Friday, May 9All That Matters

Andor is perhaps the greatest piece of Star Wars media in the last 20 or so years

24 Comments

  • I thought Andor was excellent, partially because the general Star Wars _universe_ is just a fun place to be so setting a slightly more thoughtful, dramatic show in if worked brilliantly well.

    Unfortunately that slower pace (and lack of lightsabers) is probably what caused it to not get the viewership it deserved (also as others have noted a broader cynicism of most star wars content these days)

  • I would say this doesn’t even need to be argued but I still run into Star Wars fans who refuse to watch it or call it boring and ‘not Star Wars’. It’s nuts but I guess there is no accounting for taste.

    Everyone is going nuts for Ahsoka but for me the bar is still very much Andor and so far it stands quite alone. Even Rogue One is far below it.

    I really doubt we will reach highs like S1 of Andor again, much as I hate to say it.

  • I’m honestly amazed that Andor was able to be made in the current Disney era of Star Wars. In a sea of very “Disney-esque” Star Wars properties, only Rogue One compares in its presentation of mature and thought-provoking themes. Turns out they have the same showrunner!

    SEMI-SPOILER WARNING!! The most impressive thing to me was not the visuals or setpieces that Star Wars is known for, but the compelling characters and plot. The writers really took risks with this one. Andor is a not-so-subtle satire/commentary on the nature of life under fascism and the spark of revolution that follows. It takes many of the darker realities of modern life, amplifies them with a brutalist futuristic setting, and follows normal people through familiar struggles. There are no super heroes in this show. They are all flawed. They trip and stumble their way through an unjust world, and I couldn’t help but empathize.

    Without giving away too much, Cassian Andor’s character arc was the best of all. Anyone who has seen Rogue One and the original trilogy knows where the road ends, but watching his journey from “I’m just a nobody trying to survive” to “the system is broken and needs to change at any cost” is both natural and believable. The stakes felt real. Almost every character goes through a similar and equally believable evolution of thought and realization that there is only “one way out.”

    At the end of the first season I kept asking myself “when does accepting the status quo no longer become an option? What level of systematic oppression and hardship warrants an escalation from civil disobedience to full-scale violent revolution? Where is that line drawn?” The fact that this show, A DISNEY SHOW, begs that question says it all. Highly recommend.

  • A friend of mine never got into Star Wars, so I coerced him to binge Andor. He called me later and said it was some of the best SciFi he’d ever seen and asked me which Star Wars series to watch next. I immediately hung up on him.

  • My…ONLY qualm with the series…is that it sometimes feels like it was afraid to be associated with Star Wars. It was sometimes so afraid to include aliens and more fantastical things from the Star Wars greater franchise that it seemed almost sterile, or maybe generic was the better word. It’s got cool sci-fi trappings, but sometimes it felt like you could drop it into any halfway serious space-opera or far-future sci-fi drama about war and sacrifice, etc. Tony Gilroy is a good writer, but he’s also been frank about how he feels about Star Wars, which isn’t always the most sunny opinion. And – sometimes – it’s a little slow. I am fine with that, personally, I can take slow burns with the best of them, but I sometimes wonder if this would have been better as a movie, or maybe cutting out an episode or two.

    HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT…why can’t all Star Wars content have this kind of dialogue? This kind of acting? This kind of heady big ideas? I love Ahsoka Tano, the character, and I was jazzed to see that she was getting her own show, and all of these dangling threads from both The Clone Wars and Rebels were going to be picked up and expanded upon in meaningful ways…and her show is just so boring and bland by comparison. I don’t say that lightly, and I wish it were otherwise, but it is so low-energy, and the dialogue is so dry and unethusiastic sometimes…it’s not a wonder my favorite character ends up being Huyang, which is so ironic, because David Tennant gives the most lively performance AND HE’S A FREAKING DROID.

    I don’t know if there is some sort of mandate for the writers of these Star Wars properties to stay within certain parameters or something while writing them, to meet some sort of weird quota about what can be said or not be said about the Force or how things work or how characters treat each other, etc., I don’t know (similar to how Toho doesn’t want Godzilla emoting in any depiction he’s ever in, at least when it comes to film), but I honestly feel like it’s hurting the brand. I’m not one of those types who says that “Star Wars is dead” or anything like that, I’m no doomsayer. But…Andor comes along and it feels like a shot in the arm. Sure, it could do with more aliens and wear its setting on its sleeve a little more, but man, I can’t really go back to other Star Wars shows or movies and not compare it to the dialogue or the moving pieces or the intrigue. Just…ugh. Man.

  • Part of the reason for it’s success was that they allowed the showrunners to pace the story/episodes properly. This allowed them to do slower episodes to build up the story and characters, and then you would get a much more satisfying payoff at the end. Compare that to the more standard Star Wars/Marvel formula where you have much less time to build things up and have to get to the action payoff usually in the same episode.

    Think of the incredible imprisonment and prison break storyline. Now imagine the whole thing was contained in one episode because you have a short season and need to have a big action scene in each episode. It wouldn’t have nearly the same kind of impact on the viewer as it did with a longer build-up and finally the release of the tension.

  • Just watched Andor last week for the first time, and it’s lightning in a bottle. Because the Rebellion has always been depicted as noble and righteous, it’s really fascinating to have this nuanced “founding father” character who uses the ends to justify all sorts of atrocities. That’s the kind of inspired writing I want to see in sci-fi.

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