'Who are you?'

Syril Karn is one of the most incredible characters in television history, and almost nothing about him is likable or admirable. At the end of his character arc, however, he suddenly gave us one of television's most relatable moments, as his reality came crashing down around him.

[Minor spoilers for Andor will follow, but I'm going to do my best to not actual spoil any specifics of happenings in the second season. Well, except for one character exchange. You should be watching Andor anyway, though.]

A couple of years ago, no one would have expected that a Disney+ Star Wars television series would end up being a towering achievement of narrative and political allegory, but luckily for all of us, someone at some point said, "Hey, what if we give the Michael Clayton guy a Star Wars show and no perceptible restrictor plate?" After (nearly) two seasons of universal acclaim, Andor is pretty handily the best thing to ever come out of the Star Wars universe, barring (perhaps) the original conception of the idea.

There have been nearly fifty years of Star Wars universe building and ephemera at this point. There have been dozens of comic book series, hundreds of novels, thousands of toys, and half a dozen or so long-running and beloved animated series. It's literally a religion. And many sects of it could classify as a cult. The Disney+ shows have been a roller coaster, as the various series have been pretty great if fan-service-y, but the series starring or created by – (gasp!) – women have been torpedoed by the worst and most vocal Star Wars fans ... which is to say, most of the Star Wars fans you end up hearing about.

But Andor was different right from the jump. A prequel series to Rogue One, already one of the very best things about Star Wars, set out to tell the backstory of that movie's Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna. Andor begins in the grimy streets of an industrial planet, Morlana One. The unfairly-maligned Solo: A Star Wars Story also begins on a grimy planet with a street-level view of scoundrels, but opens with a breakneck action setpiece chase sequence, then into a big confrontation and from there we're on the run and then pulling heists in familiar locales with familiar characters. Andor is slow, and unglamorous, and unfurls the universe bit by bit, location by location, and – most revelatory of all – vocation by vocation.

While most of Star Wars' previous output deals with mystic knights and swordfights and ... uh ... tariffs, Andor is the first Star Wars property that portrays exactly what it would be like to live inside of Star Wars. And for the vast majority of the billions upon billions of sentient beings who exist within the parameters of the Empire and the Rebellion, there is nary an ancient mystic swordfight temple to be found.

So now let's talk about Syril Karn.