“I Have Friends Everywhere”

This essay places Disney’s Studios’ acclaimed Star Wars television series Andor within the history of contemporary revolutionary media, most notably as a modern-day descendant of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). In placing Andor within a tradition of revolutionary media, the article aims to illuminate how the show accomplishes something far more important than parroting liberal democratic platitudes, popularizing iconic rebel heroes—such as the original trilogy’s beloved Luke, Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford)—or presenting an ideologically neat Manichean view of the struggle between liberal good and totalitarian evil. In its canny refusal to fall into partisan political clichés or else paint a morally ambiguous picture of equally flawed sides that remains conveniently vague enough to leave room for endless political appropriation by the libertarian right, Andor models what political commitment looks like.