At the end of her memorable speech to the Senate in the ninth episode of Andor’s second season, Mon Mothma dares invoke the big bad behind the curtain. “And the monster screaming the loudest?” she says. “The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough … is Emperor Palpatine!” Moments later, the broadcast feed from Coruscant is cut.
Ironically, the screaming monster Mothma names is never heard directly on Andor. Neither is he seen. If the Emperor responds to Mothma’s accusation, Andor hasn’t shown it. The closest the series has come to putting Palpatine on mic is Orson Krennic’s “unlimited power” reference in the Season 2 premiere. And so, sometimes when I’m watching Andor, I remind myself: Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader are just out of frame, acting tyrannical, too.
Such reminders are rarely necessary when watching other Star Wars projects released during the Disney era. Typically, Palpatine in-Siths upon himself. Somehow, he returned in The Rise of Skywalker, decades after appearing to perish in Return of the Jedi. Ever since, the franchise has seemingly devoted itself to retroactively explaining Palpatine’s survival, in series ranging from The Bad Batch to The Mandalorian. The Acolyte provided a glimpse of Darth Plagueis, Palpatine’s master and meme muse. Palpy is even in Fortnite now—and not for the first time. He’s essentially Star Wars Poochie. We have had plenty of Palps.
Palpatine’s lapdog Darth Vader is no different. In addition to bringing his heavy breathing to series that center on characters who were close to Anakin Skywalker—Obi-Wan Kenobi, Rebels, and (sort of) Ahsoka—Vader makes cameos (most of them gratuitous) in the Jedi games, Outlaws, and Tales of the Empire. Usually, Vader is a presence I’ve not felt since … whenever the most recent Star Wars project came out.
Yet the thought of Palpy popping up in Andor is almost inconceivable—which is all the more remarkable considering how easy it would be for the series’ creators to have called on him and his Sith sidekick. In Andor, Palpatine wouldn’t have to return; at this point in the timeline, he hasn’t gone anywhere, so both chronologically and logically, it would be perfectly defensible to slip him into the story. Even logistically, it’s a cinch; he’s right next door. The Imperial Palace is in the same neighborhood as Imperial Security Bureau HQ, and the Emperor has office space not far from the Senate chamber where representatives from hundreds of worlds gather to ignore Mon Mothma. Hell, he is the Senate.
Andor revolves around the construction of Palpatine’s superweapon and the rebellion against his rule, so it actually takes some nifty (and sometimes sweaty) scripting to keep him off camera. ISB bigwigs frequently refer to Palpatine: Colonel Yularen, Major Partagaz, and Director Krennic are constantly bragging about their audiences with the Emperor. The series has featured the following lines:
“I spoke with Emperor Palpatine last night …”
“I have assured the Emperor …”
“I met with the Emperor yesterday …”
“Colonel Yularen and myself have a meeting scheduled with the Emperor …”
“The Emperor has taken a great interest in the situation. Director Krennic's still with him now …”
You’d think an emperor/Sith lord could clear his schedule at will, but poor Palpy seems to be booked solid with weekly catch-ups. The Emperor was first mentioned in the fourth episode of the series and first named in the seventh. By my count, “Emperor” has been said on the series 27 times; “Palpatine” has been said six times. The rate of references to Palpy has increased over the course of the series: “Emperor” was said 10 times in 12 episodes in Season 1, but in Season 2, the tally through nine episodes is up to 17. At this point, Palpatine’s absence has become conspicuous. He’s every ISB officer’s monarch in Canada. “The Emperor has no screen time” is the new “the Emperor has no clothes.”
In a sense, it’s unsurprising that Palpy is so camera shy. From the start, series creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy mounted a crusade against fan service: When a legacy character appears in Andor, GIlroy said in 2022, “It’s never cynical. It’s always meant to be there. It’s always protein; it’s never icing.” To IGN, he emphasized, “When we bring them, we bring them because we need them and because there’s really some protein there, there’s something for them to really do.” More recently, after the recasting of Bail Organa (from Jimmy Smits to Benjamin Bratt), Gilroy noted the practical obstacles: “Bringing back legacy characters is really complicated. It’s very expensive. It’s very, who's working when.”
Granted, Gilroy cowrote and helped edit Rogue One, which was lousy with original trilogy characters, from Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan to the terribly digitized Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin to Vader himself. But Gilroy didn’t have sole creative control of that film, and he’d had his fill of Vader by the time he took on Andor. A Vader cameo “was never on my agenda,” he told Rolling Stone last month. “Writing for Darth Vader is really limiting. I’ve done it. He doesn’t have a lot to say.” As for the Emperor, Palpy was too much protein: “He was too big a piece of meat for me to introduce,” Gilroy said to Rolling Stone, adding, “I thought about it at one point, but it was too heavy a lift.”
There are loads of Star Wars signifiers in Andor as it is. “I’ve been hearing about Ghorman my whole life,” Cassian says in Season 2, Episode 5, and so have many hardcore Star Wars fans; when Partagaz later says, “Our struggles with Ghorman are well documented,” he could have been alluding to the long legacy of the planet in off-screen Star Wars stories. If anything, Andor might be more littered with nods to Star Wars deep cuts than most other Disney+ shows because, as Gilroy has made clear, he relies on Lucasfilm lore experts for guidance.
But Andor doesn’t do Easter eggs for their own sake: Its connections to the canon are usually subtle and almost always essential or additive. And the characters who cross over from elsewhere in Star Wars are virtually all from Rogue One—which did not feature a tête-à-tête with Palpatine, even though Krennic requested one.
So can we picture a Palpatine appearance in Andor? Sure we can, because almost any other Star Wars series with this setting and subject matter would go back to that well. When I’m watching Andor, though, just thinking about Palpy lurking somewhere off-screen—hooded, cloaked, cackling—makes my immersion in Gilroy’s world waver.
For one thing, Palpatine’s presence, in the dark-side-damaged flesh, seems incompatible with the grounded, gritty vibe Gilroy is going for. I could imagine the more measured Emperor from the original Empire Strikes Back, voiced by Clive Revill (RIP), suiting the aesthetic of Andor. But Ian McDiarmid’s heightened, ultra-sinister, yet slightly campy portrayal of the character has sunk so deep into Star Wars fans’ minds that a less over-the-top-evil Emperor wouldn’t work anymore. And that character could clash with Andor’s tone. Just imagine him crashing the conference chamber at the ISB and auditing a presentation.
It's not that Andor’s Empire isn’t sinister; on the contrary, it’s even more unsettling than the original trilogy’s, precisely because of the absence of supernatural Sith lords (and the magic Jedi who can neutralize them). As Stephen King once said: “The truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.” The key to that quote is “inside us.” It’s far more disturbing—and more applicable to real life—to highlight how easy it is for regular people to follow fascist, genocidal orders (or issue them) than it is to pin the blame on a malevolent, manipulative creature of the dark side that doesn’t exist in our world. There’s a latent evil, or willingness to tolerate it, in many people who wouldn’t read as dangerous or scary on the surface—and that’s terrifying.
With Palpatine lurking in his throne room, his secret cloning facilities, or some other sanctuary, the Imperials we do meet in Andor—not middle management, exactly, but not quite the top brass—can convince themselves they’re not the baddies, an illusion that might be harder to maintain while in the presence of their nightmarishly corrupted and twisted bosses. “There’s no telling what the Emperor’s capable of,” Mothma says in Season 2, Episode 9. Maybe not, but we’ve seen enough to know what the Empire is capable of, with or without him.
If you’d never seen Star Wars before—and as far as Gilroy is concerned, that would be OK, because “This show should work on its own”—you could imagine that the Emperor is a fiction, just another of the ISB’s psyops. Some characters seem to think so. As Carro Rylanz says to Syril on Ghorman: “Many of us believe the Emperor has no idea what’s being done on his behalf. We think the ISB is running a shadow government.” Maybe Rylanz is just trying to get Syril on his side by suggesting that the ISB is power tripping, but he may well believe that the Emperor is just a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man whose advisers are protecting or even exploiting him.
And why not? After all, you’ve gotta figure Palpy doesn’t make many public appearances. Being on camera could be bad optics, considering his whole look after Revenge of the Sith. If Richard Nixon’s advisers were worried about how he’d look on TV compared to John F. Kennedy, imagine what the Emperor’s aides must say when Sheev feels like logging some face time with his subjects on the HoloNet. (My lord, perhaps we could put out a press release instead?)
Hiding the Emperor puts us in the place of the populace at large. It makes all the sense in the galaxy that most citizens (or, for that matter, targets) of the Empire wouldn’t know what Palpatine himself is and does, because few Imperial leaders know what he is and does. As Gilroy said to Rolling Stone, “One of the fascinating things that I realized when I started the show in the very beginning is how many billions of beings are in the galaxy. Nobody knows about the Jedi, nobody knows about the Sith. It’s just a tiny percentage of people that have any notion of it at all.”
For all of those reasons, it’s more effective storytelling to have Palpatine pulling the strings from behind the scenes and ensnaring his allies and enemies alike in a galaxy-spanning ghorlectipod web than it is to have him front and center, shooting lightning from his fingertips. As Gilroy said to Entertainment Weekly in 2022, “They’ve made all this IP about the royal family, in essence. It's been great. But there's a billion, billion, billion other beings in the galaxy. There’s plumbers and cosmeticians. Journalists! What are their lives like? The revolution is affecting them just as much as anybody else. Why not use the Star Wars canon as a host organism for absolutely realistic, passionate, dramatic storytelling?”
Thus, in contrast to The Rise of Skywalker and its Palpatine-centric origin story for Rey, Andor doesn’t talk about Sheev—or doesn’t, um, Force-feed him to us, anyway. Thank the maker, and cue the “Victory Celebration” song from the end of the Return of the Jedi special edition:
“I've learned from Palpatine,” Mothma says in Season 1. Maybe Gilroy has learned from Palpatine’s appearances elsewhere in Star Wars. Well, probably not, because he doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite for the franchise outside of his own work. (He hasn’t even rewatched Rogue One lately.) But he seems to have drawn the correct conclusion: When it comes to the Emperor and Andor, less is more, and none may be most.
In Episode 7 of Season 2, Partagaz tells Dedra, “A successful conclusion to this situation will reinforce the ISB’s position at the Emperor’s side.” Only now, at the end, do we understand: A successful conclusion to Andor will probably reinforce the series’ position at a place as far from Palpatine as possible.
