Andor. May the Force NOT be with it. You've heard it's the best Star Wars since the first two movies, and I would say it is. Why it is, is interesting, and it could have been so much more. It's final epsidoe was also disappointingly mediocre in comparison.

Part of why it's good is that the Force is almost entirely absent. Star Wars is not so much SF as "Swords and Sorcery" mixed with Space Opera. Andor is not, in fact it's more Spy Thriller, James Bond without the sex. But it also has much better writing, acting, pacing and drama that modern Star Wars. Modern Star Wars is a battle of hereditary wizards and magic. Andor has almost none (and should have removed its one use of the Force.) Of course set setting is the Empire, ruled by an offscreen wizard, but we see the oppressive regime story, not the wizard story. And we see that Andor and others are as pivotal to defeating the Empire as Luke Skywalker the hereditary wizard.

Alas, the ending. Contrived only to make it appear to flow into Rogue One. (What a rarity Andor is. All prequels suck, but this prequel to a prequel is superb.) And while Star Wars is known for its over-the-top evil; I still recall the shock of Tarkin destroying Alderan just as a demonstration, Andor gets much deeper in it, though I would have loved to have seen an effort to explain more why ordinary people can become great evil. We see some of that with Syril, but the rest are just plain evil, so evil that it bothers you to see them as semi-sympathetic POV characters. At the same time the Imperial Gestapo (ISB) are so tiny, not the SS of a thousand planet empire. And the rebellion much tinier. Palpatine is right to call it pitiful, it makes Tarkin's demonstration on Alderan even more extreme. Indeed, we see that the visible parts of the rebellion were created by the Empire to justify destroying another planet.

I do wish they had just skipped that ending. Spy thrillers still yearn for the days that spies had to physically smuggle microfilm, a story obsoleted by the move to societies with computer networks. Yet they repeat that, and mainly to lead into a movie that, made when they were 9 years less experienced, isn't as good, and you would never watch in story-time order. (Plus, somehow you can just fly a warplane down into the capital and nobody reacts.) They should have just said the movie happens later.

But let's have more Star Wars without the Force. Let's truly examine how an evil empire works without an evil wizard to keep it together. More like Andor. May the Force not be with you.