Andor (Season 2)

Essential, and it finishes what the first season started. Watch season one first and Rogue One immediately after: this ends at the exact point that film begins, and the three together form one continuous story of about thirty hours.

The structure is unusual and works. Twelve episodes covering four years, in four blocks of three, with a year's jump between each block, so the series shows you a situation and then shows you what it has become twelve months later without explaining the gap. It is a way of dramatising how a resistance hardens, and it means the show can cover the entire run-up to open war without a single episode of exposition.

The Ghorman material in the middle is the best sustained thing the franchise has done. An Imperial plan to extract a resource from an inhabited planet requires the population to be discredited first, so the series shows the propaganda operation, the manufactured provocation and the massacre in sequence, from the inside of the office that designed it. It is a procedural about how atrocity gets authorised, and it is in a Star Wars programme.

Everything the first season set up is paid: Luthen's cost, Mon Mothma's position, and what the Rebellion had to become to exist at all. Tony Gilroy has said plainly that this is the end of the story, and it is.