It ties in but isn't really part of the main storyline except incidentally. You could say the same thing about Rogue One though the tie-in is even stronger in that case. The Mandalorian is pretty separate other than baby yoda.
A storyline which I'd argue was strongest in A New Hope & the initial trilogy & was weakened by the increased focus on individual storylines in the anakin & rey trilogies.
I honestly hope Disney will eventually remake them from scratch, with the excuse that FX have progressed dramatically since then. They could even reuse McEwan, considering he's supposed to be an older character already.
Whereas Senator Mothma's story arc had me engrossed from beginning to end. From the complexities of a Senator's social life, to her financial difficulties, to the medieval like politics of marrying off her daughter for the sake of a political and financial alliance, to her risking more and more, to her brave and powerful speech condemning the empire.
There is nothing in the prequels that hits nearly as hard. Because it's all dialog the audience isn't paying attention to because the Jedi stuff is more engaging, and because the political stakes never seem that great.
you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to
significantly expand his space opera by adding
in galactical politics
While "evil guy corrupting a democracy" is certainly a noble and relevant thing to explore, the prequels don't explore that in any useful or fun or insightful way. It's literally just an excuse for pew pew pew lasers and spaceships and laser swords.
(Remarkably, they also make the democracy, and the Jedi who defend it, seem almost universally super boring and dumb and uncool. Making Jedi uncool is some kind of special achievement...)
Even as a real-world allegory, it sucks.
The bad guys in real life aren't even remotely like the Sith, who are physically twisted freaks that are explicitly like "yep! we're evil!"
Real-life bad guys are often good looking and most of them think they're actually doing the right thing.
How did the Rebellion start? How was it organized? What led to building the Death Star? How did they get the plans to give to Leia to give to Luke?
The only part of the prequel trilogy relevant to the story in A New Hope is the final battle between Anakin and Obi Wan.
What's cool about the Force isn't the mechanics of how it works. What's cool about the Force is that it's a mystical thing that's everywhere, binding all living things together.
And we honestly don't need to know how the Rebellion started. It doesn't matter! They are the good guys, and they are messy but kind and loving and cool and they are rebelling against the cold and mean (but also sometimes cool) bad guys. In fact, the more dumb shit I know about them the less I can project myself onto them and see myself in their eyes. Because I have rebelled against mean authoritarian shit before, or at least dreamed of it, but I have never been involved with trade disputes or galactic senates or weird old religions.
This is true IMO 99.99% of the time.
Shockingly to me, Rogue One and Andor are so well done that they are exceptions to the rule.
Giving that concept a thematic heft well beyond its Flash-Gordon-supervillain origins appeared “fully armed and operational” in the story, but in the end it barely rises to subtext.
It's actually better for the Death Star to be unseen, so that its full horror can only be imagined - and hence, becoming greater - in our minds.
But real-world warfare history is full of these expensive disasters that, in hindsight, were spectacularly dumb ideas.
I don't think the Death Star was meant to be practical. More of a terror weapon or trump card, akin in some ways to nuclear weapons whose true value transcends their practical value. The destruction of Alderaan felt like an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But they still got built, for good political, and psychological reasons that have nothing to do with cost effectiveness.
They aren't ridiculous in the real world. They are in some theoretical worlds with alternate assumptions about what wars actually happen, but...
> They are utterly useless against well armed opponents.
They are quite useful, though, against the opponents that the US has actually fought against since WWII, though, which are mostly not with opponents that would be “well-armed” in the sense needed to make your claim true, are often also outside of the effective force projection radius of such opponents, and often would be inconvenient for US force projection without having convenient sea-mobile airbases with a air wing the same rough size as the median national air force.
In WWII they were absolutely invaluable against a peer enemy in the Pacific theater. They were the single most important bits of military hardware in that war.
They grew more vulnerable over time, first to peer enemies and eventually to rebels funded by sorta-peer enemies like Iran. In 2025, I don't think anybody doubts that a sustained saturation attack would fail to sink or at least prevent a carrier from functioning.
(Though it's also worth noting that the Houthis haven't been able to hit one yet, even with Iranian backing)
Still, a carrier group allows the US to project a tremendous amount of force anywhere in the world, and if a nation state hits one they're going to face an absolutely tremendous amount of military wrath from the US, which kind of gives them a strength beyond their literal combat capability.
There’s a version of Andor that does a bit more than hint that the Death Star is the ultimate (and ultimately doomed) metaphorical reply to Nemik’s manifesto.
In the final analysis, the Death Star is not about power. It’s not about control. It’s a choice, meant to be the last choice for the Rebellion: Submit, or lose everything you love, everything you were, are, will be, in an instant.
But, in the end, it’s this totalizing impulse that is the Empire’s critical weakness. There are always cracks in the edifice of tyranny. Other choices.
The first Star Wars movie is basically the story of the final part of the information's journey. It only gained depth with Andor and Rogue One.