My Star Wars head canon has become utterly ruthless these last couple of years. I’m down to the (not uncommon) viewpoint that ‘there are only 2 good SW films’ (you can guess which ones) and, to be honest, I may be on the verge of joining our friend/admin Anchorhead in whittling it down to Star Wars '77 alone.

I really liked Andor, but there was a part of me that was genuinely disturbed. Is this even Star Wars anymore? It’s hard to reconcile the swashbuckling ‘good guys vs bad guys’ vibe of the original movie (charred skeletons and severed limbs notwithstanding) with the bleak real-world melancholy of Andor.

Back in '79, when I was 10 and there was just ‘Star Wars’, my opinionated wannabe new-age father sat me down to lecture me about how I’d never considered that dying Stormtroopers “might have had families”. Even back then I understood that Star Wars was not intended to reflect real-life in that way, even if it did have something of a moral core. So I dismissed Dad’s bluster as just another one of his many lectures.

Andor was literally my Dad’s lecture come to life! Again, I loved it, but was it Star Wars? Ironically I’ve always been a ‘go darker/heavier’ type fan, but recent Star Wars content has caused me to reevaluate that position and wonder if the Flash Gordon/space western/swashbuckling adventure vibe of the original film is where it’s at.