Andor’s first three episodes solve Star Wars’ villain problem

polygon.com:

In the run-up to Andor, the team behind the new Disney Plus series has hit one point particularly hard: This isn’t more of the Star Wars space opera. Instead, the show is the nitty gritty of a galaxy far, far away.

In a world ravaged by the Force and other forces big and small, Andor is a more granular way into the battles between light and dark. “I think Rogue One is a film about an event. You don’t get to know those characters, you don’t get to understand exactly where they come from, what needed to happen [to get them there],” Diego Luna said in a press conference about returning to his character of Cassian Andor. “For me, it’s quite relevant today to tell the story of what needs to happen for a revolutionary to emerge.”

It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to guess what feels so prescient about that storyline now, in a time when there’s a lot of change that needs to happen for the world to feel remotely just. But what works best about Andor in the first four episodes screened to critics is the grounded look at how the Dark Side built itself up as a force to be reckoned with. And no one personifies that better in these early episodes than Kyle Soller’s bad guy, Syril Karn.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Andor.]

Syril is the sort of bootlicker who asked for extra credit to his extra credit. He takes the utmost pride in his presentation, modifying his uniform to make himself stand out as the shiniest apple in the bunch. He’s an ass. But in the first episodes of Andor, it’s clear Syril believes in the work. He’s not trying to brown-nose; he simply exists as eager to please and believes in the authority figure he serves.

In a moment when Star Wars has been struggling to make its