What happens if a man gets detained on a trumped-up charge by an increasingly authoritarian government and shipped off to a prison so remote it receives virtually no oversight — and leaves anyone incarcerated there with no legal recourse?

That’s the kind of agonizing and germane question “Andor” took up when its brilliant and surprising first season aired three long years ago.

A prequel to the 2016 film “Rogue One” (which “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy also co-wrote), “Andor” tracks the adventures — and radicalization — of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), one of the doomed rebels on that mission to steal the plans for the Death Star. Perhaps that makes the show sound like a hero’s journey, which, in some respects, it technically is. But it doesn’t feel like one because the series doubles as a far-reaching thesis on the moral degradation fascism and resisting fascism requires.

The second season, which leads directly to the events chronicled in “Rogue One,” leans hard into the kind of muddy ethical framework that fans of Cold War-era spy thrillers may find familiar. The historical touchpoints, however, remain distinctly rooted in World War II: There are nods to the Reichstag fire, the Wannsee Conference and the French Resistance.

Both seasons consist of four extended, three-episode arcs. The show starts five years before the Battle of Yavin featured in 1977’s “A New Hope,” with Cassian, who at that point was little more than a gifted thief, searching for his long-lost sister. The first season charts his recruitment to the rebel cause by Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), a morally murky, brutally effective revolutionary leader whose cover is his work as an effete antiquities dealer to the super-rich. Cassian refuses. His resistance to the resistance, so to speak, is as realistically rendered as his political apathy is understandable; he makes some decent points. But a series of developments, including the mission in Aldhani (where he met Nemik, the fervent young anti-Imperial idealist played by Alex Lawther), his imprisonment at the Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex and the rebellion sparked by his adoptive mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw) make neutrality untenable. The season ends with Cassian surrendering to Luthen: “Kill me or take me in,” he says.

Luthen takes him in, and the second season begins with Cassian, now a seasoned operative, gently talking recruits through their jitters and helming a mission that goes … spectacularly badly. “Andor” is sporadically very funny (see Kyle Soller and Kathryn Hunter’s scenes together as Syril and Eedy Karn), and Cassian’s very first three-episode arc as a full-fledged rebel is, structurally, a dark joke. It’s clear that accepting Luthen’s offer might have been a regrettable mistake — not least because of how much Bix (Adria Arjona) is still suffering. She, Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) and Wilmon (Muhannad Ben Amor) start the season sheltering on an agricultural planet, where they’re eking out a living as undocumented workers.

That botched opening operation also establishes, with admirable economy, that the rebels are not only fallible but terribly fractured; various factions have an extremely hard time communicating. Technology is one obstacle. Temperament is another. Nemik, the idealist, wrote in the manifesto he gave Cassian that freedom “is a pure idea” that “occurs spontaneously and without instruction.” “There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause,” he wrote. The second season confirms that this desirable spontaneity has a flip side: Revolutionaries new to the fight are frightened and inexperienced and impulsive.

Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) starts the season dealing with her own devil’s bargain. Having agreed to “introduce” her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) to Davo Sculdun’s (Richard Dillane) son in exchange for funds to replace the money she has been funneling to the Rebellion, she spends the first three episodes agonizing through her daughter’s Chandrilan wedding ceremony. And trying to treat a fairly clear blackmail attempt as a good-faith negotiation. This becomes one of several object lessons in how the show’s more sincere, less “revolutionary” characters choose to privilege “integrity” (bordering on blindness) over pragmatism.

The Empire, in the meantime, is plotting. Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is recruited to spearhead an ecocide on Ghorman, a French-coded planet that happens to be rich in a mineral the Empire requires for reasons I won’t spoil.

There’s a year-long time jump between each of the four triads. The first is the weakest of the four; Cassian’s storyline, while thematically resonant, is less than compelling. But Gough — who hasn’t historically gotten to express much range — gets some juicy moments. The good is very good: Ghorman is as spectacular and specific a world as Star Wars has yet produced. So is Yavin. The show’s tendency to juxtapose highbrow and lowbrow rebels will make you hate the former, a little. Elizabeth Dulau and Soller outdo themselves. Luna deserves an Emmy for his performance as Cassian undercover in Ghorman. And the last triad of episodes is as close to perfect as TV (or film) gets.

One of many factors that set “Andor” apart from the majority of Star Wars properties was how firmly it kept its focus on regular folks in a universe whose narratives have historically drifted toward the royals (here defined as Jedi and Sith, as well as politicians, etc.). For these unwilling foot soldiers, the Force isn’t really a factor. Rebels can’t afford uncut heroism; no extended spiritual exercise will reconcile the skill required to win with moral purity. “Andor” clear-sightedly acknowledges Yoda’s admonition, in “The Phantom Menace,” that “fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” It also argues, with pragmatism, eloquence and despair — through Cassian Andor’s 24-episode arc — that there’s no avoiding any of the above; the only way out is through.

The most memorable articulation of that position comes from Luthen in the first season. Asked by an exhausted agent who wishes to “retire” what he himself has sacrificed, Luthen — who will not let him go — quietly delivers one of the series’ most powerful speeches:

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.”

“Andor” is, in this sense, an epic about spiritual coarsening. That isn’t usually the way we (or the franchise) think about self-sacrifice. Nor does it comport with the way Star Wars has historically used fascism. Most of us in the fandom grew up practically swaddled in World War II propaganda that reduced a terrible war featuring many less-than-noble episodes to a useful but somewhat simplistic story about the noble Allies who defeated the evil Nazis because they were better people. The “good guys.” The subtext was: Virtue wins. That’s a tough theory of power to sustain while watching various characters in “Andor” figure out exactly how much moral injury they can tolerate before they break.