Not Yet: Andor’s Insurrectionary Utopianism

Gabriel Burrow

“Even if I die, it’s for the future.” These words are spoken in The Square, a documentary following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Their source, Magdy, is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who is willing to sacrifice himself if it means a better world for his children. His political affiliations differ from many of his fellow protesters, but the words capture the feeling in the air. People gathered in Tahrir Square believing that it would be a crucible for societal change.

We know what happened next. What began as an expression of unity against despotism became increasingly divided. The military assumed control following the overthrow of President Mubarak. Then another despot rose through political manoeuvring, this time from within the Muslim Brotherhood. By July 2013, this figurehead, Morsi, had been toppled too. Hundreds of his supporters were killed. Revolutions are messy things, fraught with factionalism and contradictions.

Many have highlighted how Andor draws from historical revolutions to bring the Rebel Alliance’s origins to life.[1] Whereas Lucas’s original trilogy reproduced the Vietnam War in broad brushstrokes, this series is saturated in the complexity of real-world political movements. Showrunner Tony Gilroy looked to everything from the Haitian revolution and the Bolsheviks’ early years to the French resistance and the ANC for inspiration.[2] In his own words, it is “as definitive a survey of revolution as I think you’re going to get on television for a while.”[3]

Gilroy’s approach gives Andor a rich sense of historicity. Its characters, factions, and narrative threads are rooted in the push and pull of revolution. So, while the Egyptian Revolution might not be an explicit point of reference for the showrunner, the series captures its dual characteristics: on one hand, the yearning for a better world (or galaxy) and a willingness to make sacrifices to achieve it; on the other, the challenges of constructing a movement from disparate parts and safeguarding it from internal and external threats.

Andor’s representation of revolutionary struggle is what sets it apart from other Star Wars media. The series eschews the saga’s usual family dramas. Its creators don’t care whether or not Rey is a Palpatine or the First/Final Order will someday rise, inexplicably, to crush a New Republic/Resistance. And although it dovetails neatly with Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, it rejects the self-referential nods and winks that have come to define Disney’s Star Wars content. Beyond spymaster Luthen Rael’s impressive collection of antiquities, there are no lucky dice or Ponda Baba cameos.

What’s more, the series’ status as a prequel to Rogue One – in which Cassian Andor sacrifices himself for the rebellion – means the protagonist’s fate has already been determined. The same goes for Saw Gerrera, Ruescott Melshi, and other key characters we haven’t already seen die on screen. If one of Andor’s rebels wasn’t present in the original trilogy, they may not have survived to witness the Battle of Yavin. I never wondered whether Luthen would die; I waited to see how he would die.

From the outside, this premise might seem bleak. But Andor is the most hopeful story in the Star Wars canon because its characters fight for a future with the knowledge that they may not live to see it. This is distinct from the simplistic evocations of hope found elsewhere – whether that’s Leia’s pre-recorded message, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” or Poe Dameron’s banal claim that “We’ve got friends out there. They’ll come if they know there’s hope” in The Rise of Skywalker.

Andor’s rebellion is built on something closer to the ‘docta spes’ (educated hope) that Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch describes.[4] This hope is aware of the structures and possibilities of its historical moment. As a result, it’s ‘more concrete… the kind that is grounded and consequential, that is cognisant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of this hoping.’[5] The series doesn’t shy away from obstacles facing the rebellion; it emphasises them, from the infighting that breaks out between members of the Maya Pei Brigade to the Imperial Security Bureau’s coordinated counter-insurgency. 

Despite these seemingly insurmountable odds, Andor’s characters still struggle against the Empire. We see this in Season One when Cassian tells his adoptive mother, Maarva, that they’re leaving their home on the planet Ferrix. She refuses to go with him, remaining to be part of a rebellion that is both “overdue and probably doomed.” “You can’t beat them, Maarva”, Cassian insists. “Not if I run away”, she responds. She dies on Ferrix, but not before she records a funeral speech that will incite an uprising.

Across its two seasons, Andor foregrounds acts of resistance premised on this educated hope, whether that’s a funeral speech, a prison break, or an Imperial staffer helping the rebellion steal an experimental TIE Avenger. The series places them in dialogue with one another, both thematically and overtly, through cross-cutting and montage. It uses this approach to storytelling to communicate a theory of change – that, in the words of Nemik, “even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

Viewing Andor’s rebellion through the lens of utopian studies brings the characteristics of the movement into sharper focus. Fundamentally, the series is concerned with a collective struggle that’s driven by a shared dream of emancipation. In other words, it’s an exploration of insurrectionary utopianism.

A Utopia, Not So Far Away

Behind the bombastic TIE-fighter chases and salvos of blaster fire, Andor is a show about utopian possibility. This might seem counterintuitive. It’s not the kind of narrative that’s traditionally associated with utopia, which means both ‘good place’ (eutopia) and ‘no place’ (outopia).[6] In stories like More’s Utopia or Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, there is a ‘good place’ that characters travel to through either space or time. We are guided around these utopian societies and invited to reflect upon how they compare to our own world. But other than the rebel base on Yavin 4 or the palaces of Chandrila, none of Andor’s settings come close to that. When the Empire spans the entire galaxy, can anywhere be “good”?

Tellingly, utopias elsewhere in Star Wars canon often exist outside the known galaxy. In the video game Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, former padawan Cal Kestis seeks out the lost paradise of Tanalorr. The Force-rich planet is shrouded from the Empire by the Koboh Abyss, so it’s a perfect haven for the remnants of the Jedi Order. Skeleton Crew, which is set five years after Return of the Jedi, focuses on the hidden treasure planet of At Attin. Although the utopian appearance of At Attin’s retro-futuristic suburbia is undercut by its droid-controlled society, it remains a place of relative prosperity and safety. Both these settings also evoke golden age civilisations: At Attin is an Old Republic mint with an orbital defence field that insulated it from the Galactic Civil War, while Tanalorr was home to a Jedi temple during the High Republic.[7]

These utopias are a far cry from Andor’s insurrectionary utopianism. Rather than wishing a good place into existence so its characters can live beyond the Empire’s reach, the series echoes the processual understanding of utopia that Bloch articulated.[8] Viewed this way, utopia is neither a particular place nor a programme that can be followed – instead it’s an unfolding process. While Bloch’s writings are both complex and wide-ranging, they have a persistent refrain: he uses ‘Noch Nicht’ (which translates as both “Not Yet” and “Still Not”) to describe the immanence of the future in the present; it’s a future that has not yet been realised, but is still not foreclosed. Andor may be set in a galaxy far, far away, but its rebels are confronted with ‘the unbearable nearness of utopia.’[9]

Bloch’s notion of the Not Yet is hard to pin down. It blurs temporal boundaries, drawing on unrealised possibilities from the past to help shape visions of what’s to come.[10] The present is incomplete, and it’s where the Not Yet is experienced as some combination of hope, desire, unrest, and refusal. As a result, it’s a site of revolutionary struggle – where this utopianism gets its teeth. This is also where Bloch’s philosophy can inform our understanding of Andor’s rebels. The acts of resistance represented in the series can be seen as expressions of utopian possibility. When you understand utopia as a process, their struggle is utopian.

In his magnum opus The Principle of Hope, Bloch describes how a person ‘becomes rebellious’:

The No to the bad situation which exists, the Yes to the better life that hovers ahead, is incorporated by the deprived into revolutionary interest. This interest always begins with hunger, hunger transforms itself, having been taught, into an explosive force against the prison of deprivation.[11]

The revolutionary subject says “No” to the pernicious state of things in the present. Then, through their utopian yearning for a better life, they’re changed in such a way that they can resist those same conditions. The transformation Bloch describes can inform our understanding of Andor’s cast of would-be rebels, who are continually confronted with the authoritarian and extractivist nature of the Galactic Empire. In response, they develop a drive to escape its metaphorical (and indeed literal) “prison of deprivation”. As Luthen observes to radical insurgent Saw Gerrera, “Oppression breeds rebellion.”

The same dynamic plays out time and time again, most notably in the case of Cassian himself. From his childhood on Kenari to his life on Ferrix and beyond, he’s continually confronted by the harm done by the extractive regimes like the Empire.[12] But the “better life” he reaches for isn’t always rooted in revolutionary politics. Cassian departs Ferrix following the Aldhani heist in search of “a place they haven’t ruined yet.” He loses himself to the drug-fuelled parties of Morlana’s beach resorts. It’s not until he is imprisoned on Narkina 5 that he concludes there is only “One way out” of the Empire’s hold on the galaxy. From there, he becomes an explosive revolutionary force of the kind Bloch describes, undertaking a range of operations for the nascent rebellion.

This process is punctuated by another rejection of the rebellion in Andor’s second season. After extracting Mon Mothma from the Senate building on Coruscant, Cassian plans to leave the base on Yavin 4 to start a new life with his partner, Bix. He’s done with the rebellion – his luck is running out, and nothing is more important than them being together. This time, it’s Bix who leaves without him, in effect “choosing the rebellion” on his behalf. She’s convinced Cassian still has a vital role to play in the fight against the Empire, and doesn’t want their relationship or unborn child to prevent him from undertaking it. Without his knowledge, she returns to the farming planet of Mina-Rau.

Bix sacrifices their family in the Here and Now for a “better life that hovers ahead” – the utopian dream of a galaxy that has overcome Imperial oppression. This is a future in which they could grow old together. “When it’s over and we’ve won, we can do all the things we ever wanted”, Bix tells Cassian via a recorded message. Well aware of the obstacles facing the rebellion, she likely suspects they won’t get to savour its eventual victory together. That makes her sacrifice in the name of a better future typical of Andor’s insurrectionary utopianism. It is based on both anticipation and sacrifice. In Magdy’s words, “Even if I die, it’s for the future.”

Revenge of the Past

One of the reasons Bix becomes convinced that Cassian has a higher purpose within the rebellion is his interaction with a Force healer on Yavin 4. We begin BBY2 with Cassian nursing blaster burns from a mission gone bad. Bix tricks him into seeking out supernatural medical attention on the rebel base, and once they arrive, the healer is drawn to him without quite knowing why. They treat his wound and, before he leaves, have a moment of clarity: “All that you’ve been gathering, the strength of spirit,” they say to him. “Surely you must feel it?” Cassian isn’t convinced that he’s special. Bix is.

You could argue that this simply aligns Andor with the wider Star Wars canon; an amateur space wizard confirms that Cassian is the Chosen One. Perhaps, like Anakin Skywalker’s force sensitivity, the strength of his spirit can be explained by a supernaturally high midichlorian count. It’s certainly a concession to Star Wars’ Force-oriented mythos, which the series has stubbornly avoided up to this point. However, it’s worth looking closer at the way the healer articulates Cassian’s significance to Bix after he’s left them:

Most beings carry the things that shaped them. They carry the past. But some, very few, your pilot, they’re gathering as they go. There’s a purpose to it. He’s a messenger. There’s some place he needs to be.

There’s still a kind of exceptionalism here. Of all the capable and committed rebels in Andor, only Cassian is granted the rank of “messenger.”[13] Most carry their experiences with them, perhaps dwelling on past mistakes or trauma; Cassian is assembling everything he needs with a particular purpose. Most interesting is the temporal role the healer ascribes to this personal journey: Cassian’s drawing from the past in service of a destination somewhere in the future. The use of “messenger” here is ambiguous. Perhaps the message Cassian carries is the material he’s collected, which he will go on to share with Jyn Erso over the course of Rogue One, helping her too to become rebellious.

This temporal dynamic can be better understood by returning to Bloch’s philosophy, which views reality as a ‘mediation between present, unfinished past, and above all: possible future.’[14] The past’s unrealised potential is latent in the present, feeding a utopian impulse. Rather than being burdened by his past, Cassian is able to use what he’s gathered to chart a course for the rebellion. Everything from his childhood on Kenari to his time spent discussing politics with Nemik gives that vision of the future shape. This is not simply personal experience; it’s the accumulation of history, drawing from the ideas, cultures, and memories of the people with whom he’s interacted.

Bloch’s own process mirrors the way his philosophy mobilises the unfinished past. Like Walter Benjamin’s ragpicker, he sifted through history, searching everything from music and theatre to architecture and medicine for scraps of not-yet-realised utopian content.[15] As noted, Tony Gilroy likewise looked to history when constructing Andor’s narrative; beyond the obvious 20th-century parallels, he drew from a 3,000-year ‘continuum’ of ‘slavery, oppression, colonialism, bad behavior, betrayal, heroism.’[16] And while the two are very different, perhaps this similarity in method helps explain why Bloch’s utopianism seems to resonate through the series. Failed revolutions, missed opportunities, fleeting victories – all of this is utopian for Bloch. And Andor is assembled from these same revolutionary moments. 

This is by no means a programmatic approach. Gilroy isn’t using history to create a blueprint for what the ideal political movement or a perfect utopia would look like any more than Bloch is. Rather, Andor represents a rebellion in the process of coming into being. The very indeterminacy of the future that the Force healer describes Cassian moving towards reflects the processual nature of the utopianism found in Andor. Instead of a single “good place” to aim for, there’s “some place” he needs to be. The beach on which Cassian will be vaporised by the Death Star isn’t a utopia in the way somewhere like Tanalorr is. But the thing he sacrifices himself for – a sense of a possible future, shaped by an unfinished past that spans millennia – is utopian.

The Music Beneath the Noise

Andor doesn’t present audiences with a roadmap for how utopia might be reached or a blueprint for what it would look like. It doesn’t present utopia as a place either. However, it does use the conception of a “good place” to articulate its insurrectionary utopianism. Via two planets, the series presents competing visions of what “good” looks like. The first is the rebel base on Yavin 4, where characters from across a galaxy-wide network come together to be part of something bigger than themselves. The second vision of a good life is presented in Mon Mothma’s home on the planet Chandrila, where wedding guests seemingly while away their days with revelry.

The interrelation of these dual paradigms – resistance and escapism – is one way that Andor explores utopian ideas. It offers viewers glimpses of what a future after the Empire could look like, suggesting that an indulgent life is not necessarily a good one and that a more humble lifestyle grounded in comradeship could be preferable. And, in the meantime, sacrifice in the name of emancipation can be the basis of shared hope and solidarity. Utopia is a process, after all.

Let’s start with Chandrila. Mon describes how her home planet is “suffering at the hands of the Empire” in Star Wars: Rebels, but you wouldn’t know it from the scenes that take place there in Andor.[17] The Empire’s influence hasn’t reached the Mothma Estate, which nestles against a mountainside like an alpine version of Naboo’s Theed Palace. Chandrilan mobster Davo Sculdun is unfortunately the guest of honour; Mon’s daughter will marry Sculdun’s son as part of a deal to shore up Mon’s finances. But this is of no concern to the revellers, who drink and dance to the intergalactic smash hit “Niamos” across three sprawling days. So far so good.

During the wedding festivities, a particular Chandrilan tradition is observed. It is customary for the host to share a greeting (“sagrona”), toast guests’ good health (“sagrona teema”), and finally offer some guidance (“sagrona teema solom”) to the happy couple. With an economy of words that’s typical of Chandrilan culture, this must be boiled down into “a single truthful insight.” Perrin, Mon’s silk-robed husband, does the honours:

Pain will find you. Trouble and disagreement will arrive without summons. There’s no choice in this. There’s no effort required. You simply stand still and the galaxy will deliver a daily basket of anxieties to your door without fail. But my solom, my hope. My hope. My hope is you learn to reach past this constant cloud of sadness. Pleasure. Gaiety. Amusement. These are the hidden things. The music buried beneath all that noise. Joy. Joy! Joy.

Perrin’s life of luxury seems from the outside to be carefree. Mon even remarks to him that “You never struggle” when he’s later worn out attending endless investiture banquets for new senators on Coruscant. Perrin may be incapable of engaging fully with the injustice and alienation of life under the Empire, but he’s well aware of pain and hardship. In the face of life’s daily battles, he hopes his daughter and her-soon-to be husband will find joy wherever they can – in “a moment of pleasing sensation”, a shared joke, or an expensive meal. Perrin’s “hope” is that the lovebirds will “search out these treasures” to distract from adversity, not to confront it. 

Both Perrin and Andor’s rebels recognise life’s challenges. The difference is how they respond to them. Unlike his wife and the rest of the rebels, who struggle against the Empire in the hope that they can loosen its grip on the galaxy, Perrin responds with a kind of hedonistic escapism. It’s something akin to Cassian’s flight to Niamos, but without the political awakening that follows it. Perrin seeks out joy in the present moment, however fleeting it might be. Meanwhile, the rebels make sacrifices in the present, hoping that it will lead to a better future.

The base on Yavin 4 is at the heart of what the rebellion is building. It’s a far cry from Chandrila’s palaces; amid its ruined temples and jungle, rebels live and work in makeshift huts, treehouses, and towers of scaffolding. From what we see of the food, it’s simple fare – likely nothing Perrin would take pleasure in. The rebel community has its share of tensions too, especially as Luthen’s agents attempt to retain autonomy in the face of increasingly rigid organisational structures. Cassian doesn’t like asking for permission to go offworld. And yet a shared purpose connects them.

We see this in Season Two’s final montage. Cassian puts on his jacket, waters his plants, and walks to his U-Wing, ready to embark on the mission to the Ring of Kafrene that begins Rogue One. As he makes his way through the base, the camera cuts to the people he’s met along his journey: Melshi trains recruits; Wilmon shares a meal with Dreena, the Ghor resistance fighter; Mon and Vel talk with fellow rebels in the mess tent; Kleya wakes up and sees what has been built on Yavin; the Force healer is packing crates and, in contrast to their interaction in BBY2, Cassian acknowledges her with a purposeful nod.

The montage also cuts to characters off-world, be that Dedra staring at her cell wall, Saw in his hideout on Jedha, or Krennic surveying the Death Star under construction. Notably, we return to Perrin too. He cruises across the Coruscant skyline as his daughter’s new mother-in-law, Runai Sculdun, sleeps on his shoulder. We can assume they have found a moment or two of “pleasing sensation” with one another. Seemingly lost in thought, he takes a flask from Runai’s hand, fills his glass, and takes a drink. The “joy” he described as “the music buried beneath all that noise” at the wedding on Chandrila evades him.

Instead, the final montage suggests that same music is found in collective struggle – that’s what utopia means in Andor. The rebels don’t need fleeting pleasures or luxury on Yavin. They’re motivated by the shared dream of a future free from the Empire. The jungle moon itself isn’t a utopia, but its gravitational pull brings together characters who share a particular utopian sensibility. They each bring their failures, unfinished plans, and unrealised hopes to Yavin, not to assemble a shared blueprint, but to collectively refuse the circumstances of their present moment and dream of something better.

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[1] For a thorough breakdown of how Andor relates to real-world movements, see Mike Towill’s chapter “This is What Revolution Looks Like” in Andor Analysed, Part 1.

[2] Stephen Armstrong, “Andor creator Tony Gilroy: ‘My Star Wars characters are based more on Trotsky than Trump’”, The Telegraph, 2025: telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/tony-gilroy-interview-andor-star-wars-disney-plus; Anthony D’Alessandro, “‘Andor’: Tony Gilroy On Cassian’s Season One Finale Ultimatum; Teases Season 2 Filled With Rebel Gangsters & Outliers”, Deadline, 2022: deadline.com/2022/11/andor-season-one-finale-tony-gilroy-interview-season-two-spoilers-1235181298.

[3] Chris O’Falt, “‘Andor’ One Year Later : How the Moving Opening Scene Perfectly Sets the Table for Season 2”, IndieWire, 2025: indiewire.com/features/interviews/andor-season-2-opening-explained-1235117453

[4] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1986), p. 7.

[5] Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p. x.

[6] The two etymological meanings of utopia – good place and no place – exist in tension with one another, and utopian narratives since More have questioned their own legitimacy. For a more rigorous study of utopia as place see David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 5–6.

[7] Tanalorr and At Attin’s association with past golden ages aligns them with prelapsarian utopias like Eden, which call back to an idyllic past. Often, this is associated with nationalist imaginaries, especially the restorative nostalgia that Svetlana Boym describes. Within some Marxist views of history, it could be “a golden age before the fall, that is to say, before capitalist dissociation”. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 337.

[8] Bloch’s approach to utopia as process went on to influence everyone from Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson to Ruth Levitas and José Esteban Muñoz.

[9] Jon Greenaway, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch (London: Zer0 Books, 2023), p. 15.

[10] See Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 20–21 and Caroline Edwards, Utopia and the Contemporary English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) p. 28.

[11] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1986), p. 75.

[12] The environmentally-destructive mining operations that took place on Kenari were undertaken during the years of the late Republic. The Galactic Empire had yet to emerge, but it would only intensify the kind of colonial extractivism Kenari was subjected to on planets like Jedha and Ghorman – up to and including genocide.

[13] This question of exceptionalism – and indeed determinism – is echoed in Cassian’s final interaction with Luthen. When Cassian claims that he makes his own decisions, Luthen doubts him. He notes to Cassian that “you appeared when I needed you”. Even the cool, rational spymaster sees something extraordinary in Andor. There is also potentially a metatextual layer to this observation: given that Cassian dies in Rogue One, his path was always predetermined.

[14] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1986), p. 196.

[15] See: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 349.

[16] Anthony D’Alessandro, “‘Andor’: Tony Gilroy On Cassian’s Season One Finale Ultimatum; Teases Season 2 Filled With Rebel Gangsters & Outliers”, Deadline, 2022: deadline.com/2022/11/andor-season-one-finale-tony-gilroy-interview-season-two-spoilers-1235181298.

[17] Star Wars Rebels, “In the Name of the Rebellion: Part 1”, Disney+, 2017: disneyplus.com/en-gb/play/d324ab85-076e-48ec-8f41-ea99874b6c9c.