By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Star Wars was in a tailpin, and there is only one bright point.
This light point is two seasons of the series AndorAnd it’s the best Star Wars has long been for a very simple reason.
It is the first product of Star Wars since the departure of George Lucas who knows who is the Galaxy Far, the real villain of Far Away.
The real villain of Star Wars, the only coherent face of evil throughout the franchise, has not been and should never be, Palpatine or the dark side of the force. It is certainly not Anakin or Snoke, or Adam Driver In a Vader tribute mask.
It’s probably not Luke SkywalkerBut if he drinks too much blue milk and becomes pretty grumpy, then you never know.
The real Star Wars villain is and has always been the government bureaucracy.
The Death Star is DMV
The death star, in the first film, was the ultimate representation of bureaucracy as a real evil.
This super weapon is the final form of what is happening when a large number of sycophantic bureaucrats strip the richness of those under their control and use it to build massive, impracticable and completely erroneous weapons of war.
And it is managed by a bunch of environmental managers who jockeying for attention around a conference room table.
When the death star did not work, the same inflexible bureaucratic structure, massively incompetent, managed by Imperial DMV workers who only care to keep their jobs so that they cannot admit that they were wrong, turned and did the same thing again.
The death star is the Californian high -speed rail which was to go to San Francisco, but which no longer costs ten times more and only goes to Bakersfield.
Luke Skywalker not fighting strength
This clear similarity of the real world is what made Luke Skywalker’s trip so exciting and easy to identify.
He does not fight a person or a mystical and evil force; He was fighting a corrupt bureaucratic oppression system.
The same oppressive system with which we are all tortured when we have to descend and obtain new license plates for our truck.
The same as we are tormented when filling the forms for the IRS.
Luke was fighting a legion of lazy teachers from public schools and inspectors of the code violation in the name of all normal people who want to be left alone.
This trend continued in the prequelles, when the Naboo bureaucracy monarchy was attacked and held hostage by a group of intermediate managers from the Trade Federation.
He degenerated when, as the prequelles were continuing, the massive tall bureaucracy of the old Republic empowered and hid Palpatine, helping her in his ascent to the management.
In a sense, Palpatine was the supreme product of this bureaucracy; It was his greatest creation, the natural result of the years of bloating and administrative formalities strangling well -intentioned people until no one was left to oppose it.
Andor puts the bureaucracy in his reticle
That brings us to Andor.
As mentioned at the start, the best of the recent Star Wars series East AndorAnd Andor is the best recent Star Wars series specifically because it makes this swollen bureaucracy the only villain in the series.
Andor Concerns guys in the cabins and meetings planning the destruction of the innocents.
They don’t do it because they love evil, but because that’s how they are paid.
Andor Season 1 followed several facets of overwhelming bureaucracy.
In a multi-episodes arc, he explores the imperial justice system, a system so drowned in administrative formalities and the bureaucratic disinterest that he is more focused on the realization of a profit for the managers of the environment that has become judges and prison guards who manage it than doing something like real justice.
If you have had entries with the real world’s judicial system, you have probably spent these episodes to shout yes and point to television, because it has precisely portray the way it exists only to use.
Sympathy for the Devils
Even the bad guys of the show, trapped in the imperial bureaucratic nightmare, felt nice in the face of bureaucratic challenges.
They too have been lost in a series of cabins and endless meetings, places where everyone is concerned and has no interest in doing the real work of the government.
If you are an adult who has already tried to obtain health insurance or helped an elderly parent to treat social security, then everything you saw on the screen was precise science fiction representation of your reality.
Andor Season 2 resumes where season 1 stopped, with a bunch of intermediate managers in a conference room which plans to erase a planet in order to finish an inflated public works project so that they can win promotions.
He continues by plunging into the controversial subject of immigration, by introducing corrupt imperial bureaucrats that appear on a planet to make a state of the head and take what they can under the table.
And that’s why Andor is the only new Star Wars that works.
Why Disney Star Wars did not work before Andor
The JJ Abrams films failed because they have become obsessed with Palpatine and the Skywalkers.
Programs like Acolyte Lose yourself in the Jedi’s beading religion.
The Mandalorian Falls because it has become obsessed with the royal destiny of Katie Sackhoff and supported the corrupt Beaurocracy of New Republic instead of fighting it.
Ahsoka I tried to make a Thrawn villain, a fisting demolition of administrative formalities.
Skeletal crew thought it could repair all of this by focusing on the adventure. But Star Wars has never been a superficial adventure.
Palpatine represented the real bad guy of Star Wars
Star Wars should never have a single goal and a real villain.
It’s not palpatine and never was. The real Star Wars villain is the massive bureaucracy that the palpatine represents.
Each character in the Star Wars universe is struggling under their weight.
This is why the galaxy is full of black markets and smugglers, and that is why you love it.
Because the heroes of Star Wars are not content to take the Empire, they face the IRS and the lawyers, the maids, the medical system and all the boring things that suck your life.
Star Wars is at its best when he is Dilbert in the 1990s with a lightsaber.
When Star Wars departs from this formula, he stops feeling like Star Wars and begins to feel like something else.
And we already have something else.
