In the 12 years since Disney purchased Star Wars, we have gotten five feature films, seven animated television series and seven live-action television series. To describe the result as a mixed bag would be an understatement. The quality has ranged from good to terrible, with fan responses ranging from enthusiastic to despairing. Some series and movies have been critically and popularly panned while others have been praised. And, overall, there seems to be a “Star Wars fatigue” setting in among the general public, somewhat similar to the Marvel fatigue, with each successive venture drawing lower ratings or fewer ticket sales. It has gotten to the point where many think Disney should just pause the franchise for a decade, like a field left fallow to renew itself.
Rogue One was one of the successes of the Disney movies, making over a billion dollars in box office and drawing praise from critics and fans alike. It was different from the other Star Wars movies, being almost completely disconnected from the Skywalker Saga, having no Jedi, little of the Force and focusing more on the everyday struggle of the Rebellion. However, when it was announced that a prequel series to the prequel — Andor — was coming, anticipation was muted because of the growing fatigue with the universe.
Despite a lack of hype, the series debuted to rave reviews, if not great ratings. The first season was praised for its acting, directing and, well, the things Star Wars is almost always good at — visuals, music and production values. But it also received praise for its narrative heft and maturity. This was not your father’s Star Wars (or maybe your grandfather’s at this point). No cute puppets. No laser swords. Not a Skywalker in sight. It played in the shadows, giving us a view inside the nascent Rebellion as it built itself. From Luthen’s Rael’s ruthless ungentlemanly warfare to Mon Mothma’s political scheming to Saw Gerrera’s insanity, we got a tour of a growing resistance of the Empire, bound together by the journey of Cassian Andor from a petty criminal to a committed rebel.
We recently saw the completion of Season Two, which will also be the last season. And with both seasons now finished, I can confidently say that Andor is not just one of the best Star Wars properties ever made; it’s one of the best television series in recent years. If it were up to me, it would be getting all the awards at the end of the year. It is exceptionally good, even if you are only a casual Star Wars fan.
The key to understanding Andor is that it is not a traditional Star Wars property. Most Star Wars content is driven by plot: getting characters from Point A to Point B, destroying mega-weapon C, being betrayed by D, etc. Andor, by contrast, is a character drama. It is driven by what is going on with the people who inhabit this universe. Those two things are not exclusive — the best Star Wars content has featured good characters and Andor has a compelling plot. But the emphasis is different. And the result is glorious.
This review will have spoilers from this point on, although I will try to keep the biggest plot point and reveals to myself.
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Andor’s second season is divided into four three-episode arcs, each set one year after the other, ending right before Rogue One and A New Hope. The first, revolving around an Imperial audit of the agricultural world Mina-Rau and the wedding of Mon Mothma’s daughter on Chandrila, is probably the least compelling.
But that’s praising with faint damnation. It picks up the threads of the last season and re-orients the characters toward their eventual destinies. We get to see how Cassian has grown into a leader, how the survivors of Ferrix are dealing with the trauma of Imperial oppression and how Mon Mothma is navigating the treacherous waters of opposing the Emperor while keeping her head. It does contain what I regard as the poorest arc of the series — Cassian’s time with what I call the “Beavis and Butthead rebels” in a jungle. But it culminates in a breathless twenty minutes as events on Chandrila and Mina-Rau reach simultaneous conclusions. And it does this while expanding the Star Wars universe to multiple new planets and cultures.
In this arc, we see the theme that defines the second season of Andor: that there is no hiding from the Empire. There is no safe harbor. There is no planet one can flee to. Even on peaceful Chandrila, the claws of the Empire are never far away. The encroaching menace of the Empire is the basso ostinato of this trio of episodes, sometimes literally as we often hear the Imperial menace approaching before we see it on screen. This sense of overwhelming dread is palpable. We can feel the walls closing in around our heroes.
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Star Wars‘s treatment of female characters has often been a bone of contention. Our own Kristin has written about the subject many times, contrasting the subtle feminism of Leia’s gold bikini to the not-so-subtle sexism of the sequels. In recent years, this debate has cropped up with the phrase “the Force is female” which was deployed generously in defense of the unpopular Acolyte series.
One of Andor’s strengths is that it does well by its women characters. And it does it without the cringey sloganeering of The Acolyte. Dedra Meero, Mon Mothma, Kleya Marki, Vel Sartha, Cinta Kaz, Bix Calleen and Marva Andor all have critical roles to play. And they are well-developed three-dimensional characters. They are not all warrior princesses or girl bosses. Some never fight at all. They are not clones of each other or male characters with the names swapped out. Each has an arc, agency and purpose. And, unlike the sequels, older women characters have purposes other than dying for the sake of younger women. Marva dies of old age but is a fighter to the end, drops wisdom to the other characters and gives a speech at her own funeral that is one of the more inspiring in the show. One of Mon Mothma’s great moments is set up by the parliamentary maneuvers of an older woman.
None of this comes at the expense of the male characters, who are equally three-dimensional, have equal agency and have arcs of their own. It’s almost like … someone decided to write a story and make all the characters interesting rather than connecting dots on a political matrix.
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The second arc of Andor pushes us a year closer to A New Hope. Cassian and Bix are in hiding on Coruscant, trying to contribute what they can to the Rebellion. Mon Mothma is slowly seeing the Imperial Senate get more subservient to the Emperor. But what ties this together is a growing resistance movement on the planet Ghorman. The Empire has been using propaganda to demonize the Ghormans and is slowly building up their presence there. A resistance movement is rising in response. Unbeknownst to the Ghormans, but knownst to us, the Empire has designs on the planet and is carefully manipulating events to take it over.
With the second arc, we see more of what makes Andor so wonderful. For two episodes, “nothing happens”. Except that the chess pieces are moving on the board. Cassian is trying to figure out if the Ghorman resistance is worth his involvement. Imperial spies are lurking behind the scenes. It’s not clear if anyone is who they seem to be — agent, double agent, triple agent? The political, military and intelligence scheming is front and center, building toward the inevitable confrontation in the third part of the arc that centers on a weapons heist and an attempt to retrieve a piece of spy equipment. And while one side appears to be victorious, we know that it is a hollow victory.
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Roger Ebert once lamented that British authors had given us entire imaginary worlds: Narnia, Middle Earth and the Wizarding World; and asked why American authors had not done so. My response would be that American authors have. It’s just that their worlds tend to be more in the realm of science fiction than fantasy: Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.. It reveals something, perhaps, about the two countries that British imaginary worlds look to the past while American imaginary worlds look to the future, even if that future was technically a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Too many of the Disney Star Wars properties have folded back into themselves, visiting the same planets, hitting the same leitmotifs and revolving around the same characters as the original trilogy. Which is a pity because Disney has occasionally shown that the franchise can still go to new places.
Andor goes new places. In the first season, we got Ferrix, Narina 5 and Aldhani. In the first arc of this season, we get Mina-Rau and Chandrila. In the second, we get Ghorman, a tiny planet that’s basically Space France, complete with a language that is almost but not quite French. We pull back and see the architecture, the clothing and the culture. Much of the action takes place on the familiar Coruscant, but we see it in ways we haven’t before.
This world building is part of what makes the second arc so thrilling.
And the third so tragic.
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Andor‘s third arc may be one of the best pieces of Star Wars content ever produced and possibly the best thing that we will see on television this year. Bringing the Ghorman arc to its conclusion, it is the best encapsulation of the Empire’s oppressive power we’ve ever seen. The finale in episode eight is electrifying; the denouement in Episode nine satisfying. We see here the hinge of the Rebellion, when blood begins to flow in the streets and people have to start taking a stand. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube reaction to this trio of episodes and, more often than not, it ends with the reactors in stunned silence.
Much has been said and written about the political relevance of this arc. Whether you relate to our current events or to past events or as a warning for the future is irrelevant. Andor manages both to express itself clearly but not preach. You can see the political relevance so clearly that, as one reviewer put it, you forget you’re even watching Star Wars until Palpatine is mentioned. Or you can let it fly over your head and just enjoy yourself.
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With Andor having had a successful second season, there’s been talk of turning the reigns of the franchise over to Tony Gilroy (assuming he’d take them). But I’m going to demur on that. What make Andor fresh is that it’s different. If everything in the universe were like that, it would grow stale quickly.
The lesson here is not to emulate Andor. The lesson is to have free reign to do different things in this fictional universe. The Star Wars universe can have room for the weight and relevancy of Andor, the lightweight fun of Skeleton Crew and … well, whatever the hell The Acolyte was trying to do. The response to good additions to a franchise should not be, “Yes, do everything that way”. It should be to find new ways of being original.
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The final three-episode arc is, perhaps, a slight step down as we move away from Ghorman arc. But it both ties up the Andor series and sets up Rogue One in a way that will bring tears to the stoniest of hearts. After finishing Andor, I fired up Rogue One and the series has improved what was already a very good film. The writing is so crisp that a movie filmed nine years ago feels like it was made after the TV series. The characters feel like they haven’t changed, the Rebellion is still struggling to coalesce and the Empire continues to advance on all fronts, convinced of its own inevitability.
When the finale comes down, it feels not just like the end of a movie, but the end of a three-episode saga. If you add in A New Hope, which starts hours after Rogue One ends, you have a seven-hour continuum that tracks the Death Star story from the moment the information is leaked to the moment the weapon is destroyed. A New Hope is recast not just as the beginning of an adventure, but as the culmination of the efforts of a string of heroes — from Lonni to Luthen to Kleya to Cassian to Jyn to Leia to Luke, a spark of hope passed through hand after hand like an Olympic torch, culminating in the a victory so critical all dates in the Star Wars universe are set by it. We go from despair to hope, from defeat to victory, from an Empire that seems inescapable to an Empire that is crumbling before our eyes. It is a reminder, as Nemik’s manifesto tells us, that tyranny is unnatural, that it constantly has to fight to maintain power and that freedom is a revolutionary force that can bring even the strongest and most evil regimes to their knees.
I haven’t talked much about Andor as just a TV show, but it sets a high standard on technical marks as well. The universe looks real and lived-in. I couldn’t tell what, if anything, was CGI. The acting it outstanding all around from Genevieve O’Reilly’s excellent turn as Mon Motham, to Elizabeth Dalau’s stunning debut as Kleya to Stellan Skarsgard’s ominous Luthen. It’s just a fun show to watch.
But what pushes it over the top is the story-telling. Andor had a tale to tell us and it told it well, adding one of the best chapters to this universe we’ve seen in a long long time.
Is it strange to wax for so long about a piece of science fiction? My dudes, this is what art is. This is what the best stories do to us. Take any piece of literature that has passed the test of time, from the Iliad to Hamlet to Moby Dick, they’re ultimately just stories that struck a chord and stayed with us. That were well-written enough to find new ways of making dead words speak to living people.
Sequels are as old as writing. The Iliad got its sequel in the Odyssey. Henry IV gots its sequel in the Merry Wives of Windsor. The Hobbit got its sequel in Lord of the Rings. Sequels can meet or exceed the quality of the original. Just because something is a sequel or a prequel or a spinoff doesn’t make it automatically garbage. Mostly garbage, I grant. But occasionally, you get a gem. Andor is a gem.
I’ll reign my enthusiasm in just a bit. Andor will have to age a bit and see if it holds up. Maybe I’ll revisit it in five years and see if it still sings. But there’s no reason not to think that, five decades into the era of Star Wars, it’s possible to enhance and expand the legend.
Post Scriptum: I am doing video reactions to Andor on my YouTube channel. I’ve only posted the first three episodes because the shoulder injury makes editing difficult. But you can check them out here.
It truly was a fantastic series. Honestly, a prequel spinoff of a prequel spinoff has no business being this good.
I’d like to offer a wane defense of the “Beavis and Butthead” rebels. They strike me as painfully realistic. The reality is that in the early stages of a rebellion those idiots and nuts are generally very likely to be the leading edge and early adopters of the act of rebelling. People who are either too dim witted, too deranged or too mentally damaged to recognize/care about the horrific odds of their coming to an unpleasant demise are the natural first adopters of rebellion. In this case we see a grab bag of those nuts and mitwits who were originally recruited and directed by a solitary capable rebel and who summarily imploded when their leader got killed in action.
That Cassian ran afoul of them early on strikes me as very realistic.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think it also helps show the development of the Rebel Alliance over the season. By the final arc, the Alliance is a true paramilitary, with a command structure, ranks and procedures. At the start, the rebels are just a bunch of cells acting on their own. We’ve seen some of the more effective cells (Luthen’s and Saw’s), but seeing that a lot of rebels are just random yahoos until the whole structure formalises, is both realistic and provides helpful context for why the Rebel Alliance is so regimented.
Yes, I found it quite delightful how they portrayed how an organization as big and complex as the Rebel Alliance didn’t just spring fully formed from the forehead of Athena but developed over time. I also really admired how the original rebel central intelligence: Luthens’ network, fell out of favor with and became sidelined by the successor militarized rebellion. Just incredibly complex concepts for a fishin TV show.
I enjoy Star Wars stuff, but am not really a fan, if that makes sense, so take this for what it’s worth, but as someone who really liked season 1, I really disliked season 2. What I liked about the first season is that, though it was part of the original Star Wars story, it felt a lot like they’d taken the Star Wars universe and made a very local story, about very local drama, only tying it into the larger story explicitly at the very end. In season 2, it was almost entirely about the larger story, with the local drama taking a back seat, and instead of relying on allegory, as the original movie had, they made the politics super contemporary and in-your-face. It felt like they decided their audience was really stupid, so they had to make things extremely relatable.
Frankly, the Star Wars universe seems to have a lot of potential for interesting local stories that don’t have to be tied either to the original grand narrative. I wish they’d do that, but I think fans are in the way, as they so often are in so many areas of pop culture.
I think you’re right. I would note that if the Franchise could reliably churn out local story offerings like Andor S 1 produced then even if the existing fans were irritated a lot of new fans would be minted.