In Andor, the Disney Plus Star Wars series focusing on Rogue One’s Cassian Andor, we’re getting a different picture of the Empire from what we’ve seen before. This is a more bureaucratic, boring Empire focused on building things in prison — and perhaps the scariest one yet.
There aren’t many Stormtroopers in Andor. They’re not absent — occasionally they patrol the streets of Ferrix, appearing just often enough to suggest that they could always appear — but they’re never in focus. It’s an odd thing about a story so strongly centered on the Empire, the iconography of which is a part of the very fabric of Star Wars. Can you think of a Star Wars story without a helmeted trooper?
Andor exists in opposition to this. Its primary depiction of the Empire is not soldiers in nondescript armor, nor their weapons of war — images that meant something before they became aspects of brand identity — but in giving the Empire a face. This face is decidedly not The Emperor. Sheev Palpatine, ironically, couldn’t matter less to the Empire he founded. His power to rule the galaxy does not come from being a Sith mastermind. It comes from desk workers and corporate strivers, in boardrooms and economic incentives, on every impulse humans have to turn on one another instead of building community and solidarity.
This is what makes the Imperial Security Board among the most compelling things about Andor. Through bureaucratic meetings, people jockey for power and position under Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser), a well-mannered and incisive officiant that knows how to run a meeting: As quickly as possible.
