Andor’s Syril Karn is a Star Wars villain finally worth fighting

In the lead-up Andor, the team behind the new Disney Plus series has hit one point particularly hard: This isn’t more of the Star Wars space opera. The show focuses on the details of an alien galaxy.

A world that has been ravaged and destroyed by the Force, and other large and small forces. AndorThis gives you a better understanding of the struggles between light and darkness. “I think Rogue OneA film is an account of an event. You don’t get to know those characters, you don’t get to understand exactly where they come from, what needed to happen [to get them there],” Diego Luna said in a press conference about returning to his character of Cassian Andor. “For me, it’s quite relevant today to tell the story of what needs to happen for a revolutionary to emerge.”

It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to guess what feels so prescient about that storyline now, in a time when there’s a lot of change that needs to happen for the world to feel remotely just. What works the best? AndorThe first four episodes were screened for critics and offer a grounded view of how the Dark Side became a powerful force. And no one personifies that better in these early episodes than Kyle Soller’s bad guy, Syril Karn.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Andor.]

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Syril is a notorious bootlicker. His presentation is a proud moment for him. Syril modified his uniform so that he stood out among the rest. He’s an ass. However, the first episode of Andor, it’s clear Syril believes in the work. He’s not trying to brown-nose; he simply exists as eager to please and believes in the authority figure he serves.

Syril is a standout in a Star Wars moment where Star Wars’ bad guys are struggling to succeed. Boba Fett’s BookThe story was somewhat muddled, with neither an interesting antagonist nor a complicated antihero for our beleaguered protagonist to face off against. Mandalorian had a good enough twist on Star Wars’ good/evil dichotomy, but the villain wasn’t what came to define the show (even when played by one Giancarlo Esposito). Obi Wan KenobiWith its Empire villains, it ran out of runway. And Skywalkers are on the Rise’s take is… better left unspoken.

Syril is a better version than the most prominent failed of recent times. Even on first impression, he is fully baked: a literal company man who fancies himself a hero — and, without making him Right™, certainly is operating from a place that makes each of his actions feel logical and understandable. Though he’s not dumb, one gets the sense that he’s so insulated in his position that even explaining the flaws of the system wouldn’t get through to him.

Subsequently, Soller’s buttoned-up performance shows how personal this is for him, even as he feigns corporate duty. It’s not just that he’s doing his job; he identifies with the men killed by Cassian. “Two men are dead, sir. Employers,” Syril underlines in the first episode. “If that’s not worth staying up for, then I’m not worthy of the uniform.” As he’s dismissed it’s clear his disappointment isn’t just about being dressed down and letting these men’s lives be a “sad but inspiring” and “mundane” misadventure, it’s the implication that people in positions like his can be lost so easily to the corporate world at large. To make the power elite conform to him rather than vice versa, he only needs to do light tailoring.

In an attempt to improve himself, he did this. KnownHe makes terrible mistakes, and more company employees are killed. He’s willing to accept that the people of Cassian’s hometown are all “bluff and bluster,” as his corporate goon tells him, because he misses how it’s solidarity in action. Even we as the audience don’t see any planning or rigging; we see him and his enforcers recklessly run in with a half-baked attack. The battle scene is thrilling and there’s some amazing imagery of Cassian running across fields before Syril returns to us, distraught and possibly Empire-pilled.

While Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Reva (Moses Ingram) are deeply entrenched in the highest orders of the Empire’s central death cult, Syril exists light years away from that moral universe. He has more in common with Cassian, though he’d never admit it. It’s what makes him such a compelling character to follow alongside Cassian, and through these early days of both the Rebellion and Andor: Like presumably thousands of people across the universe, he has no idea what he’s part of. He is not menacing because he’s some fallen Templar. Syril is dangerous because he’s imitating monstrousness without fully understanding it. Syril is simply an authority figure hated by people from his perspective on the ground. But as we know all too well in our galaxy a long, long time later, that’s the sort of banal evil that can be the most threatening of all.

Three episodes from the first season of AndorDisney Plus now streams these episodes. Every Wednesday, new episodes are added to Disney Plus.