I've been trying to formulate my thoughts on the second, and final, season of Andor since I finished the last couple of episodes earlier this week. The first thought that came to mind was that it may well be the best Star Wars offering of all, including the much-hallowed original trilogy.
Perhaps that's overblown. Andor and the original films represent very different things, based on the times when they were made and the audiences they were aimed at. Moreover, they're connected by Rogue One, which is my favorite of the new Star Wars movies but has its own problems. Still, I want to explore these ideas in this blog, and I'm gonna need to spoil the hell out of the show to do it, so you can catch that after the jump.
I didn't go back to watch season one of Andor in preparation for season two, or for this blog. Nor did I rewatch Rogue One, although I'm tempted to do so now, since the final episode of Andor leads directly into Andor's first appearance in the film. I didn't write much about the first season of Andor when it came out, so I can't draw on those thoughts either.
All of which is to say that I'm coming to the second season fairly fresh. I remember broad strokes of what happened with Cassian, Bix, Syril, Dedra, Luthen and Mon Mothma in the first season, but maybe I don't always remember the finer points. It doesn't seem to matter, though: the show does a good job of portioning out the information you need to get on with things.
The structure of it was interesting. Showrunner Tony Gilroy basically made four movies, each split into three parts, and released each "film" on consecutive weeks. Each film jumped forward one year from the previous one, and the release schedule meant that viewers who were bingeing them as they came out didn't have to go back and remember what had happened the previous week.
It does raise the question of why they couldn't just make them into proper movies, but I suspect the answer is that movies released to streamers go nowhere (this is the impression I've had of Paramount's Section 31 movie), whereas TV shows evoke the idea of prestige content. Also, Disney probably couldn't have been persuaded to make four movies about Andor (or eight, if you count both seasons), but seemed not to notice when Gilroy just broke them up into 45-55 minute chunks.
As someone who's getting more interested in getting into TV writing, I'm taking notes.
Like the first season, these episodes do a good job of showing what exactly it means to live under the Empire. The original movies nod to it only a bit, by showing the Imperials as space-Nazis who shoot Luke's aunt and uncle, but there's no sense of the apparatus needed to maintain that control. Same with the prequel trilogy: you see how Palpatine subverts the Republic from within, but it only seems to directly affect the main characters, and they all just run away to Tatooine or Dagobah or wherever as the Clone Troopers enact Order 66.
The Imperials in Andor, especially season 2, are a lot more chilling. The best evidence of Gilroy's focus on that aspect is the meeting early in the season, where Director Krennic explains that they need to frack a planet to death to get at the ore that will let him finish building the Death Star. He and a number of Imperial officers, including Dedra Meero and Major Partagaz, are enjoying the comforts of a mountain chalet, but the talk is all about how to spin the need to essentially ethnically cleanse the planet of Ghorman.
They're chilling in other ways, too. Over on Mina-Rau, where Bix and other refugees from season one's riots on Ferrix have escaped, the Empire is conducting raids looking for "illegals", which in this context means people who have traveled from one planet to another without authorization. One of the officers takes a shine to Bix and doesn't seem inclined to take no for an answer, even when she explains about her husband. Yet another example of how a system of order without law allows petty tyrants to prey on civilians without repercussions. Though it's fairly satisfying when Bix knocks that officer's head in with a wrench.
For me, the emotional high point of the season was the culmination of the plans on Ghorman. After that creepy meeting early on, Dedra sends her boyfriend Syril Karn as an asset to make contact with the Ghorman resistance, as a way to drive them into taking actions that will allow the Imperial media apparatus to portray them as extremists. Over the course of several episodes, Syril insinuates himself with them, feeds them enough information to make them dangerous (to themselves), and then the Imperials move in to first enflame and then settle the situation.
Syril lives long enough to regret his part in the whole business, when he watches how the Imperials have maneuvered the Ghormans into gathering in the square, provoked them into violence, and then gone ahead and slaughtered everyone they could find. Watching the episode, you feel the hope drain out of the Ghorman characters long before the Imperials shoot them all down; when they send out the droids to murder protesters, including characters we've grown to appreciate over these episodes, it's heartbreaking.
Were there things that could have been done better, or addressed more clearly? Sure. Bix's subplot about drug addiction kind of went nowhere, and in some ways I wonder if the wedding of Mon Mothma's daughter in the first few episodes went on a little too long. I also thought Luthen may have been used better in the first season, though I liked his swan-song, where Dedra catches up to him and we finally see what made him turn against the Empire and link up with Kleya. That subplot also gave us a wonderful showcase for Kleya as a badass, when she sneaks into the hospital where Luthen is being held, shoots a bunch of stormtroopers, kills Luthen, and then escapes under cover of a bombing she set up. I don't think it's a coincidence that her name is so similar to Princess Leia, who was equally badass.
So what about the thought that it's the best Star Wars show or movie out there?
Again, maybe that's overblown. The problem is that Andor and the original trilogy are attempting to do very different things. George Lucas's original movies were just meant to be adventure movies in the vein of old serials he used to watch as a kid. There are clear messages and subtext to those first movies, in the shape of anti-war messages generally and the allegory for the Vietnam War specifically. But at heart they're meant to be crowd-pleasing B-movies, which have been freighted with all this meaning and significance because they unexpectedly sold loads of movie tickets and merchandising.
Andor plays in that world, but reads more like John Le Carré's attempt at Star Wars. There's a whole spectrum of grays and morally dubious choices, the likes of which George Lucas's movies don't really engage with. Both seasons of Andor also grapple with the present much more than the trilogy, since they're focused on how tyranny insinuates itself into every place that it can, out of fear of losing control. The first season came out after Donald Trump had left office, but its scenes of resistance were still resonant; this season came out just as Trump's new administration is deporting "illegals" and punishing anybody who doesn't fall into lockstep with them.
Incidentally, George Lucas showed himself able to engage with current politics in the prequel trilogy. I'm not going to argue some revisionist history that suggests the Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were great movies, but Lucas certainly didn't seem to mind people drawing connections between Palpatine's seizure of power and George W Bush's War on Terror back in 2002 and 2005. A lot of the business with Mon Mothma in the Imperial Senate, including her final speech denouncing Palpatine for the Ghorman massacre is indebted to those movies, and finds a resonance now in actions like Cory Booker's 25-hour speech on the Senate floor a few weeks ago, in which he denounced the Trump administration's actions and disregard for the law.
So, is Andor really the best Star War? It depends on what you're looking for. It doesn't capture the swashbuckling adventure of the original trilogy the way the first two seasons of the Mandalorian did, but it also justifies its own existence and does a better job of bridging Lucas's two trilogies than shows like Obi-Wan Kenobi did. The pleasures of the original trilogy are in the simple narrative of the good guys winning over the space-Nazis with the help of a diverse alliance of aliens, while the pleasures of Andor are in seeing the main character grow from a callow loner to someone willing to fight for the greater good.
You can watch and rewatch the original movies without engaging with any other shows or movies in the universe, but Andor begs for those connections backward to the prequels, and forward to Rogue One and the original movies. And more than a revisionist piece that suggests the Republic and the Alliance were more morally grey than initially implied, Andor shows why the Rebellion and the actions in the original movies were needed.
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