All of the Star Treks

Last week I finally hit a goal I first set for myself back in 2006, when I watched the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. That means that I've now watched almost all Trek, with the exception of Short Treks and the Section 31 movie - which I suppose means my title for this post is somewhat misleading, but bear with me.

When I decided that watching every Trek show and movie was a worthwhile goal (yes, I know, I know), we were a couple of years off from the end of Enterprise, which was the last, somewhat labored gasp of what I like to call Trek's imperial phase: that period from 1987 to about 2004 that saw the launch of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise, as well as four movies starring the TNG cast. Not only did Trek finally get a measure of critical and ratings recognition, but every one of those shows lasted longer than the Original Series (and Enterprise was the first Trek show to be cancelled since TOS).

When I made that goal, I'd only seen a few episodes of TOS here and there, none of the Animated Series, large parts of TNG but never in any systematic way, seasons 3-6 of DS9, and parts of the first two seasons of Voyager. I'd also seen all 6 of the original cast movies and three of the four TNG movies (Nemesis might not have come out yet). The Kelvin Timeline movies hadn't come out yet, and we were still more than a decade away from new Trek TV shows.

A big part of my decision to try to watch all Trek was that I'd just started a new job after graduating from journalism school, and I'd made a friend at work who was just as into Trek and all the other 90s SF shows that I'd loved. My new friend Paul lent me DVD box sets of Deep Space 9, Babylon 5 and the X-Files (as well as the West Wing), and when I discovered that someone in my building was stealing my mailed-in DVDs of DS9, Paul graciously allowed me to send them to his place and then brought them with him to work.

(No lie: this incident led me to rule out subsequent flatshares if they didn't have a personal letterbox in the front door, for fear of my rental DVDs getting nicked again)

Another coworker helped me catch up with a couple more seasons of TNG and the first two seasons of Voyager, and other shows I caught bit by bit, by renting from Sofa Cinema, which was the UK version of Netflix back then. But I wasn't very focused on my goal in those days: I watched all of TNG and Enterprise, but my attempts to watch TOS, DS9 and Voyager petered out - in part because TOS is quite slow and uneven, and Voyager takes a while to get better, if not ever properly good. I can't remember why I lost the thread of DS9 at that time, but on that attempt I only managed to get to the end of Season 4.

One thing that helped me stay focused on the TOS watch was the Mission Log podcast, which I've spoken about here. I remember seeing their first episode pop up on the Nerdist Podcast Network in 2012, so I listened to it eagerly even though I hadn't watched the Cage (TOS's first pilot). By 2013 I was watching more of season 1 of TOS and dutifully listening to Mission Log after each episode - but I took so long with it that in the interim I moved to the US and had to switch my DVD and streaming queue over to Netflix.

Now, I was a partisan of Netflix's DVD rental service up until the end, but I have to admit that once I was able to stream Netflix on a TV (first through the smart TV itself, then through an Amazon Fire TV and finally through Apple TV), it made it easier to keep up with Trek shows. I also determined that I was taking too long with too many shows - I'd finish a season of something, jump to another show entirely, and then by the time I went back to the first show I'd forgotten what I'd already seen of it.

So with that in mind, I finally decided to polish off DS9, all in one go. I took a few months, but it was the only show I was watching, and it was so good that I didn't feel the need to check out other shows in that time.

(I suspect that Kids These Days might have more trouble conceiving of a world with only one streaming service, Netflix, than of a world where Netflix mailed you DVDs)

With the end of DS9, I decided it was finally time to tackle Voyager, but I didn't do it in a very methodical way. It's so long ago now that I can't remember when I started it, but I must have given it a proper try after 2018, because that's when I worked with another colleague who also loved Trek, and assured me that Voyager picked up after Kes left and Seven of Nine joined the cast.

Getting a girlfriend put a little kibosh on the Voyager watch-through, especially because we were effectively living together during the pandemic and she didn't like Trek (she liked Star Wars, though). The other thing that slowed me down was Voyager's move from Netflix to Paramount Plus, along with the rest of the shows. I subsequently signed up for Paramount, and when I broke up with the GF, I had more time to watch whatever I wanted. I duly resumed Voyager, reserving it for lunch on Sundays.

That all still took years, of course. I finished season 7 of Voyager in June of 2025, and determined that I'd finished season 6 in June of 2024, with a similar amount of time since I finished season 5. It doesn't help that Voyager is still, for me, the weakest of the pre-2017 Trek shows - making it my only show, seven days a week, is probably more than I could handle.

And of course, yes, it took me so long to watch all these shows that Trek underwent a renaissance in the interim (two of them, technically). It's notable that in the time it's taken me to watch all of Voyager, I've also watched all 5 seasons of Discovery, 3 of Picard, 5 of Lower Decks, 2 of Prodigy, and the 2 so far of Strange New Worlds. 

So what does all this Trek amount to? I've watched the good (large chunks of TNG, almost all of DS9, large bits of TOS, Lower Decks and SNW), and I've watched the less entertaining (Voyager, Enterprise, Disco, those other bits of TOS and TNG). I've even watched TAS, which looks pretty abysmal but features the odd grown-up storyline, like a young Spock mercy killing his beloved pet to spare it a painful death, and the Devil telling children that they shouldn't let authority figures tell them who to be friends with. I'm not even joking!

My favorite period of Trek remains the imperial phase, specifically season 3 of TNG to the end of DS9. A lot of modern Trek is very good, but even the best of it sometimes feels too beholden to the past, as if they're worried that viewers won't like shows if they don't call back to every minute detail from the last 60 years of shows. This nostalgia works better on Lower Decks, which subjects every era of Trek to this treatment, and mines all that continuity for good-natured laughs; and while I love SNW, it sometimes feels too beholden to fan service as well. But it's still miles better than Star Trek Into Darkness, the second JJ Abrams-helmed Kelvin Timeline film, which does... not a great job of revisiting The Wrath of Khan.

And unfortunately, even when Trek does try to break free of the past, it feels very self-conscious. Look, Discovery is, hands down, my least favorite Trek, but I applaud it for making a clean break with the past at the end of season 2 and jumping forward over 900 years, so that it's nominally not beholden even to the TNG era. And yet, the show still fails to hold my attention as much as I'd like - its attempts to discuss hot-button social issues feel inorganic and labored, we never learn enough about the non-Michael Burnham characters to really like them, and the plots just don't feel that urgent. Even Prodigy, which grew into a fine show by the end of season 1, sometimes feels like it's laboring under the burden of showing that it's a Trek show.

This isn't to say that 90s Trek is perfect. Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG are absolutely terrible, with only one episode of note (Measure of a Man) to redeem them. DS9 can be slow at the start, and even up to the final season isn't completely immune from subjecting to us to some duff episodes. And for a supposed showcase of futuristic values, 90s Trek can be pretty disappointingly regressive: early TNG episodes like Code of Honor are rightly held up as grossly racist, while Harry Kim, Voyager's Asian cast member (the first since TOS's Sulu), always seems to get belittled and forgotten compared with the boorish white character, Tom Paris.

But the best summation I've heard of Trek (I believe from Mission Log) is that it's "competence porn", i.e. a show about smart people working together to solve problems. This squares with Gene Roddenberry's original vision, and his oft-quoted disparagement of "ancient aliens" hokum: he used to say that of course humans built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard. This spirit suffuses the best of Trek, and it's why Lower Decks and SNW and Prodigy have landed the best for me among the most recent entries.

It's worth noting that I've finished Voyager at an odd time for Trek in general. We're only a few weeks off from the premiere of SNW's third season, but Paramount has also announced that the show will be ending with season 5, which will be an abbreviated 6 episodes, rather than SNW's usual 10. Given the long lead times for the show, that could take a while yet, but it means that Trek is going from having 5 series on the air to just one, the Starfleet Academy show that's meant to emerge at some point.

Trek hasn't been immune to the toxic fandom that plagues other nerd-world properties, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. It's also suffered, in my opinion, from over-production on the TV shows, meaning that Paramount had to cancel them all to save money as it looks for a buyer; that over-production, in turn, has meant that the Trek creative teams relied too much on visual effects and action scenes, and not always enough on the interpersonal relationships among the members of each ensemble cast that made Trek so good (at least in the 80s and 90s).

I want Academy to do well, but I also kind of wonder if it wouldn't be good for Trek to have a little break again for a year or two. It'd be nice to see it come back with something important to say, rather than always trying to recapture the magic of TOS - a quest that goes back all the way to 1995, when Voyager launched. My friend Paul, the one who lent me those DS9 and X-Files and Babylon 5 DVDs almost 20 years ago, hasn't really warmed to the latest generations of Trek, because he'd like to see another time jump like the one between TOS and TNG - one where there are reminders of the past, but where the shows aren't in thrall to it.

I'd like to see that new, third generation myself. And I'd like it to bring the best of both worlds with it: the actual recognition of non-white, non-male, non-hetero characters that New Trek does so well, with the episodic but still interconnected storytelling that Old Trek did nicely.

And if it goes away for another long period, well: today I restarted Enterprise. As long as it's available somewhere on streaming, we'll always have Trek to inspire us.

RIP Brian Wilson

Usually I'm a little quicker at getting these obituary posts up, but a number of things got in the way, and I also found myself having to consider what I could say about Brian Wilson or about The Beach Boys in general. I'm not that big of a fan: my direct experience is with Pet Sounds, as well as some of the songs that have filtered through into the wider culture, like the early surf-rock songs or Kokomo. 

I'm also aware of Brian Wilson's influence on other artists, REM being a prime example. In their singles collection, In Time, several members of REM talk about how their love for Pet Sounds and later Brian Wilson work influenced songs like At My Most Beautiful.

I'll also be blunt: for the longest time I associated liking The Beach Boys with a certain type of middle-of-the-road white dude. I then met a super-racist white dude in college who was into them, which colored my opinion of the band. It wasn't until I got into the Beatles that I learned about how influential Pet Sounds and other Brian Wilson works were on them. And it helped that a friend of mine, who was also into the Beatles, could paint a better picture of The Beach Boys (hi, Matt!).

So a couple of years later, spurred by those experiences and by reading panegyrics about it on Pitchfork, I picked up Pet Sounds. I'll say that it's not my favorite album of all time, but it's a good listen - my favorite is Sloop John B, but there's a certain spirit pervading the entire album, from the first note of Wouldn't It Be Nice to the sonic landscape at the end of Caroline, No.

From there I heard about the lost album, Smile, but I never got as far as that, even when Brian Wilson came out of seclusion in 2004 to release something approximating what he'd envisaged the original album to be. I got more traction with Surf's Up, which is another step in that darker, more mature direction that Wilson dreamed of when he came up with Pet Sounds.

Reading this piece in the Guardian, it's easy to see why Wilson gets name-checked by so many other artists. In collaboration with Van Dyke Parks and others, he went deeper than the surf-rock style that the band was famous for and pulled in influences from all over American music. Indeed, listening to Parks's album Song Cycle feels like the bits of Surf's Up and Smile that I have heard, while also reflecting folk and classical idioms. BTW I should point out that Van Dyke Parks remains the only artist I've ever met after a gig, and the only one I've ever high-fived, after having asked him whether Aaron Copland really smacked him on the ass. Nice guy.

Anyway, I don't know as much about Brian Wilson's work as I ought to, but I greatly appreciate what I do know. And I think I'll take a break from my British music project to listen to Smile and Surf's Up, because I should know more about them in general.

A Quick One on the No Kings Protests

I went to the protests against Trump's military parade and general agenda this afternoon, because I thought it was important to be part of it, rather than sniping from social media and whatever. I also just wanted to see what it would be like: we've had some protests in Palo Alto and Mountain View and Los Altos in the last couple of years, but never anything too big.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was by far the biggest protest I've seen in the Peninsula, even if it was pretty small compared to the march against the Iraq War I attended in London back in 2003. It certainly beat the protest I joined briefly in 2017 in response to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, as well as the various protests calling for an end to the war in Gaza more recently. The one protest I've seen lately that was comparable - but still nowhere near as big - was the one at all the Tesla showrooms a couple of months ago, which protested Elon Musk's DOGE activities.

For this one, I went with my dad to stand along a stretch of El Camino in Mountain View, and we were among the hundreds of folks holding flags and signs and eliciting honks of approval (usually) from people driving past. It was all pretty calm, with just about everyone who joined in being pretty chill and good-humored about it. Most of the drivers along El Camino, as I mentioned, were supportive, but one guy did shout something incomprehensible as he drove past, and another guy rode by on his bike in a MAGA hat. But the only organized counter-protest was a couple (literally two) anti-abortion rights protesters across the street from the main group.

This was good, because I was a little worried about agents provocateurs causing fights or looting, or about crazy assholes driving their cars into the crowds. I was also a little apprehensive about my dad and his partner walking around and potentially getting targeted by Nazi thugs, but it looks, as I say, like everyone was pretty chill.

I'll also admit, it was kind of moving to join in with the crowd and see people standing up for constitutionality and rule of law: a friend of mine suggested that the folks protesting down here tend to be self-ingratiating and disingenuous, which is hard to argue with, given how many older white folks there were. But he also appreciated that they were actually out there, whether or not they're in it for the long haul. And notably, while the crowd where I was skewed heavily older and whiter, there was definitely a range of ethnicities and age groups represented.

That was more true as I left the protest and drove into Palo Alto, to see what things were like there. The protesters were still out along El Camino until Los Altos, and then petered out until I got to the Stanford Campus, where the protest had taken route on all four corners of the intersection there. That crowd also seemed to venture further into the heart of Palo Alto, down Embarcadero, which was even more impressive: Palo Alto doesn't really seem like it'd be into the protests, but folks came out.

In terms of what's next, who knows? Things will happen regardless of what a bunch of people in the Peninsula do, but as I say, it's nice that they came out for this. At the very least, it'll give our elected representatives, both in Sacramento and in Washington, an idea that people want them do something about this mess of an administration. Though with the handcuffing of elected officials like Senator Alex Padilla, I think they've gotten the message on their own.

Europe's Top 4 Leagues and PSG

Much as it pains me to say it, congratulations to Paris St Germain for becoming the first French team to win the Champions League since Marseille in 1993. I don't know if they were particularly on form tonight, if Inter were particularly off, or whatever, but 5-0 is a pretty emphatic victory. Especially when you consider that PSG got here by beating a bunch of English teams, while Inter got here by beating this season's German and Spanish champions. One would have expected more of a fight from Inter, but clearly their age told, especially when up against epochal talents like Kvicha Kvaratskhelia and Desiré Doué, plus all the other great players PSG have built into this team.

It's easy to be dismissive, but maybe a little unfair. Yes, the French league is ridiculously uncompetitive: PSG have won the last four titles, plus eight of the last 10, and they didn't lose a game this season until they'd guaranteed the title. This is after the period a few years ago when Olympique Lyonnais won seven titles in a row.

It's also easy to be dismissive of a team that's so transparently become a petrostate's sports washing project, and that spent the last decade pursuing the Galactico model. They paid a record fee for Neymar Jr, brought Lionel Messi in from Barcelona, and snapped up Kylian Mbappé in time to see him blossom into one of Europe's finest players and see his transfer fee and influence shoot up. As a result, it was easy to enjoy the sight of them dominating the French league but always falling short in the Champions League, sometimes embarrassingly so.

But credit where credit is due: the management at PSG have abandoned the Galactico thing, allowing those three huge-name players to leave (some with better reputations than others, it must be said), and then giving coach Luis Enrique the latitude to actually build a team. I haven't watched much of PSG this season, but when I have, Kvaratskhelia has been particularly eye-catching for his runs up the flank, and I think he has a genuine claim to being Europe's most exciting young player. Kylian who?

I don't know if I've changed my stance about France's position at the top of the UEFA coefficients. I continue to maintain that there's a Top 4 leagues (England, Spain, Italy and Germany), which are typically closer to one another than they are to the chasing pack - though currently England is so far ahead that I might need to revise this statement. France has the fifth-highest coefficient, but it's farther from Germany, in fourth, than it is from the Netherlands in sixth, or than Germany is from Italy in second place.

French teams haven't really performed very well in Europe, historically, as evidenced by the fact that today's result is only the second time a French team has won the highest European trophy. No French team has ever won the Europa League (or its predecessor, the UEFA Cup), and PSG is the only French club ever to win the now-defunct Cup-Winners' Cup.

PSG is helped along by its owners' financial clout, much as Manchester City has benefited in the Premier League - although curiously, they also found it difficult to win the Champions League until fairly recently, when they, too, beat Inter in the final. This is why I say, there's no Top 5: it's just a Top 4 plus PSG.

Would it be good if French teams won more stuff? I suppose, if it meant more than just PSG winning European trophies, or at least getting to semifinals of major European competitions. But I wouldn't like to see a situation where England, Spain, Italy, Germany and now France are all getting oversized Champions League presences. 

Under the previous rules, before the Champions League switched to the league format in the fall, the top 4 countries got four spots each, guaranteed, which accounted for fully half of the teams participating in the competition at that level. Accordingly, the group phase typically featured teams from more countries but then the knockout phase would only ever feature teams from the Top 4 and PSG. Maybe a Dutch or Portuguese team would slip in there, usually because an Italian team would slip up somewhere, but certainly no Eastern European teams.

I don't see this state of affairs changing anytime soon. The other traditional French powers just can't seem to compete with PSG's money, and they can't seem to get their acts together in Europe. But although today's result isn't exactly a win for teams from countries outside the Top 4, it does at least mark the first Champions League win from a team that isn't English, Spanish, Italian or German since 2004.

Although now that PSG has its trophy, I wouldn't mind seeing an Italian team win it again, for once...

The Europa League Penalty

Like most fans of the Premier League, I watched dumbfounded this season as Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur flailed through two achievements that don't normally go together. The first and more prestigious is reaching the Europa League final, but the second was doing that while being the two worst teams in the English top flight that didn't get relegated.

Watching them play against one another on Wednesday, 21 May, made me think again about the long-held tradition that playing Europa League matches on Thursdays drags a team's league performance down. It's usually blamed on the shorter rest time compared to teams in the Champions League (which is on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), or on the fact that the travels to away matches are longer - there are more Eastern European teams in the Europa League, so you might find yourself drawn against a side from Kazakhstan and effectively be playing in Asia.

Another possibility was that because the teams that usually play in the Europa League aren't as rich as the Champions League teams, they might have less chance to rotate out players who are as good as their normal starters. It's also fairly common for some clubs de-prioritize the Europa League or domestic cups by fielding academy teams (Arsenal used to do this quite a bit with the EFL Cup, if I recall).

In any case, as I always do when I have a question like this, I built a spreadsheet to see what the numbers suggested. I took the English Premier League teams that have participated in the Europa League in the past 10 seasons and calculated their average points per game in the Premier League for each of those seasons. I then compared their averages in seasons when they were in the Europa League with seasons when they weren't. I also included participation in the more recent Europa Conference league, because those games are also played on Thursdays. Once I had the average points per season and points per game in UEL (UEFA Europa League) and non-UEL seasons, I calculated the averages across all the teams.

There are 13 teams in total, but not all of them have point totals/averages for every season, because some were relegated from the Premier League during that 10-year period. Frankly, those relegation seasons tended to come with such low point-totals that they may have skewed the numbers a bit. At the other end of the scale, a number of teams (Leicester City, Chelsea and Liverpool) have won the Premier League at least once in the same period, which presumably also skews the numbers.

In the end, I can report that there doesn't appear to be a UEL penalty, at least in the years I'm looking at. Average points per game across all 13 teams was 1.5, regardless of whether they competed in the Europa League or not. If you add one decimal place, UEL seasons on average had 1.53 points per game, while non-UEL seasons had 1.48. With regard to total points per season, the 13 teams accrued an average of 58.1 points per season that they played the Thursday games, against 56.3 points for the seasons where they didn't.

That's right: playing in the Europa League was associated with better league form.

I don't need to tell you that correlation doesn't equal causation, so I'm not saying that playing in the Europa League made the teams have better seasons. But I also don't observe clear drop-offs in points during the seasons where the teams did participate.

To take one example, Burnley's single Europa League season (2018-19) saw them reach 40 points, or 1.1 points per game. In the season right before and the season right after, they earned 54 total (1.4 per game), but two seasons before playing in Europe, Burnley had also racked up just 40 points during the season. Two seasons after playing in Europe they picked up just 39 in total (a little over 1.0 per game), and then the season after that were relegated after getting 35 points, or 0.9 per game.

Wolves make for another interesting example. Like Burnley, they played in the Europa League just once during this period (2019-20), but that season they ended up earning their highest points tally since getting promoted back to the Premier League, with 59 (1.6 per game). The season before, which was their first in the top flight, they earned 57 points, or 1.5 per game, and the season after they got just 45 points, or 1.2 points per game. In every subsequent season Wolves have earned between 1.3 and 1.1 points per game, and have not played in Europe.

The bigger teams fared a little worse. In seasons where they didn't play the Thursday games, the representatives of the so-called Big Six accrued an average of 1.9 points per game, compared with 1.8 points per game where they did play in the Europa League. Also FYI, the teams included in those numbers are Manchester United, Spurs, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea; Manchester City was the only Big Six team not to play in the Europa League during this period.

Liverpool suffered the biggest drop, going from 2.2 points per game in non-UEL seasons, as against 1.9 in UEL seasons. This result is skewed by the fact that Liverpool played just three UEL seasons, of which one (2015-16) represented their lowest points-per-game average during this decade; in among the non-UEL seasons are the two seasons where they won 2.6 points per game (2018-19 and 2019-20, the latter of which they won the league). Liverpool's most recent UEL season (2023-24) saw them get 2.2 points per game, but this season, where they won the league they got 2.3.

Arsenal also suffered a drop in UEL seasons, registering 1.8 points per game vs 2.0 in non-UEL seasons, and Tottenham's UEL points per game are 1.7 vs 1.8 for non-UEL seasons. Manchester United's points per game are the same across the decade (reflecting the years of drift post-Alex Ferguson), while Chelsea actually sees better points per game in UEL seasons (1.9) as against non-UEL seasons (1.7).

So what accounts for the discrepancies, both in the general sample and in the Big Six teams?

For the smaller teams, points totals and points-per-game may be skewed by the presence of historically bad seasons in which they got relegated. Southampton, Burnley, Leicester and Aston Villa each suffered at least one relegation in this period, and of those, Southampton, Burnley and Leicester managed to get relegated twice. Southampton's first relegation season of the period saw them net 25 points across the season (0.7 per game), and their second, which was this season, got them 12 points (0.3 per game), which is the second-lowest points total in Premier League history. Villa's relegation in 2015-16 saw them earn a pretty dismal 17 points overall or 0.4 per game.

And while none of the big teams got relegated in this period, they did have a few stinkers. Chelsea amassed just 44 points, or 1.2 per game, in 2022-23, as they recovered from the forced sale from former owner Roman Abramovich in response to the Ukraine war. But Manchester United and Spurs have them beat this season, with 42 and 38 points overall, respectively, or 1.1 and 1.0 points per game. 

The big teams skewed things in the other direction, by the way, mainly by having really good seasons. Leicester, Chelsea and Liverpool all won the title during these years (Liverpool twice), which suggests some good points totals, but even when they didn't win some of the big teams racked up good points totals. There were seven seasons in which a team amassed over 80 points without winning the league, and four of those were non-UEL seasons. All of the four times that a team won over 90 points (Liverpool in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22, Chelsea in 2016-17) were non-UEL seasons for those teams.

Coming back to the original question, it seems clear that their extended runs in the Europa League aren't sufficient to explain Manchester United or Spurs' low points totals this season. A more likely explanation for both is severe injury crises, where a great many key players were unavailable for large parts of the season. The other problem, though less quantifiable, is the dysfunction in the backrooms of both clubs: Spurs are run by Daniel Levy, who tends to be quick to sack managers but reluctant to buy players, while Manchester United is in the middle of a decade-long quagmire relating to servicing their primary owners' debt incurred in buying them, plus a new minority owner who seems even less inclined to spend than the majority owners. United's dysfunction has extended to selling off a load of players who promptly pull up trees at their next clubs, which implies that morale and management are both in the dumps.

This is all to say that, while the achievement of contesting a major European trophy puts at least some lipstick on the pig that the 2024-25 season has represented for both clubs, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur need to look to other factors to explain this year's dismal form. While they may do marginally worse in seasons where they play in the Europa League, they won't have this excuse next season. 

But at least Spurs can look forward to playing in the Champions League. Hopefully they strengthen the team enough for it.

Andor Season 2: The Best Star Wars of All

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.

Congrats to Liverpool as 2024-25 Premier League Champions

It doesn't feel like it should be a big deal, but Liverpool winning the Premier League does feel exciting in a way that a league title hasn't in a while. This is only the second time in the past eight seasons that a team other than Manchester City has won the Premier League, and Liverpool won that other time too. BTW, for the completists: if you look at the previous decade, you also get Chelsea's win in 2016-17 and more importantly, Leicester's in 2015-16 (how long ago that must seem for Leicester City fans...).

This reminded me a lot of Liverpool's previous title win, during the 2019-20 season. Leaving aside the impact of the pandemic on that season, Liverpool spent basically that entire season at the top of the table, and it was similar this season. Last time round, they didn't seem to lose a match until the teams returned from the Covid-induced break, but by then it was pretty much already in the bag, to the point that they recorded the earliest win, in terms of games left to play (seven).

This year's Liverpool didn't sweep the league quite so commandingly, winning with "only" four matches left to play. They also seemed to stumble a few times, though for all that they had the odd inopportune draw or loss, second-placed Arsenal was never able to capitalize on those mistakes. Liverpool are currently 15 points ahead of Arsenal, and 20 points ahead of Newcastle, who are currently in third place. 

Much of the commentary on Liverpool's win has focused on the fact that it was masterminded by the new manager, Arne Slot, in his first season at Anfield. Taking over from Jürgen Klopp, Slot hasn't tinkered much with the team, bringing in only one player of note (Federico Chiesa, whom I'd like to see have more of a role in future). This has led to some commentators suggesting that this win belongs to Klopp, but I disagree. 

Klopp was a good manager but not quite the revolutionary genius that some seem to have made him out to be - he may have masterminded Borussia Dortmund claiming the Bundesliga, but by the time he left that team they were clearly on their last legs, and out of ideas. English commentary talked a lot about Klopp's "heavy metal" brand of gegenpressing football, and while this style of play kept Liverpool in among the top teams of the league, it also burned players out easily. 

It's impressive, therefore, that Slot got such good results out of the same group of players, but with a less frenetic style of play. Klopp may have assembled this team, but Slot is the one who got the best out of them, and so he deserves full credit for the title win.

The question that remains, then, is what Slot does next season. He's managed to hold onto two of the side's key players, Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk, after a season-long drama of whether they'd sign new contracts. Keeping them at Anfield next season is definitely a positive, but whether they succumb to age next season or the season after, their knees and reflexes will go sooner rather than later. It'll be interesting to see if he can maintain this balance next season, getting the best out of this group of players, or if he'll be forced at some point to perform a major overhaul.

The question came up on Football Weekly of whether this is the start of a dynasty at Liverpool, but apart from how well Slot can build a team, the answer will depend on what the rest of the teams do next season. Manchester City had an absolute mare this year, and it'll be interesting to see if Pep Guardiola is able to rebuild his team into challengers, or if he's now become the problem keeping them from winning. 

Same with Mikel Arteta at Arsenal: I sometimes think he's a bit too much of a whiner, but it's undeniable that he did well to pull Arsenal out of its post-Arsène Wenger, post-Unai Emery doldrums. He's definitely brought in a number of good players, but I don't know if he's had the tactical nous to properly fill the positions where he's lacking cover, mainly a good striker. Next season will be the most important, I think: if he can't strengthen the side enough to challenge for the title, then it'll probably be time for Arsenal to find a new manager.

I'm not too interested in whether any of the other so-called "Big Six" will do well, with one exception: Ruben Amorim has presided over Manchester United's worst campaign of the post-Alex Ferguson era, but he seems to eke out the odd result here and there. He got hamstrung by being hired mid-season (because the Manchester United hierarchy can't seem to organize a piss-up in a brewery, given that they should have fired Erik ten Hag at the end of last season), but it'll be interesting to see if he can rebuild the squad for next season. Or if he'll even be given enough time to do so.

I'm slightly more interested in the prospects of other strong teams outside the traditional big names, specifically Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa. Newcastle have generally had a good season, their win in the EFL Cup balancing out some inconsistent league performances, though as I said, they're currently in third place. Forest have been the big surprise of the season, sitting in third place for large parts of the season and only recently falling away; I'm still hopeful they can at least qualify for the Champions League next season, even if that'll probably be a poisoned chalice for them. And finally, Aston Villa did well to get to the Champions League quarterfinals, so if they can strengthen and make their league performances more consistent, they should challenge for Europe again... though it'd be fun to see someone from outside of London, Manchester and Liverpool challenge for the title again.

The league's not quite over, as the European places are still up for grabs, at least third through fifth. And if either Manchester United or Spurs win the Europa League, they'll be in the Champions League next season, despite lying closer to the relegation places this season. But overall, with Liverpool's win and the relegation places sewn up, most of the drama is done now. It'll be interesting to see if Liverpool rest on their laurels for the rest of the season, or if they come out ready to play again - that'll be the real test of what kind of manager Arne Slot turns out to be.