Analyzing Evil: Andor

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:05]Hello everyone and welcome to the 273rd episode of Analyzing Evil featuring the characters and themes of Andor. If you're a fan of my channel, consider signing up to become a patron over on Patreon where you'll get access to my videos adree, uncensored, and a day early for as low as $2 a month. And with the many changes that YouTube is constantly making to their platform, any support you can offer the channel would be greatly appreciated. Since its release nearly 4 years ago, Andor has been lauded as one of, if not the best pieces of Star Wars media to come out since Disney acquired the franchise. And with its more unique approach to conveying to us the evils of the Empire and the struggles of the fledgling rebellion in such a beautiful and nuanced way that doesn't focus on Jedi, Sith, and the Force, I'd argue that it's proved to be one of the best Star Wars stories we've ever received, both in and outside of the current Disney cannon.

[00:00:51]Now, at the time of this video's release, the second season of Andor concluded over a year ago, but I didn't have the time to cover it back then.

[00:00:58]However, recently, David Kaylor released a fan edit of Rogue One titled Rogue One: The Andor Cut. So, I thought it would be a good idea to dive into it now in the wake of its release. And if you'd like to watch Rogue One: The Andor Cut, I'll leave a link to David's video explaining how you can do so in the description. Now, because Andor is essentially a prequel to Rogue One, we will be taking a look at the evil present in both Andor and Rogue One. And while this is a characters and themes video, I wanted to do things a bit differently this time around. Because Andor and Rogue One have a lot to offer as far as morality goes. This video was more so going to be focused on its themes than its characters. That doesn't mean we won't be talking about the characters that appear here at all, as they are intimately tied to the themes of this series. But the characters that I believe do deserve to be talked about in depth, like Orson Krennic and Sawerrera, will not be receiving their full analyses in this video, just so you're aware. Now, we all know Andor and Rogue One are beautiful pieces of media all around, and I know we all love to catch every gem like this that we can, and there's no better place to do that than on Movie. Movie is a different kind of streaming service, one that's been specially curated by an elite team of curators that has worked hard to ensure their platform only offers cinematic works that have already been added to the pantheon of great cinema or will soon join others of their caliber as one of those lauded greats. Because movie is this wonderful platform filled with fantastic films from all genres all across the world. Movie has become the definitive place to find amazing works from both iconic directors to emerging aurs with great films like The Fall, a mythical romp through the imagination, The Girl with the Needle, a psychological horror film set in a secretive adoption agency, Under the Sun, a look into life behind the curtain in North Korea, and Antichrist, a horror film that fills you with utter dread as you watch a married couple's life descend into madness now showing.

[00:02:37]There's plenty to sink your teeth into if you're a film buff. And that's even more so the case for fans of this channel as Movie will often feature films that I'm soon to cover or have already covered as they continually update their list of featured films, which makes it all the more easy to ensure you're able to watch each piece of media that I feature on my channel.

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[00:03:31]19 years before the Battle of Yavan, a plot to destroy the democratic government of the Republic that sought to place supreme power into the hands of one man and one man alone came to fruition. The culmination of a thousand years of Sith plotting and scheming that sat the Dark Lord of the Sith Darcyius on an Imperial throne of his own making.

[00:03:50]But an emperor is only as powerful as his empire. And the power of his empire, like many empires, was derived from control. Control of the people under their iron thumb. Oppression, the tool of control that all tyrannical regimes must utilize in order to keep their grip on power intact, is the foundation of their evil. But what is oppression? In short, it's everything. It's how an empire grasps everything before it and twists it in any way that will suit its needs. It's the gun pressed to your forehead to keep you in line. It's the threats made to your family to fill you with fear. It's the promise of total domination over your daily life. It's the abuse your people will suffer, should even a handful dare to raise their fists in rebellion. Oppression is what keeps Coruscant, other wealthy worlds, and the Imperials who reside there that tow the Imperial line flourishing, while countless others flounder as they're used and abused in order to fuel the everpresent machine, working to subsume all before it.

[00:04:45]Oppression is the forced relocation of the Eldani and the eradication of their culture as the men giving the order sip champagne. Oppression is the annihilation of the Disenites, who refused to allow an Imperial refueling station to be built on their home world.

[00:04:59]Oppression is the breaking of a people in their world in order to mine their soil for ores to be used in manufacturing weaponry. Oppression is the occupation of a city in its holy sight to loot energy to power that weaponry and destroying that city in order to test that weapon. Though that may be true, oppression is not a living thing. It is a mechanism of the powerful that chokes the life out of the powerless. a mechanism that requires organic life to operate it. But the living beings who serve as the cogs in this machine are not people who volunteer to do so out of the kindness of their hearts. No, more often than not, they are deceived.

[00:05:39]Order, safety, security, pillars of a harmonious and prosperous society that you'll find in any civilization to varying degrees. But for a totalitarian system, these are the ideals that they claim to uphold above all others. Ideals that they use to sway the populace into accepting their rule and supporting it.

[00:05:58]Propaganda is the greatest tool the Empire has as far as deceiving the populace into believing that they are the ones who will provide them with these things, which is only made all the more effective as it's combined with the lived experience of the populace just prior to the formation of the Empire.

[00:06:12]The Clone Wars was one of the most devastating conflicts ever fought in the galaxy. A conflict that was entirely engineered by the Sith to provide them with a secure path to power. And it was the absolute horror of galaxywide warfare that laid that path for them.

[00:06:26]Billions upon billions of people experienced what it was like to have battles raging across or above their home worlds for three long years. A cataclysmic war that ended up consuming billions of lives. In the wake of such a disaster, it's only reasonable that a sizable chunk of the populace felt that the Republic had failed them and that measures needed to be taken to ensure such atrocities never again manifested in the galaxy. And so, when Chancellor Palpatine announced the reorganization of the Republic into the First Galactic Empire, it was something that many readily welcomed, unaware that they had been so thoroughly deceived into believing its creation was the solution to their woes. So it was that millions, if not billions of government employees were poised to become the new proponents of Imperial rule. And with millions or billions more signing up to defend their new empire through service in the Imperial military, the empire became as normalized as the Republic was the moment it was created. For the average person, depending on where they resided, things didn't change much. But what did change were the asurances they were constantly fed through state sponsored media that said that society had become safe and secure due to the existence of the Empire and so living their day-to-day lives now free from the woes of the previous government. Most of the people of the galaxy were now content and complacent. Either enjoying new privileges via the benevolence of their new overlords or living their lives in much the same way they had been prior to its institution.

[00:07:46]This is how evil becomes normalized through the great effort of the villains who unleash that evil to convince the populace that they aren't just good but necessary. And it's through two characters in the concepts that fuel them that were shown just how effective the Empire's propaganda and conditioning truly is.

[00:08:07]Sirill K is about as unremarkable as they come. Plain, uncarismatic, and wolffully dry. He is the perfect representation of what the mind-numbing ideals of the empire can make a person into. When we first meet Sirill, we find him employed as a deputy inspector for the corporate police of the Priox Morana Corporation on Morana 1. In this capacity, we find a man who is proud and no nonsense. One who tailors his own uniform and likely removes every bit of lint from it with a pair of tweezers.

[00:08:37]Sirill is a man who, in part due to his nagging mother, believes wholeheartedly in the Empire and everything it represents. His speech often mimics what you might expect to hear blaring on the Imperial News Network or what you might read directly from any given corporate or imperial handbook. While he is concerned with the sanctity of sensient life, he's only concerned with it so far as it's associated with and abides by the empire and imperial protocol. He will not tolerate any amount of rulebreaking or derelction of duty. As for Sirill, duty is everything. Being a part of the great machine that provides the galaxy with structure and order.

[00:09:12]That's why he is so easily convinced that whatever the Empire says is right, that the cause he has been raised to believe is the only thing keeping the galaxy together is doing just that. And as a result of his utter allegiance to such an institution, he is the embodiment of mundanity and mediocrity.

[00:09:28]And it's through him and people like him that great evil finds the support necessary to keep all the little parts that make it up moving in the direction they need it to move. And it's only once a person like Sirill, who's fed the cleanest version of the Empire there is, is forced to confront the awful truth of what they do and what he helps them to do, that they realize that they are not the scions of a benevolent regime that safeguards the people of the galaxy, but blind and ignorant villains in their own right who have been conditioned to believe they are the virtuous and not the vile.

[00:10:03]Dedra Miro is as much a victim of the Empire as the men and women that it rents the life from are. Dedra, whose parents were branded criminals and executed by the Empire, was raised in an Imperial Kinder block where her entire life was dictated by Imperial programming. She and the rest of the children she was raised alongside were trained to be the future of the Empire.

[00:10:22]people who ate, slept, and breathed imperialism, who would go on to become some of the most important members of that imperial machine. The principles that raised Dedra were duty, order, and ambition. Things that made her into a more competent and extreme version of the man who would eventually become her lover. All the things that made life worth living were thus foreign to Dedra.

[00:10:44]connection between beings, laughter, joy, all were diminished in her as the empire in service to it became her most defining traits. But how can you blame her? She knew nothing else. For Dedra, the empire was everything. It was her home, her parents, her career, her lifeblood. And it's through this indoctrination, this conviction drilled into her that had her believing she was a representative of the framework of an entire galaxy that saw her becoming a ruthless and ambitious woman who would lay down her own life as well as the lives of anyone else in order to secure the power of the institution that she believed in. An institution that was greatly supported and fine-tuned by the drab bureaucracy that she was employed by.

[00:11:33]A piece of paper with a directive written on it can be just as, if not more, destructive than the deadliest of weapons. For it's often those directives that point the weapons of evil in the places they need to be pointed to secure the power of any given regime. The ISB, the Imperial Security Bureau, is a harrowing example of this. On Corissant in a pristine white building lies dozens of neatly pressed employees discussing the particulars of subjugation, imprisonment, and torture. In these sanitary conditions are exchanged words most terrifying in the most unremarkable of ways. Quotas are set for the detainment of dissident with the same fervor you might find at the DMV, and the plans to subdue or execute thousands is treated as routinely as any other normal government function. Major Leo Partigaz serves as the human embodiment of these dreaded facets of imperial rule with his line about the true nature of the ISB being one of the most horrifying examples of institutionalized evil.

[00:12:28]We are healthcare providers. We treat sickness. We identify symptoms. We locate germs whether they arise from within or have come from the outside.

[00:12:37]The longer we wait to identify a disorder, the harder it is to treat the disease.

[00:12:43]A disease. That's what resistance is to an Imperial machine, what freedom is, what life is. And it's these doctors and their metaphorical gowns operating on the galaxy from within their purified operating theaters that seek to eradicate these diseases, not with passion, but with dispassion and certainty. Certainty that they are doing what must be done for the greater good and to cleanse a galaxy of the filth that has accumulated over so many thousands of years. institutions that provide the illusion of virtuosity to both the men and women who work for them and the ones they claim to protect for the sake of acquiring and maintaining one thing and one thing alone, ultimate power.

[00:13:30]The evils of power once it has become magnified and turned towards the selfish acquisition of it are the most defining aspects of any authoritarian institution. All that we've discussed so far only made possible through power near absolute. The power to control and shape the minds of anyone who might try to resist that power in any way. And the force applied to those who resist even further. But on a smaller level, on an individual level, the power that the Empire provides to those who toil for it can be used to great effect in providing oneself with anything they might desire.

[00:14:00]The authority granted by a position in the corporate police force allows men and women employed by it to use their status as both weapon and shield that enables them to do anything they may wish with minimal consequences.

[00:14:11]Typically, at least this is what emboldens the two men who attempt to rob Cassian on Morana 1, instilling within them that they have enough power to act as thugs and abuse anyone they may wish to in order to enrich themselves in any way they can. Much the same can be said for Lieutenant Croll, the man who used his position in the province of leniency during an audit the Empire was conducting on Minao to coers Bixcalene into sleeping with him. This is a classic example of men in positions of authority using that authority in an attempt to extract sexual favors from women in exchange for any number of perks and guarantees they can provide them. But Croll and men like him are not truly men. There are brutes who use the mask of their position to hide the beast that lies within their souls. And predictably, when that mask fails to provide them with what they desire, they turn to violence as a means to acquire what they want and what they believe is owed to them. An abuse of power so grave that few others can match the diabolical nature of these acts. Power. Power, both real and imagined, is what facilitates such acts of evil. But it's imagination that allows such evil to exist in the first place.

[00:15:24]Conquering the world, the dream of every tyrant. But how does one accomplish such a dream? Well, like any dream, it takes imagination to figure out how to make that dream a reality. The thoughts that bring about the plans one needs to put into place in order to make the intangible tangible. The Sith dreamt of supremacy over the galaxy, and so they imagined ways in which they could bring about that supremacy. And it was through their continued efforts to actualize their dreams that saw each successive Sith Lord imagining and devising greater means to accomplish their goals until the greatest dreamer of them all took all their work and imagine the perfect way to bring to fruition a plan a thousand years in the making. But in Andor, one man's imagination serves as one of the most egregious evils we're exposed to in this series. The imagination of Dr. Gorst. Sometime before the beginning of this series, the Dizenites of the Moon Don Frey were eradicated by the Empire. And out of that eradication emerged audio recordings of the genocide that was committed there. Ones that featured the screams of countless innocents dying in unison as the oceans they called home were filled with cracks of electricity that sealed the fates of every last one of them. The screams on these recordings included those of younglings, of the Denonite children who perished alongside their parents at the hands of Imperial brutality. And it was Dr. Of course, too, after hearing this recording, found within his depraved mind a means to aid his empire in overcoming its enemies.

[00:16:47]Thus, a helmet was devised that one could place on any victim to draw information out of them via immense psychological torment. With the prisoners of Dr. Gor suffering hours upon hours of the screams of dying children that would melt their minds after prolonged exposure to such horror, who could hear the screams of children and feel not pity, but inspiration, but the crulest and most barbaric of monsters ever to be born? demons with a total absence of mercy within their souls who revel in the torment they unleash on behalf of their masters. It's monsters like these with imaginations like Gorst who devise all the means with which the Imperials savage the people they rule. Means that when proven to be effective become not just the isolated tool of one man's depravity but an institutional staple that doubtlessly saw the breaking of thousands of people's minds in the most horrific way possible. For it's within the dark recesses of the sapient mind that all evils originate and are made manifest.

[00:17:41]But as evil as the Empire is, evil is not a monopoly controlled solely by the Empire. For in the pursuit of the greater good, evil can and will manifest itself along the road to retribution.

[00:17:57]Cassian Andor, the man who was once a boy named in Kasa, was raised in an environment that was destroyed by insatiable greed. Long before he was born, the Republic came to Cassian's home world of Canari to mine it for precious resources. And as they dug into Canari's soil, they unearthed poisons and toxins that turned the verdant jungles of this paradisal world into pits of death that few could survive in.

[00:18:20]By the time Cassion was born, the planet had been abandoned by the corporations that had destroyed it, leaving only native children behind to forge for themselves as the few remaining survivors of the corruption unleashed by corporate greed. Once the empire took over, mining was resumed on the planet, sealing its fate forever more when a mining disaster unleashed even more toxins and devastated all remaining life on the planet, rendering it a dead world where only the memory of a great and destructive greed still lived. The willingness to abuse sensient life for the sake of profits is what sealed Canari's fate and the fate of so many other planets. But greed is not always the realm of conglomerates or governments. For the average person is more than capable of harming others as they seek to enrich or empower themselves. Arilken is an example of such greed. a man who accompanied the squad who oversaw the raid on Aldani, who attempted to make a deal with Cassian to split the loot they acquired 50/50 so they might ride off into the sunset away from a rebellion that would certainly see their lives forfeit. Such greed, such cowardice would have taken funds away from the rebels that may have ensured the loss of thousands more lives, all for the sake of one man's pocketbook and safety. Similarly, Teoma, who attempted to blackmail Mon Mothma into compensating him for the losses he suffered as a result of his involvement in the rebellion, could have deprived the rebellion of a crucial leader that may have fractured them and either delayed or ruined their mission. But as far as any evil unleashed by members of the Rebel cause, greed is a rarity, and it's far more likely that evil will be unleashed in pursuit of the cause rather than in spite of it.

[00:19:58]The desire to be free, a desire that comes naturally to all of us. Once this freedom is taken away, though, the effort to reoptain it can be maddening.

[00:20:08]Living day in and day out as the oppressed, who desperately wishes to be free of the chains that bind you. From that madness comes desperation, the need to be free at any cost and to do whatever it takes to bring about that freedom. This desperation is perhaps best embodied by Sawerrera and his partisans. People who present themselves as being so dedicated to their cause that they appear to be willing to unleash any number of horrors necessary to ensure their success. They're fighting for good. They're on the side of good, but they're also people who might annihilate 90% of the population in order to ensure 10% could be free.

[00:20:43]And as that desperation grows more and more potent as years fly by, the likelihood of atrocities occurring in the name of justice and freedom only grows. But not all evils unleashed by righteous causes are unwarranted. For there are many acts in service to rebellion that fall into the category of necessary evils. The assassinations, the bombings, the raids that all work to further the cause of freedom. All of which can end up harming innocent life as those undertaking these missions attempt to preserve it at any cost. with even those who are allied with the cause subject determination should they prove themselves to be obstacles on the path to freedom. Though all of this may be true, there is nothing that the Republic nor the rebels ever did that can match the evil of the Empire, the machine that ground down the lives of so many as the great wheel of one man's insidious will.

[00:21:37]The Empire is as all-consuming and as welloiled as evil can get. From top to bottom, it's a machine that can carry out any manner of evil acts at a moment's notice, with bureaucrats and commanders moving the pieces on the galactic chessboard with deadly precision. And it's through this great behemoth of pure evil that atrocities, both great and small, were carried out on a daily basis to ensure the power of the most evil man ever to be born in this galaxy was maintained at all costs.

[00:22:05]Despite this, despite how perfect the evil of the empire was, evil itself can never be perfect. For evil is unnatural, it is an aberration, and it lies in opposition to the very fundamentals of life itself. And perhaps most importantly, evil can never rest. It cannot stand idly by and be secure in its power. It's always playing catch-up, maintaining or expanding its reach through continuous effort that only serves to embolden those under its yoke as time goes on, spurring them into eradicating the forces that seek to subdue them. Yes, the Empire's evil was as perfect as they come. Yet, the greatest testament to its imperfection is both its destruction and its length of existence. For as perfectly evil as it was, the Empire only managed to maintain itself for 23 years, a mere fraction of the thousand years of planning it took to create it. Despite this, the atrocities the Empire facilitated and the absolute terror they unleashed cannot be understated. But an empire deals in fear because those who constitute it are themselves afraid.

[00:23:09]They fear being powerless. They fear the chaos of freedom, of life itself. And they hide all that fear behind a veil of power and order, so they might make themselves feel secure and satisfied with their miserable and wretched existences, to bring structure to what needs none, save for what structure people who hold to genuine virtues wish to manifest. And in opposition to all that life is, and all that makes life worth living, in the end, empires like the Empire of Palpatine are always doomed to fail, to die like the many they murder have died, as they drown in the bottomless oceans of blood they spill. the darkness that destroys without just as it destroys oneself within as it attempts to annihilate the very soul of the universe with evil.

[00:23:53]Thank you all for tuning in to this episode of Analyzing Evil, and I hope you've enjoyed. What are your thoughts on Andor and Rogue One? Did I miss anything? Let me know down below, and leave a suggestion for a villain you'd like to see featured while you're at it.

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