When Darth Vader first appeared in Star Wars, you heard him before you saw him. The pew-pew of laser guns gave way to a foreboding barrage of horns and then that hoarse, rhythmic breathing. In a story about good and evil, Darth Vader — his face covered by a Samurai-inspired mask of matte black, his body enrobed in a billowing cape of midnight fabric — was clearly the latter. He was pitiless, his Force power a means of domination and a tool of violence, until his final redemptive act of saving his son Luke in Return of the Jedi. Over the past 45 years of franchise content since A New Hope, Darth Vader has become a kind of narrative shortcut, a way to reassure viewers that the Star Wars they’re watching is the Star Wars they remember — new but fundamentally unchanged. The prequel films explored what made Anakin go to the dark side, and the sequel films turned him into an enduring symbol via his grandson Kylo Ren. Whenever a villain is needed, he’s there: in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the Clone Wars film and series, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he’s rumored to appear in the upcomingAhsoka. And one of the best things about Andor is that Darth Vader isn’t in it.

This is not a slight against James Earl Jones, Hayden Christensen, David Prowse, or the other actors who have embodied Emperor Palpatine’s right hand. But it is praise for the way Andor, while mostly turning away from the Skywalker saga, intermittently echoes some of its touchstones to build a sense of simultaneous familiarity and discovery. Instead of the man who was once Anakin, Andor gives us Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), Vader’s analog in styling (all those black capes and hoods), weaponry (his ship’s red lightsaber-esque laser beams), and complicated morality (that whole “responsible for people’s deaths” thing).

By taking the accoutrements of an Imperial agent, Sith Lord, and many-times-over murderer who fans forgave because of his one act of mercy toward their special boy and giving them to Luthen, a Rebel mastermind willing to burn allies and eager for the Empire to amp up its oppression in order to inspire more “pockets of fomenting,” Andor challenges this series’ longheld considerations of right and wrong. If killing many is acceptableif you also save one person, how does killing a few dozen to save hundreds more compare? What kind of humanistic calculus does that require? How much rebellion is enough? When are ruthless deeds required for the greater good?

Andor transformed the Star Wars hero’s journey, previously centered on Luke Skywalker and his relationship with the Force, into a radicalization narrative focused on thief, spy, and killer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and how the subjugation he experienced on planets like Ferrix, Aldhani, and Narkina 5 inspired him to join the Rebellion. And by crafting in Luthen a baddie who resembles Vader but uses the tools of the enemy to fight the Empire instead of serving it, Andor reconfigured not just the obstacles faced by heroes in a galaxy far, far away but what defines heroism in a world without the black-and-white morality and superpowers of the Jedi.

Rogue One, which Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy co-wrote, started this trend with a ragtag group of scientists, defectors, convicts, and mercenaries who came together to steal Death Star schematics. Their actions unfurl in an existing franchise framework: Darth Vader operates at Emperor Palpatine’s behest, the Death Star will be a world-destroyer, and the Force endures as a philosophy — nearly a religion — that provides guidance to believers. These are all broad-scale concepts with top-down effects (literally, in the Death Star’s case), and Rogue One argues that collaboration among disparate groups is one of the only ways to enact bottom-up change. Six years later and set five years in the past, with Skarsgård taking over for Mads Mikkelsen in the “decorated European character actor giving Star Wars unexpected gravitas” department, Andor pushes the “ordinary people acting extraordinarily” idea further through Luthen.

He’s not a royal, a politician, a general, or a Jedi; he seemingly doesn’t have a family, a romantic partner, or friends. He’s absolutely an accelerationist and arguably an extremist; he’s definitely a liar and possibly a manipulator. He demands loyalty, reminding his cohorts over and over of the vow they willingly took, but considers every aspect of another person’s private life as potential blackmail against them; he’s loath to share information about his plans but maneuvers people as he pleases. “Has anyone ever made a weapon that wasn’t used?” he asks Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), and Luthen’s ruthless wielding of that arsenal against Imperial authority makes him the hero that Andor needs. In a world where compromise is ineffective and complicity is widespread, he reconfigures the morality we expect and accept from Star Wars’ good-guy protagonists.

In Andor, Imperial fascism is a system that operates via sprawl; as young revolutionary and manifesto author Nemik (Alex Lawther) writes, “Tyranny requires constant effort.” And as Nemik also writes, “Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy,” and resistance requires more than one family or one kind of power. That ensemble includes Cassian, a thief and mercenary; Mon, a politician working within the system to funnel money to the Rebellion; mission-oriented Cinta (Varada Sethu), who has no problem murdering Imperial officers; extremist Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who toys with anarchy and insists upon ideological purity; and the sons and daughters of Ferrix, who smash bricks in the faces of their occupiers. These groups are dissimilar in nearly every way but their shared rejection of the Empire and their shared connection to Luthen.

Gilroy and his collaborators crafted a kaleidoscope of moral gray and put Luthen at its center: mentor and benefactor to some on his side, antagonist and rival to others. Luthen’s power is that he can move back and forth between those spaces, not just with various people in the rebel network but sometimes with the same people: with Cassian, whom he recruits for the Aldhani heist, gifts a rare and valuable Sky-Kyber crystal, and then marks for death so he can’t identify Luthen if caught; with Ferrix contact Bix (Adria Arjona), whom he cuts off contact with after the Imperial Security Bureau starts looking for Cassian; with Aldhani heist lead Vel (Faye Marsay), whose increasingly concerned messages he ignores; and with Mon, whose worries about the Empire’s tightening fist he dismisses. (“People will suffer. That’s the plan.”)

But Luthen is as pragmatic as he is mercurial, and Andor affirms his strategies as effective. The Aldhani heist gives the Empire another reason to tighten its grip and further empower the Imperial Security Bureau, but it also inspires and emboldens everyday people: the prisoners who break out of Narkina 5 by working together, Saw’s Partisans on Segra Milo, who go against their isolationism to agree to assist fellow militant Anto Kreegyr, and the citizens who rise up on Ferrix after listening to Maarva Andor’s (Fiona Shaw) instructions to wake up and fight. “I need all the heroes I can get,” Luthen tells Empire informer Lonni (Robert Emms) when refusing to let him leave their arrangement, and his methods create them.

There’s a purposeful malleability to Skarsgård’s performance given that he’s playing two men: the real Luthen Rael, who coolly assesses every relationship and situation based on whether it can provide resources to the Rebellion, and his front, Luthen of Coruscant, a rakish antiquities dealer to the wealthiest citizens of the Imperial capital. The former is rigid, brusque, and evasive; the latter loose-limbed, foppish, and artificially candid. Each character has a different musical cue written by series composer Nicholas Britell, with “Luthen Rael” heavy on percussion and thrumming with purpose and “Luthen of Coruscant” a fragile expression of strings evoking an exhaled breath. They dress differently, too, with regular Luthen in muted earth tones, grays, and blacks, and Coruscant Luthen in rich jewel tones of emerald, sapphire, and aubergine.

The moment when Skarsgård transforms from one Luthen to another in episode “Aldhani” is a phenomenal thing, and director Susanna White shows it to us in full: the head tilt upward, resolute, as Skarsgård puts on the robe; the slow grin that spreads over his face as the garment settles on him; his raised chin, as if his head is in the clouds; the wide shot that captures his cocked hip and curling right hand, deliberately careless; and how he abandons that persona to walk across the ship as himself, showing us how quickly he can turn Luthen of Coruscant on and off. This disguise is keeping Luthen alive, and Skarsgård gives his performance-within-a-performance tangible pathos.

All that subterfuge, though, takes its toll, and as Luthen becomes more calculated and cutthroat, Andor positions him as more Vader-like. His spaceship’s lasers, employed in “Daughter of Ferrix” to evade an Imperial patrol ship, evoke the Sith Lord’s blood-red space sword. He becomes more imperious, ordering Cassian’s assassination, disregarding Vel and Mon’s concerns, and justifying to Saw how sacrificing Kreegyr and his 30 men to the Imperial Security Bureau is a shrewd choice in the long run. And during Luthen’s confessional to Lonni in “One Way Out,” the series’ explicit and implicit comparisons between Luthen and Vader come to the forefront — from his shadowy silhouette and black cape flapping in the wind to his acknowledgment that the Empire has made him what he is — in a speech Skarsgård imbues with anguished self-reproach, bone-deep weariness, and resentful vulnerability.

Luthen is in full Vader mimicry in “Rix Road,” with a black hood pulled down low over his face, but the natural revolution he sees happening in Ferrix shakes him out of the inelasticity he’s used to protect himself and undermines his certainty that Cassian must die. Luthen never hears Nemik’s manifesto about how freedom “occurs spontaneously and without instruction,” but he experiences it, and the courage displayed by people on the ground and in the streets pushes his ideology forward. For all of the Luthen-Vader connections, there is no greater Force here, no deliberation between the light or the dark side with which Vader struggled. There are only the oppressed and the oppressors — and Luthen, who in seeing his overarching plans come to pass remembers that saving people was once his primary motivator.

While Luthen dropping his hit against Cassian does broadly resemble Vader’s choice to save Luke, the decision is distinctly different. There are no familial ties binding Luthen and Cassian together; instead, Luthen is going against his own self-preservation to make this choice, unintentionally fulfilling an irritated observation he made to Saw in the episode “Narkina 5”: “We’ll die with nothing if we don’t put aside our petty differences.” Endangering one’s own survival for freedom’s sake — for humanity overall, without religious or biological influence — is exactly what Andor is about. Skarsgård has little dialogue in the finale, but like that Luthen-transformation moment, this epiphany is all over his face as he listens to Cassian’s “Kill me or take me in” declaration and understands that he’s gained an ally instead of creating an enemy.

Many of Luthen’s conversations play out like negotiations, duels, or, as Luthen himself says to Cassian, games: escalations that dare the other party to stop wasting time and to meet Luthen at his level of commitment. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again. In most other Star Wars properties, these would be reasons to abhor Luthen and to find him unsuitable for the cause — think of the inflexibility of Yoda’s “Do or do not; there is no try” and what it implies about the intersection between moral purity and heroism. Andor, meanwhile, dictates the opposite in Nemik’s “Remember this: Try” and holds open the door to both the Cassians and the Luthens, the beaten and the damned, the people offered as sacrifice and the people directing the sacrifices. Who needs Darth Vader with a tableau as rich as that?

Luthen Rael Embodies Andor’s Gray Side