PARIS: If Andor which returns from Tuesday for its second and final season has been received as one of the very best Star Wars TV series, that is largely thanks to the grittier, more adult approachtakenbyitscreator Tony Gilroy.

That standpoint far, far away from the familypleasing tone often encountered in the Star Wars universe run by the Disney empire should be of no surprise to those who watched the 2002 action thriller The Bourne Identity, written by Gilroy.

Its genesis was already evident in the 2016 Star Wars movie Rogue One, which Gilroy co-wrote and which serves as the climax to Andor, which recounts the rebellion leading up to that film`s events.

`Everything is emotionally charged` because `we`re getting close to `Rogue One`,` Diego Luna, the actor who plays the protagonist CassianAndor, said. For Disney, the success of Andor stands out as a new hope for a franchise that has become hit-or-miss with audiences in recent years.

That is why it has banked heavily on the 12-episode story, which cost a staggering $645 million to make, according to Forbes magazine.

Where Rogue One was about a rebel suicide mission to steal the plans for the Death Star, with `characters that sacrifice everything for a cause`, Andor is about how one of those characters `gets there`, Luna said.

Unlike in a typical hero`s journey, the series explores the motives and dark sides of both camps: the rebels and the Empire.

It spends time with figures such as a rebel alliance operative played by Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard.

Gilroy, said during a Paris visit, said the original plan was for five sea-sons of Andor, but he came to realise `there`s no physical way to do it` given `the volume of work`required.

The result was two seasons, but with episodes that were `more intense, more complex in every possible way`, Luna said.

With season one finishing in late 2022 with a stunning 96-percent rating on the critic aggrega-tion site Rotten Tomatoes, season two has star billing on the Disney+ streaming platform.

That season hits the small screen from Tuesday in the United States,orfromWednesday in France, Germany, Italy and other territories.

Revolutionary reading Andor is not the only hit Star Wars televisionseries. The Mandalorian, which preceded it, excited audiences for the first two seasons before interest waned in its third. That story will move to the cinemas, with a film scheduled for release next year.

But Andor has impressed fans and critics with its darker vibe, greater political themes and more realistic tone.

Gilroy said his approach to the series was informed by a decades-long reading obsession about uprisings `all this crazy stuff Pye learnt about the Russian Revolution and...

the French Revolution, and Thomas Paine and Oliver Cromwell and the Haitian Revolution and the Roman Revolution and Zapata.` `Imean,it`s all in there,` he said.

The second season focuses onthe use ofpropaganda, looking at the tragic destiny of a planet called Ghorman, for which Gilroy and his team embarked on seriousworld-building, imagining its economy, language, culture and dress.

Part of the inspiration came from a French TV series about a village living under German occupation in World War II, A French Village.

`I loved that show... I had some of those actors in my head` while writing about Ghorman`s inhabitants, he said. Even if some people might see some echoes of today`s Earth in aspects of Andor, Gilroy said a writer`s horizon, stretching years ahead, did not allow him to anticipate current events.

But, he said, `the sad truth is that history is...

rinse and repeat,` adding: `We so commonly feel, narcissistically, that we live in unique times.

Technology might change, the rhetoric might alter, `but the dynamic of oppression and resistance are a Catherine wheel. It just keeps going. I think it`s timeless, sadly.`-AFP