From Ron Bronson comes this excellent perspective of Andor.
In Andor, rebellion isn’t sparked by righteous anger or sweeping ideology. It emerges from miscalculation. Staffing errors. Bureaucratic overflow. The real genius of the show lies not in its allegory, but in its accuracy. For all the Empire’s sleek corridors and ominous surveillance towers, what Andor reveals is a much plainer truth: authoritarian regimes run on labor. Fear isn’t ambient; it has to be staffed and actively turned on. And someone, somewhere, always has to push the button.
We talk a lot these days about so-called “humans in the loop” of automation, especially the proliferation of AI tools and where that human should exist. A TV show depicting a retrofuturist canon dating to the 1970s has to operate on a much larger canvas than the sparseness that might depict today if it was being made from scratch. The Empire’s staffing model in Andor felt akin to going to a pharmacy or supermarket where there were enough staff wandering the aisles asking “if you need help finding anything,” which feels like a foreign concept in a world where now you have one or two people manning an entire store and everything locked up.
Unlike most political fiction, Andor doesn’t portray fascism as an aesthetic, but shows it as an operating system. The kind that requires contractors, custodians, caseworkers, and coordinators. There are no central villains in this narrative. Just functionaries. Just people doing their jobs, most of them poorly, some of them too well. What we’re watching isn’t the rise of evil. It’s the maintenance of empire.