It is in the DNA of Star Wars to borrow from other genres. Indeed, George Lucas built his science fiction universe around the visual language borrowed from newsreels about samurai, swashbucklers, and fighter pilots.
The latest manifestation of that universe, Andor (available on Disney+) has succeeded by taking the “war” part of the Galactic Civil War seriously, and borrowing from the languages of literature and cinema that were designed to describe conflict. Season one was about the messiness of rebellion; season two is about the dark corners of the intelligence community.
Star Wars: Andor. Image Credit: Disney Handout.
The Smileyverse
If season one of Andor drew from Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, season two leans heavily into John Le Carre’s long-running “Smileyverse” and its depiction of the bitter, brutal struggle between the United Kingdom’s “Circus” (MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service), and Moscow Centre, headquarters of the KGB.
Conflict within the British IC is often as bitter and brutal as conflict with the Russians, leading to betrayal and tragedy. The Smileyverse stretches across nine books, several of which have been adapted for the small and the big screen, but even that understates its influence on the spy genre as a whole, with rich dramas such as Slow Horses (adapted from Mick Herron’s series of novels) taking up the contemporary baton.
The Great Game
Andor doesn’t simply mimic Le Carre, but rather understands how Smiley’s world works on a deep level. Just as Le Carre built his plots around richly drawn, deeply flawed characters, Andor comes by its character notes honestly. In the Karla Trilogy the victories and defeats of the Circus and Moscow Centre come down to the advantages that each has in exploiting the personal flaws of their opposites. Smiley is vulnerable because of his philandering wife; Karla is vulnerable because of his deep affection for his mentally ill daughter.
The drama doesn’t work if the characters are shallowly drawn, something that showrunner Tony Gilroy uses as an excuse to create some of the most richly developed characters in all of Star Wars.
The central players have implied or explicit backstories that make their reasoning intelligible and their flaws natural. Dedra Meero, senior officer in the Imperial Security Bureau (roughly the Star Wars equivalent of the KGB), leverages a personal relationship to achieve an intelligence coup on Ghorman, accidentally leading to the death of her partner. Indeed, information about the Death Star becomes available because Meero determines to go rogue in her hunt for rebel intelligence operatives, inadvertently collecting and then making available a trove of information about the Imperial battle station.
The analog nature of the entire Star Wars universe (switches, buttons, and levers instead of digital interfaces) serves the Cold War comparison well; Andor even references technologies (radio pulse crystals) that are key to some of the more obscure corners of the Smiley canon.
And it is surely not accidental that the cohorts of the Imperial Security Bureau carry the kinds of accents that we might expect in the Circus, while Stellan Skarsgard’s rebel intelligence operative speaks with a Swedish accent that might well be mistaken for something more slavic.
A broken alcoholic like Alec Leamas would be out of place in most Star Wars, but in Andor one half expects to see Richard Burton having a drink in a cafe as Cassian walks by.
Parting Thoughts…
Yet in Le Carre the consequences of intelligence community combat rarely find their way into the real world. Spy games only really matter for the spies, adding a layer of irony to the brutal games that the spies play with one another. In Andor, by contrast, the consequences become very real. The Ghorman Massacre is the consequence of a long-range Imperial intelligence operation, unwittingly supported by the Rebel spy network.
The fruits of the activities of Cassian Andor and Luthen Rael are the formation of the Alliance, the freeing of a Rebel leader, and finally the destruction of the Death Star, the Empire’s greatest weapon. But then that perhaps is also commentary on the reality of intelligence work; only in a fictional universe could the efforts of spies and their handlers actually result in something visible and meaningful to the rest of the world.
About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley
Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.
