I like Andor. It’s one of the best political sci-fi TV series since Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, and even sometimes feels like a version of Star Wars fused with Blade Runner and John le Carré spy novels. I don’t even mind the recasting of Bail Organa, and I can live without an onscreen appearance of Emperor Palpatine, even though the show does sure talk about him a lot.
However, since it's now common knowledge that Darth Vader will not appear on the show, I think it's okay for fans to have an opinion about that. It’s not so much a disappointment that we’re not going to get a glimpse of Vader through a gritty Andor lens, it’s that the reason showrunner Tony Gilroy offered — to borrow a phrase — was vague and unconvincing.
When asked by Rolling Stone why Vader doesn’t appear in Andor Season 2, and if Gilroy ever thought of bringing in the baddest guy in the entire Empire into the show, the Andor showrunner and Rogue One collaborator said: “That was never on my agenda. Writing for Darth Vader is really limiting. I’ve done it. He doesn’t have a lot to say.”
Gilroy is, of course, referring to his work on Rogue One, for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz. In that film, Darth Vader appears in two scenes: one in which he confronts Orson Krennic about the Death Star, and another scene in which he goes on a lightsaber-heavy murder spree. Gilroy is right, in these scenes, Vader does not speak much. And yet, is Darth Vader a “really limiting” character?
Obviously, every Star Wars fan who has ever lived is some kind of Monday morning quarterback. We all think we could have handled the tonal shifts of The Phantom Menace much better than George Lucas back in 1999. Many of us were quick to point out the shortcuts J.J. Abrams made with the plotting of The Force Awakens, and perhaps the less said about Mandalorian Season 3, the better.
Clearly, Gilroy is, if not a visionary, a very competent and unique creative force. Andor is correctly praised for delivering a tone and aesthetic that is unparalleled in any other Star Wars project. But are we all going to just nod our heads and agree that Darth Vader is somehow too “limiting” for Andor? Say what you will about 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series, but the portrayal of Vader in that show wasn’t dull, nor did it approach Vader’s menace with the slightly cartoonish take Rogue One employed. I said what I said: For all its flaws, Obi-Wan Kenobi did take an Andor-esque approach to Darth Vader insofar as the complexity of Anakin Skywalker was dealt with in ways both new and nuanced. These touches are largely absent in Rogue One.
Now, in fairness, in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, Darth Vader was a main character. In Rogue One, or hypothetically, Andor, he’s not. And yet, leaving Vader out of Andor because of the perception and implication that the character is somewhat flat at this point in the chronology feels misguided. Krennic is also a supporting character in Andor Season 2, as is Bail Organa. But from a plotting perspective, both of these legacy-ish characters were deemed important enough to include in Andor Season 2, and in the case of Bail, so essential that recasting became necessary. So you can tell me Darth Vader isn’t a main character in the Andor story, but even if he’s not present on screen, like the Emperor, he is impacting the story. To put it another way, whenever the Emperor is mentioned in Andor, we think of Darth Vader, and that’s because Darth Vader was a crucial part of the Emperor’s rise to power. How is that not relevant to the story of Andor?
This isn’t to say Vader should have been shoehorned into Andor with a bunch of gratuitous action scenes meant to ape the baddassery of Rogue One or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Instead, it makes perfect sense from a storytelling point of view to have Vader around for some of these big Imperial schemes, even if he’s just present as a hologram. Rogue One established that Vader had been aware of Krennic before that moment, which makes Vader’s absence in Andor a bit of a missed opportunity to establish that rivalry at an earlier point.
Plus, imagining what folks like Dedra or Syril think of Darth Vader would have been fascinating through the Andor lens. Would Dedra make excuses for the pure terror of Vader? Would Syril be a Vader fanboy? Princess Leia says Tarkin is “holding Vader’s leash” in A New Hope. But why is that? Andor could give us a perfect context to unpack some of Vader’s actual role in the way the Imperial machine operates.
All of this is to say, writing Vader in a vacuum is hard, of course. But seeing how the Andor characters — especially those in the Empire — respond to Vader would have been utterly fascinating. When it comes to what makes this character so immortal and interesting, it’s not just about who Vader character is, but rather, what he represents to other people.
