Andor is the angriest Star Wars has ever been
Traditionally in Star Wars, getting pissed off doesn’t get you very far. Like a lot of annoying things in the Star Wars mythos, you can blame the Jedi for this: When your most iconic characters and ideas revolve around cool space wizards who adhere to a strict moral code, stepping outside that code becomes the sole provenance of the bad guys. Where this gets tricky for Jedi is that normal, understandable human emotions become anathema. While expansions to the canon add a bit of nuance — love, for example, isn’t forbidden as much as attachment is, and how it can warp a Jedi’s balance in the Force — more negative emotions like fear and anger are more verboten.
As Star Wars stories reach beyond Jedi, its heroes slowly shed these restrictions. The clone troopers of The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch deal with all manner of emotional and moral dilemmas that make the show’s premise — brainwashed clones finding their humanity and (sometimes) bucking their programming — so compelling. Shows that follow Jedi on the fringe when the Order is nigh extinct, like Kanan Jarrus or Ahsoka Tano in Rebels and beyond, dip into stories that give the stodgy wizards a more pragmatic rework, treating them as people first and Jedi second.
Yet, in part because the bulk of Star Wars shows have been aimed at a general audience, a lot of its darker turns have the edges filed off. Protagonists have angry moments, but none are angry people. Even Jyn Erso of Rogue One, perhaps the most quietly rage-fueled character to lead a Star Wars film, is ultimately on a quest to redeem her father’s legacy, and find a noble cause. Anger, in her story, is a distraction.
Cassian Andor is built different. As flashbacks in the first three episodes of Andor show, his
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