half a galaxy removed from the shiny lightsabers and cuddly critters that have defined so much of this franchise. It’s got good guys and bad guys, sure. But within those factions — among the rebels, particularly — are a whole unruly mess of competing ideas. Moderate politicians like Mon butt heads with more extremist guerillas like Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). The Alliance military disapproves of the manipulative tactics employed by spy master Luthen (a wonderfully weary Stellan Skarsgard), even as it often relies on him for intel.

Amid this discord, Cassian continues to be the glue holding the narrative together, as the closest thing it has to an everyman protagonist. Luna’s natural charisma is a boon, warming the show’s chill with touches of humor (especially once Alan Tudyk’s snarky droid K-2SO comes into the picture) and grounding its ambitious ideas in intimate feeling (usually opposite Bix, a “suffering girlfriend” figure who is frankly a disappointing underuse of Adria Arjona’s talents).

But despite Cassian’s last name being the one in the title, Andor has always been an ensemble piece. This stretch is a particularly strong one for O’Reilly as Mon, a consummate stateswoman cracking under the pressure of her increasingly risky double life, and Elizabeth Dulau as Luthen’s right-hand woman Kleya, whose loyalty to her boss and commitment to the cause are intertwined in poignant ways.

Still, the most fascinating performance this season may be Gough’s as Dedra. She gets perhaps the only real laugh-out-loud funny scene of the season, when she and her bureaucrat boyfriend, Syril (Kyle Soller, excellent), invite his overbearing mother (Kathryn Hunter, delightful) over for dinner, with predictably disastrous results. It’s a relatable moment, but not a softening one; if anything, the reminder that these are ordinary people make their actions on behalf of the Empire seem only more disturbing. Many episodes later, as Dedra suffers a crushing setback, Gough performs her attempts to choke back tears and still her trembling hands with an almost violent desperation. Perhaps nothing frightens Dedra more than the possibility of her own humanity breaking containment.

In a speech at his daughter’s wedding, Mon’s feckless husband Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie) advises the newlyweds on the importance of seeking out “pleasure, gaiety, amusement” in a world where pain and worry are never in short supply. It’s reasonable advice on its face, made grotesque by the fact that it’s delivered amid scenes of a genocide being set into motion, of refugees fleeing sadistic Imperial auditors, of heroes making impossible sacrifices in the name of a nobler ideal.

It is easy to see how this show, with its propulsive plot and blockbuster budget, could simply become one of those pleasures. It could just be a treat offering righteous rage and satisfying catharsis in one slick package, a distraction to be enjoyed on the screen and then left there until we get bored again. Not for a lack of conviction on the part of the series, which wears its revolutionary heart on its sleeve, but simply because no piece of art can bear the burden of changing a world by itself.

In its second season, Andor shows us what a good story can accomplish — its capacity to dull empathy or amplify it, to placate people or awaken them. The series leaves up to us, as it must, what we now wish to do with that knowledge.