The one thing everyone agrees on so far about Andor is the Disney+ series ventures far from expectations. Whether that’s satisfying or not depends, as a wise old Jedi once said, on “a certain point of view.” The prequel series reveals how Diego Luna’s Rogue One character, Cassian Andor, became a fearsome Rebel spy. Though The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi emphasized familiar galactic figures, textures, and tone, Andor pushes in the opposite direction. It’s a Star Wars story that doesn’t feel especially Star Wars-y. 

But that was on purpose.

Showrunner Tony Gilroy, a key creative force in the Bourne theatrical franchise and an Oscar nominee for both writing and directing the 2007 drama Michael Clayton, deliberately crafted Andor for people who were not lifelong Star Wars obsessives. Andor is set several years before Luke Skywalker boards an X-wing fighter and blows up the first Death Star, but the series doesn’t insist you know that or anything else about what came before or after. In fact, the less aware viewers are, the more surprised they might be.

“In the galaxy, there’s billions and billions of beings,” Gilroy tells Vanity Fair. “There’s electricians and carpet cleaners. All these people are there. They don’t all know about the Force, they don’t know about Jedi, they don’t know about the royal family. And the revolution is affecting them the same way. My approach is, What about them? What about what’s happening in the kitchen? I guess I’m always looking around the corner, ‘What are these other people doing?’”

This is actually a mental exercise Star Wars watchers have been playing for years. Remember Kevin Smith’s Clerks, when the main characters pass time by musing about all the innocent construction workers (“plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers…”) who were undoubtedly killed when the second Death Star was obliterated in Return of the Jedi? Gilroy and Andor lean into that notion, but not for laughs.

The characters in Andor are scrapyard mechanics like Adria Arjona’s Bix Caleen, one of Andor’s closest friends, or Imperial police officers like Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn, who’s trying to solve a pair of street killings. In the higher echelons of power, the galactic Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) isn’t yet orchestrating vast space battles, but rather she’s trying to covertly funnel funding and resources to undercover freedom fighters. Although Star Wars has traditionally inhabited the fantasy genre, imbued with the magic and mysticism of folk tales and mythology, Andor is more like a gritty sci-fi version of The Wire, exploring the flow of power through the various strata of a society under duress. That society just so happens to be in space. 

“I like to build out small. I like to start with small things in big environments, and then just molecularly follow them out,” says Gilroy, who first joined the Star Wars universe doing rewrites and reshoots for Rogue One. “You set these characters up, and you believe in them, and you really get down in it with them and what they need and what they’re afraid of.” He says Andor depicts how resistance is born. “The pressures on people and the events that are happening are like being in France during World War II. What do you do? Who do you betray? What do you say? How do you act? What should we do? Should we pay no attention? Should we join the rebellion? I mean, that’s fascinating. So that’s my approach.”

Most of the reaction to the new show has been positive, but some aggrieved Star Wars followers have grumbled that—in its first few episodes, at least—Andor doesn’t revel as much in references or connections to previous stories as other entries do. It does fill in some significant blanks about Luna’s character from Rogue One—just as the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series did with Ewan McGregor’s exiled Jedi—but Andor doesn’t populate its world with as many instantly recognizable characters from other films. Rogue One mainstays like O’Reilly’s Mothma and Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera don’t turn up until later chapters, and even Andor’s blunt droid companion from the movie, Alan Tudyk’s K-2SO, isn’t expected until season two. Easter egg hunters will not fill their baskets easily.

Luna, who is an executive producer of Andor in addition to being the star, is glad this series feels so distinct from the others. “I think we succeed in that, definitely, which makes me very proud because we were meant to be different,” he says. Luna says Andor is designed to amplify the harder tone of Rogue One, which was the first Star Wars film that wasn’t focused on the Skywalker family. “It was a stand-alone, the first one,” he says. “It was a little darker, it was more of a war story. It was its own. And when we were asked to do this series, it was the same task.”

For viewers burned out on fan service, shout-outs, and setups for other shows and movies, this may be a relief, and for non-fans, it could be a much-needed entry point to a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars is about as big as global entertainment franchises get, and part of Lucasfilm’s ongoing strategy for keeping it that way is to make it more inviting. The more self-referential it becomes, the more closed off it becomes. TV shows on Disney+ allow Star Wars storytellers to experiment with storylines and highlight new characters.

“The hardest thing about the movies right now is trying to appeal to it all,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair for our June cover story “The Rebellion Will Be Televised.” “The greatest thing about television is that we can be a little more niche, and we can find stories that we know might appeal to a younger audience. We can find stories like Andor. We know that it’s going to appeal to a slightly older audience, knowing that Obi-Wan is the sweet spot of the family audience, like The Mandalorian.”

Although the classic Star Wars story was refreshingly simple in its good-versus-evil story, Andor explores the murkier moral questions of how life would actually proceed under such circumstances. Star Wars depicted the Naive Hero, the Feisty Princess, the Doubtful Cynic, the Wise Old Man, but Andor strives to be more idiosyncratic than archetypal. Its main villain, Karn, is defying his superiors to solve a double homicide; its other high-ranking Imperial security officer, Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), is tracking signs of what she fears will become a deadly insurgency. In any other TV show, these might be the good guys. But here, their misguided diligence is in service of brutality and oppression.

Luna credits Gilroy with making viewers question their own impulses and allegiances. “He never writes in terms of right and wrong or black and white. He lives in the gray areas and he is always about the contradictions and complexity,” the actor says. “These characters commit mistakes, and they react to them, and they try to become better people, but sometimes they fail—and sometimes they don’t! This series is about the people on both sides, and their struggles, and their everyday life. I think it is an ambitious idea, but that’s what we had in mind.”

Work is already underway on a second season of Andor, and even though the storylines will begin to converge, and the characters of the show may become more aware of the galaxy around them, Gilroy still isn’t planning to dive deeply into the world of the Jedi and the Force. “It’s not something that we will completely ignore, but it’s been done a lot. It seems like the story of the Force has been pretty well chewed up and consumed at this point,” he says. “It didn’t seem like fresh territory.”

Will there one day be lightsabers in Andor? Never say never. “Who made the lightsaber?” Gilmore says. “I’m interested in the people that are, like, the lightsaber repair man.”