Andor has returned for its second season and it’s just as fantastic as ever. While the first three episodes of the show get us ever-closer to the Death Star-focused finale in Rogue One, scenes of characters hiding from visa-checking Imperial forces also make it clear in this first batch of episodes that Andor hasn’t lost the real-world grounding that made it great in the first place. And while it’s easy to map moments from these episodes onto our current political moment, perhaps its strongest real world comparison came from paralleling the Empire to the Nazis.
Star Wars’ Galactic Empire has never been far from Nazi Germany comparisons — if nothing else, the aesthetic inspiration is instantly obvious and totally inescapable. But rarely, if ever, has the connection between the two been drawn quite so clearly as Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy draws it in the first episode of season 2, when Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) calls together a secret Imperial meeting to discuss Ghorman.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Andor season 2, episodes 1-3.]
During the meeting, Krennic shows the table an informative video about the planet of Ghorman, and shows a video about the fabric it exports, which is widely renowned as some of the finest in the galaxy. He then lets everyone know that Ghorman also hosts a rare substance inside the planet that the Empire needs for completion of Emperor Palpatine’s “Energy Program” — and that mining it will mean destroying the planet completely. In order to take over the planet without fomenting negative fervor, Krennic details a series of propaganda campaigns the Empire has been running to make the Ghormans seem aloof and stuck up, in an attempt to foment negative sentiments from other planets against Ghorman itself.
It’s an absolutely harrowing scene on its face, but when coupled with Tony Gilroy’s inspiration, it becomes downright chilling to see the connections seep from surface-level signifiers into social and political tactics that were really used.
“I mean, look at the very first episode,” Gilroy told Polygon in an interview. “Krennic’s conference that he has, where he first brings up the topic of Ghorman. That’s very much modeled after the Wannsee Conference that the Nazis had when they, you know, had a PowerPoint luncheon to figure out the final solution.”
Drawing an even deeper connection, it’s hard not to notice that the ornate and carefully hidden castle they’re meeting in looks an awful lot like Wewelsburg, a castle in Germany that served as one of the central bases for Heinrich Himmler and the SS.
Of course, all these direct parallels shouldn’t be mistaken for clues that Andor season 2 will only parallel the Galactic Empire with the Nazis. Just like Gilroy has said that Andor isn’t simply a story solely about modern times or modern political issues, it’s also not a story of just one political past either. Instead, it weaves in various aspects of historical empires and rebellions across history.
“I’m not psychic; we did not write this with a newspaper,” said Gilroy. “The show was supposed to come out a year ago, [but] for the strikes. So the opportunity of the show was to be given this gigantic canvas and to do a show about revolution. And the opportunity for me was to use all the debris that I’d accumulated in my brain from reading about history that I never thought I’d have a chance to use. So I’m catalogue shopping throughout 6,000 years for all kinds of things I can [use] all the way through the show.”
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
You can see this once you start to look for it: The real world rhetoric Nemik applies to the Imperial takeover of Aldhani, the rebellion’s use of tactics pioneered by T.E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt, or the clear inspiration that Andor takes from The Battle of Algiers and its realistic portrayal of the National Liberation Front. The show might have given the Empire some heavier shades of Nazism during Krennic’s secret meeting, but the truth is that its cycle of resistance and oppression are more a mosaic of historical references than any one allegory.
This, to Gilroy, is exactly what makes the show feel so prescient.
“What’s sad about it is that it’s really the moments of peace and prosperity that are unique, and the rinse and repeat of history is the sorry truth. I think you could drop this show almost anywhere in history and and people would say, Oh, that’s where we’re at.”
