Count me as one of the relative few who didn’t really dig Andor,
the critically acclaimed live action Star Wars series that was released a couple of months ago
on Disney Plus. General consensus regarding the show is that it’s the best thing produced under
the Star Wars banner in quite a few years — some of its more over-the-top admirers
have declared it the best Star Wars production ever, and one of the best TV shows of the year.
And, I’m glad you all liked it — I really am — but I don’t really see it.
However! That is not to say that I thought the show was a total loss,
or that I didn’t like anything about it. There were, in fact, several things I
liked about it very much, and those things are what this video is going to be about.
See, what I noticed as I watched Andor this year is that the things I didn’t like about
it are things that I’ve also seen in countless other shows I didn’t like. Its problems are not
unique — poor pacing, spending too little time with its most compelling characters,
etc. Its virtues, on the other hand, while not unparalleled, are far less commonplace,
and therefore far more interesting, so I’m going to talk about them, instead.
The first — and, for me, foremost — of Andor’s strong points is its near
total lack of fan service. While Andor is technically a prequel — it’s set a few years
before the events of the film Rogue One, and Cassian Andor is one of the heroes of
that film — it spends almost no time doing typical prequel stuff. There are few if any
winking references to the events of other Star Wars films or shows, there’s no heavy-handed
foreshadowing — well, almost none — there is that scene where Luthen says to Andor,
“We both know eventually you’re going to die fighting these bastards,” and . . . yeah.
It’s not that the story of Andor is completely disconnected from the rest of the franchise — it’s
that it isn’t constantly waving those connections in your face to make sure you notice them,
and the story works just fine even if you don’t notice them at all.
Along that same line, the cast isn’t infested with legacy characters — there’s Andor himself,
there’s Mon Mothma, there’s Saw Gerrera, and I think that’s it.
Three might sound like a lot if you haven’t seen the show, but trust me,
there are like a hundred characters in this fucking show — three is nothing.
The lack of fan service is particularly encouraging given that Andor follows three
other live action Star Wars series — The Obi-Wan Kenobi Show, The Book of Boba Fett,
and the second season of The Mandalorian — that leaned heavily on blatant and pandering
fan service, much to their detriment. I loved season one of The Mandalorian, and I’ve got my
fingers crossed for season three, but I fear that one day soon many of us will look back at Luke
Skywalker showing up at the end of season two as the exact moment the show jumped the shark.
Andor’s popularity despite its lack of fan service demonstrates two very important things:
one, you can produce a Star Wars project that doesn’t rely on fan service, appearances from
legacy characters, or aimless meandering through “the lore”; and two, such a show can not only
be pleasing to your existing fanbase, but also be popular (and accessible) enough to actually
grow that fanbase! Hopefully the higher-ups at Disney and Lucasfilm will take the critical and
commercial success of Andor as a sign that it’s worth investing in series and films produced
under the Star Wars banner, set in the Star Wars universe, but centered on new characters involved
in new stories instead of constantly revisiting people, places and plots we’ve seen before.
The next strong point of Andor I want to highlight is its story structure. Whereas
most other streaming series — including its most recent predecessor in the Star Wars franchise,
The Obi-Wan Kenobi Show — have attempted to sustain single season-long story arcs,
Andor broke its twelve-episode season down into four smaller multi-episode arcs.
Now, as I mentioned briefly, the pacing of Andor was one of my big issues with it — it suffers
from the same “taking three episodes to tell one episode’s worth of story” problem that afflicts
many streaming series. But, while I don’t think its storytelling is very good most of the time,
I do think the framework within which it attempts to tell that story is a solid one.
After seeing how badly the first few episodes dragged, and knowing how frequently streaming
shows try to stretch a story out for an entire season, I was worried when Luthen recruited Andor
to join the heist at the imperial base on Aldhani. I assumed that would be the story for the rest
of the season, that we wouldn’t actually see the heist until episode twelve. I was wrong! Instead,
we get the heist in episode six, and the second half of the season focuses on the
show’s many characters dealing with the fallout from the heist in various ways.
The overarching story of the season is structured something like a Shakespeare play,
in the sense that the climax — the Aldhani heist — happens at around the midpoint,
and the back half is all falling action leading into the resolution. It’s a much
more interesting way to lay out a story across an entire season, giving the show a chance to explore
the meaning and consequences of things that happen in it, rather than spending
the entire time building up to a pay-off that may or may not be worth the wait.
Again, hopefully the powers-that-be will take this as a lesson. Andor, with its more complex story,
built from multi-episode arcs rather than trying to sustain a single story arc for
the whole season, has attracted a lot of praise from both its audience and critics alike. It, as
well as other streaming shows that came out this year — the even more episodic Star Trek: Strange
New Worlds being first among them — reminds us that a series doesn’t need to string its
viewers along waiting for a pay-off in the final episode to keep the attention of those viewers.
It’s pretty simple: if people like the show, they’ll want to see what happens next, whether
there’s a major plotline left unresolved or not. As always, the best hook is a good episode.
Next is one of the most praised elements of the show: its depiction of the Galactic
Empire — specifically, its focus on the more small-scale tyrannies the Empire imposes on the
people under its authority. You read reviews of Andor and the phrase “banality of evil”
shows up a lot. That phrase was coined in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem,
an account of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had been a high-ranking
official in Hitler’s Third Reich and was one of the primary architects of the Holocaust.
Eichmann was ultimately found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged. Arendt
noted how unimpressive, how almost pathologically mundane Eichmann was. He was one of the people
most responsible for one of the most horrific atrocities in human history, and yet he didn’t
seem especially intelligent, or charismatic. He was examined by multiple psychologists, who found
that he showed no signs of any personality disorders or mental illness. Arendt even
observed that Eichmann exhibited no particular hatred of or hostility toward Jewish people.
He didn’t come across as a violent psychopath, or a monster. He seemed chillingly ordinary.
That’s how the agents of the Empire we meet in Andor seem. The evil Emperor
Palpatine is kept entirely off-screen and is only referred to a handful of
times. There’s no Darth Vader — I don’t think he’s even mentioned,
in fact. There are no Sith lords. There are only soldiers and bureaucrats,
doing their jobs. They aren’t supervillains. They’re just people. Which is the point.
The evil they perpetuate with such banality is also seen only on a relatively small scale.
There’s no Death Star blowing up planets — the thingamajigs being manufactured by the
prisoners at Narkina are Death Star components, but that isn’t confirmed until a post-credits
scene in the final episode, and it’s not of primary importance to the story. Instead,
we’re shown glimpses of a slow-motion genocide being committed against the
indigenous people of Aldhani, an unjust prison system built on baseless arrests and indefinite
detention, and the imposition of a suffocating surveillance state.
This view of the Empire is powerful because it is plausible. The instant destruction of
Alderaan in Star Wars is spectacular, but it’s also located firmly in the realm of
fantasy. It presents the evil Empire as something larger than life. In Andor,
on the other hand, it doesn’t take very much imagination at all to relate the
actions of the Empire to those of real world governments — including our own.
Which leads neatly into the next strong point of the show — its message, its main theme,
if you will. That theme being: fascism is bad and must be fought. MUST be fought — this is
crucial to the character arc of Cassian Andor himself. He spends most of the season on the run,
trying to hide from the Empire, or escape from the Empire, until finally he realizes that in a world
ruled by fascism, there is no escape, and there is no option to simply stand on the sidelines and
mind your own business. You can join the fascists, you can be crushed by the fascists, or you can
fight the fascists. Those are the choices, you have to do one of them, you don’t get to sit out.
Of those choices, Andor argues strenuously that the best choice is the third one: fight. The fight
will not be easy, the fight will not take the same form for everyone, the fight may demand that you
do some bad things in the service of a greater good, and the fight is not guaranteed to be won,
but to fight against fascism is the only moral and sensible response to fascism.
And here’s the thing: that has always been the message of Star Wars. It’s been
explicitly antifascist from the very beginning — it’s just that Andor is
closer to the ground and more literal in its depiction of fascism. Which is fine by me,
because I’m happy for Star Wars to be more than one thing. I’m happy for it to be an
epic action-adventure space opera! I’m happy for it to be a sci-fi/fantasy riff
on westerns and samurai movies! And even though I personally didn’t think Andor was all that great,
I’m happy for it to attempt to be a serious drama set in a society on the brink of revolution.
It can be any one of those things, it can be all of those things. Jedis
and light-sabers and the Force are not necessary — it can still be Star Wars.
That brings me to my final point — something else I truly hope studio executives and
producers and writers of future series and movies will take as a lesson from Andor,
especially when those future series and movies are part of established franchises:
if you want to do something different, don’t overthink it — just do it.
We’ve become so accustomed to reboots that we’ve forgotten that they’re hardly ever
actually necessary. If you want to tell a story within an established franchise
that is significantly different from the rest of that franchise in terms of tone, or style,
or focus, or whatever, you don’t have to do a hard reset of that franchise’s continuity and
start your story fresh in a new, separate fiction — you can just tell your story.
For a hypothetical example, I’m a Superman fan, as those of you who watch my stuff regularly already
know. I haven’t been a fan of any of the movies in which Henry Cavill has played Superman, but
I also think Henry Cavill is an actor who would be perfectly capable of playing a great Superman
in a film that treated the character better than he has been treated in the DCEU thus far.
Full disclosure: I wrote this bit before the news dropped
that Henry Cavill will officially not be playing Superman again any time soon, so
this example is even more hypothetical than I initially thought it was!
Not super relevant to the point I’m making with this example, but I just wanted to mention it.
Anyway. Sometimes I’ll be discussing this with fellow Supes fans, and someone will say “Sure,
Henry Cavill could be a great Superman — hypothetically — but don’t you think they
would have to just do a reset at this point and let Cavill start fresh with
a totally new version of the character, one without the baggage of Man of Steel,
Batman v Superman, and both rotten versions of Justice League?”
And my answer is always the same: no. Sure, you could do that,
and the resulting movie could be excellent, but it’s an unnecessary step. If you want to make a
good Superman movie starring Henry Cavill, write a good Superman movie, hire a good director,
and cast Henry Cavill. Make it as different from the established DCEU stuff as you want — make
it brighter, more fun, more optimistic, give Superman a completely different personality.
Don’t worry about whether or not it matches what came before — just do it.
Tell your story. Leave the irrelevant nerd shit to be argued about by irrelevant nerds.
Look at how different Andor is from other projects in the Star Wars franchise. I already
mentioned the lack of Jedi, light-sabers and the Force. There’s no Darth Vader,
no Obi-Wan Kenobi, not a Skywalker in sight.
Andor also features almost no space battles — just one quick one when Luthen has to break bad
to escape an Imperial patrol in the second-to-last episode. The action of the series is almost
entirely planet-bound. There are almost no aliens — all of the major characters are humans,
with just a few aliens in the backgrounds of a handful of scenes. There is a cute droid,
but he is used very sparingly. And the story isn’t a rip-roaring sci-fi
adventure, but more of a cross between a political thriller and a crime drama.
It looks, and sounds, and feels unlike anything else in Star Wars,
but it takes place in the same world as the Mos Eisley Cantina, and Jar Jar Binks,
and Harvey Korman the four-armed space chef — the Holiday Special is canon, fight with
me about it all you want, you’ll never change my mind. Andor doesn’t waste any time trying
to explain why it feels so different from the rest of the franchise, or justifying those differences,
or anything else like that. It tells its story the way it wants to tell it, it doesn’t worry about
how well it fits in tonally or stylistically with what’s come before, because the creators of Andor
are smart enough to realize that if they make a good show, nobody will give a shit about that.
And in my case, even though I don’t think they made a good show,
I still don’t give a shit about it, and I’m surprised and delighted
to find a Star Wars creative team that doesn’t give a shit, either!
One of the strongest principles of my personal philosophy as both an audience member and a
critic is that the creators of a TV show or a movie or whatever it is should have
the freedom to make their thing the way they want to make it. It doesn’t matter if it’s
meant to be part of an established franchise. That’s why I never cared about the stylistic
and aesthetic changes introduced to Star Trek by the Kelvin timeline films, or Star Trek:
Discovery. It doesn’t look or feel like the rest of Star Trek? Not a problem — the
people who made it have the right to make it look and feel however they think it’s
supposed to. It’s a sci-fi/fantasy show, not a dramatization in a historical documentary.
Same deal with Andor. It takes place in the same continuity as Star Wars,
it deals with events that are meant to lead up to the events of Star Wars, it is quite different
from Star Wars tonally and stylistically — I don’t care, the people who love it don’t care.
The lesson: if you’re making something that takes place within an established fictional universe,
and you want it to be a departure from the other stories that have been set in that universe,
you don’t have to overthink it, you don’t have to bend over backwards to justify it, you can — and
you should — just do it. The audience will embrace it or reject it on its own merits.
So anyway. Andor is one of those rare projects where even though I didn’t personally enjoy it
all that much, I am nonetheless very happy for its success. I’m glad a show like this has attracted
so much positive attention and praise, even though I have often found that praise to be way over
the top. Because, despite its shortcomings, it exhibits qualities I wish I encountered more often
in new series and films. It eschews popular trends that I find dismaying, such as the overreliance on
pandering fan service and legacy characters. It has something important to say about what fascism
looks like, and how we ought to respond to it. And it demonstrates that a venerable franchise like
Star Wars can be taken in new directions, and both old fans and new will come along for the ride.
I didn’t really like Andor — usually — I did like some of it — I mean, how could
you not love that monologue from Luthen in episode ten? — but it’s definitely a
show with attributes I admire. I’ve found it a lot more enjoyable to think about it
and talk about it after the fact than to actually watch it. But, who knows?
Maybe I’ll like season two better. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. May the Force be with us.
Except on Andor. You don’t need it.