Cassian Andor is a thief and scavenger whose home planet, Kenari, was rendered uninhabitable by a botched Imperial mining project.
Despite the Empire's role in his planet's demise, Andor has little interest in ideas of rebellion or resistance. His concerns are far more personal and selfish. They include looking for his sister, who he believes may also have survived Kenari's destruction, looking after his adoptive mother, and making enough money to be comfortable.
The first of these objectives is about to render Andor's life very complicated, however. His search for his sister leads to a fight with two security officers. When Andor accidentally kills one of the two, he murders the other to cover his tracks, then looks to sell some black market technology so he can flee off planet. His escape route turns out to be the Rebellion, who hire him to help complete a daring robbery. His payment is both his passage off the planet and a big pile of credits.
Andor intends this to be a one-and-done deal. He has no intention of joining the Rebellion on a full-time basis. But as he soon discovers, even if you're not looking to be the enemy of a fascist autocracy, such autocracies are often more than willing to treat you as their enemy, regardless.
Andor is almost certainly the best piece of Disney-era Star Wars media, an intelligently written, well-constructed, well-acted dramatic thriller with steadily rising stakes and consequences. It's a level above the simple nostalgia rush thrill ride of The Force Awakens or the self-consciously Campbellian SF-western stylings of The Mandalorian. This is a show which has a deeper and more relevant theme at its core. One that drives the action - and the actions of its characters - in meaningful ways.
This is a show about the many costs of resistance to a fascist regime, which can physical, psychological or financial, or all three. More than that, though, it also examines the cost of simply not actively collaborating with such a regime. These costs are less immediate and even less certain than those of active resistance, but nonetheless very real. The only 'safety' in such a regime is to actively participate as one of the agents of its oppression. And even that is not the guarantee it might appear. As anyone who has seen a Star Wars movie already knows, in the Empire, failure can be punished with lethal force.
Andor just wants to be left alone, and would happily ignore the Empire's oppression if it was not oppressing him. This makes him a hard character to like, but also I think an easy one to understand, and one with a lot of clear room for growth. He's perhaps the most interesting and complete character the franchise has yet offered up.
And he's not the only rich and interesting character her, as Andor looks beyond its title character to show us the ambitions and struggles of several other interesting characters. The naively doctrinaire Syril Karn, who believes in the Empire's right to power because it has the power; the idealistic but ruthless Luthen Rael, who is compelled to fight tyranny but who makes himself as hard and terrible as those he opposes to do so; the ambitious Imperial officer Dedra Meero, who may I suspect find herself chewed up by the machine she serves; and of course senator Mon Mothma, who may have to sacrifice her principles - perhaps even her daughter - to fund the resistance against the Emperor.
It's a great, layered show, showing the messy consequences of an oppressive regime in all their myriad forms.
As far as weaknesses go? I will admit that I found the first episode a little slow, but by the end of the second episode, I felt fully on board.
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