I’m not a Star Wars guy. I grew up a Trek fan because my best friend Sean got me into it and through the years, I identified mostly as a Trek casual. It wasn’t until the streaming era that I did rewatches of shows from front to back and began a true canonical love for the various series of the Star Trek legacy. Andor was not a show that was on my radar, I think I watched the first episode mostly because I read about it somewhere but once I started I was hooked.

The Expanse is another show that I felt depicted what I’ve been calling “space politics” really well. Star Trek, Babylon 5 and other shows of the genre don’t really show you the machinations of the behind the scenes, we have to stitch most of that together ourselves. Sure, there are trials and promotions and such, but the prose is mostly reserved for interspecies strife and romantic entanglements. Because Andor is at its heart about rebellion, it has to set the stage for a variety of interconnected stories happening all at once. What we’re seeing is something of a parbaked pie, not the finished thing, which is what draws me in.

When I recommend the show or talk to other casual fans, there’s a delight in discussing how much of Andor is just meetings. I find this funny as someone with a lot of work meetings, but the scripts are sharp and the language is precise. 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.

This is what makes Andor perhaps the most honest fictional depiction of authoritarian power in recent memory: it refuses myth. Instead, it gives us logistics. The Empire’s greed is shown as its undoing. All that conquering meant expending resources to figure out how to control distant lands of which it knew very little about. The best parts of the character studies aren’t even the rebels, whose intentions are easier to parse the more you come to understand them. It’s seeing how the bureaucrats, who we see most often, are incentivized to maintain the order of this vast machinery. Watching them jockey for favor, to conspire with and against each other under the (mistaken) belief that the Empire will reward their loyalty is fascinating to watch. It helps you understand how people could be motivated in real life towards such horrors, under false belief that they’re on the right side of the fight.

The metaphors between real life and fiction eventually hollow out, but the decentralization of terror across different nodes has its limits. Bureaucracy is like a game of telephone—the results are only as good as the messenger’s ability to transmit efficiently. Andor makes a clear case that liberation isn’t a flip of the moral switch. It’s logistics under pressure.

Resistance must coordinate without centralized control, distribute risk without guaranteed outcomes, share intelligence without shared ideology, fund operations without traceability, and act decisively without consensus. What’s depicted here is not dysfunction, but coalitional insurgency. This is Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism applied to rebellion: friction isn’t failure, it’s function. The impossibility of perfect consensus doesn’t preclude collective action. In fact, it’s how collective action survives complexity. So many factions made up the Rebellion, all having their own means and motivations for what drew them to the fight. It’s never neat or clean, but realizing that our differences together aren’t as significant as those who object to our liberty is a key component in making things go and having people lower their guards.

Throughout Andor, the Empire is overextended. It’s surveilling too many systems, processing too many prisoners, handling too many reports. Luthen Rael understands this better than anyone: power doesn’t panic, but it does exhaust. He bets everything on this truth—that when you scale control, you scale vulnerability. The real threat to authoritarianism isn’t disobedience. It’s burnout. This is the regime’s blind spot. Fascism believes it can replace loyalty with automation, that bureaucracy can substitute for meaning. But every camera needs an analyst. Every arrest order needs a clerk. Every fear mechanism has to be pushed by someone.

This is the operational paradox of authoritarianism: it creates more systems than it can maintain. And in doing so, it turns its enforcers into liabilities. Compliance decays. Systems misfire. And eventually, the machine begins to eat itself.

blame erin for why i wrote this post