Directed by: Ariel Kleiman, Janus Metz, Alonso Ruizpalacios
Distributed by: Disney+
Written by Anna Harrison
85/100
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, “Star Wars” was good.
It looked beautiful. Its characters were lively. Its script had meaning (even if it sometimes lacked nuance). The releases were proper events, heralded by a bunch of sweaty nerds clumsily swinging around lightsabers. But since the dud of J.J. Abrams’ “The Rise of Skywalker,” “Star Wars” has sat on the cultural shelf, if not forgotten, then at least defanged. Recent “Star Wars” has, by and large, been neutered; any sharp edges have been sanded down to allow for cameos and glup shittos instead of those pesky little things such as character development and thematic relevance.
Not so with “Andor.” As a prequel show to a spinoff movie, “Andor” could have easily fallen prey to that apex predator known as nostalgia, relying on lazy self-references instead of its own world-building, yet at every turn, showrunner Tony Gilroy does the impossible: he resurrects “Star Wars.” It may be a brief spell—we have more flat, nonsensical shows and movies to look forward to soon and nary a promising story on the horizon—but at least for now, somehow, “Star Wars” has returned, and not a moment too soon.
Season one shows the slow radicalization of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), who learns how to stand for something other than himself as the Empire begins to tighten its grasp on the galaxy. Season two now takes us through how a lowercase-r rebellion becomes a Rebel Alliance with the tools and people they need to take down the Imperial war machine.
It would be reductive to say that “Andor” shines a light on our current political state, though you would be a fool not to see the parallels, especially in the show’s first three episodes, where much of the tension comes from Imperial agents sent to the remote farming planet of Mina-Rau to sniff out refugees whose legal status is in question. But history is a circle, and Gilroy has drawn on fascist regimes and the fights against them throughout the ages: the Wannsee Conference, the June Rebellion, and the Continental Congress, to name a few. Abuses of power, rape, genocide, and the reactions against them, whether successful or not, are nothing new. What makes “Andor” so special, then, is how it so meticulously presents every domino that must fall for these things to happen, and, on the flipside, for rebellion to occur.
Take Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), for example. Her first arc in this season deals with the minutiae of her financial contribution to the various rebels, namely Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). Not exactly cinematic, and yet under Gilroy her plot becomes an urgent political thriller, and we see firsthand how everything might have fallen apart without Mon’s intricate banking arrangements and political promises, even at the cost of her family. When she must be safely squirreled away from the Senate following a fiery speech, Cassian must step in to escort her due to an Empire mole on the original group that planned to get her to safety. How does he know about this mole? Luthen’s plant in the Imperial Security Bureau, Lonni Jung (Robert Emms), has his own plant on Mon’s escort team as part of the deception he must perform to keep his job intact. Gilroy never holds the audience’s hand as they puzzle this out; Lonni never appears on screen in the episode, and only one offhand comment from a different ISB officer lets us connect the dots. Rebelling is intricate stuff. Compromises must be made, morals bent, friends lost, yet it is also necessary and vital.
Though season two was split into four “pods” of three episodes each, with each three containing a complete arc and an in-universe year between each pod, one of the largest overarching threads concerned the project that would become the Death Star. Overseen by Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, returning from “Rogue One” and obviously having the time of his life), soon ladder-climbing Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and her boss, Partagaz (Anton Lesser, one of the undersung heroes of the show), join the project, which is disguised as an energy initiative. There’s only one problem: Krennic needs a certain material only found on the planet Ghorman, and to get it, the planet would be rendered inhospitable.
Fascism, it turns out, is also intricate stuff. To render the genocide of the Ghormans acceptable, the Empire begins to plant narratives in the media—they’re too haughty, they’ve always thought of themselves as above everyone else, they’re dangerous thugs. Dedra uses her now-boyfriend Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) as a patsy so she can catch a whiff of any scent of rebellion on Ghorman.
The Empire begins to encroach on Ghorman, so slowly that the rest of the galaxy hardly notices. It does this not by grand speeches and obvious violence, but through everyday people like Syril who buy into the security that the Empire sells. Evil is boring. Evil is efficient bureaucratic workers just doing their job, where each cog turns another, on and on and on again until you get a weapon capable of wiping out an entire planet. This evil is far scarier than the Sith because it’s the kind that lets you relax your guard—and it’s precisely because of its banality that it can take hold so effectively. By the time you realize what’s happening, it’s too late, and it’s easier to just accept your lot rather than fight against it.
When the Empire does finally spring the trap on Ghorman, “Andor” turns into not just the best “Star Wars” property in a decade, but one of the most urgent and excellent television shows today. It’s a scenario we’ve seen played out before: the people gather to protest. They sing, they wave flags, they chant. The alleged peacekeepers arrive, armed to the teeth against a crowd of civilians. Then the pin drops, and thus follows the bodies. It’s a massacre so effective that it even rocks Syril, but it can’t be stopped. Cassian, stationed there to keep an eye on things, can only run as Ghorman burns—but at least, as Luthen puts it, “It will burn very brightly.”
Much like the Ghorman “solution,” much like Luthen’s handling of his convoluted network of spies, everything on “Andor” is executed with precision. Each shot, each line, is meticulous. Only the music, so excellently penned by Nicholas Britell in season one, suffers: though replacement Brandon Roberts does decently, his best moments are when he uses Britell’s leitmotifs. But who wouldn’t pale in comparison to Britell?
And let us not forget the performances. “Andor” features the type of actors who remind you that the profession isn’t just about charisma or natural talent—there is technical skill involved that requires years of training. O’Reilly can convey all of Mon’s complicated feelings towards her traditional-leaning daughter, Leida (Bronte Carmichael), without moving a muscle; a smile from Luthen, when it slips out, reveals all. Soller, Gough, and Luna all improve on their standout performances from season one, and supporting performances from the likes of Emms, Lesser, and Richard Sammel as Ghorman revolutionary Carro Rylanz fill in the gaps between years with an ease that speaks to years of honing their craft. Forest Whitaker returns as Saw Gerrera to give a monologue that would convince you to go on a suicide run for him. And, of course, I would be remiss not to mention Elizabeth Dulau as Luthen’s assistant, Kleya, who becomes the secret weapon of “Andor” going into the latter half of the season. When the time comes for Kleya to carry the show on her own in episode ten, Dulau does it so easily that it’s hard to believe “Andor” was her first job after graduating drama school. Kleya rarely speaks and even more rarely betrays her true emotions, but behind Dulau’s eyes there is an entire world.
It’s strange, after watching such an astonishing season of television, to have regrets, but I do: I regret that we won’t ever get the five seasons that Gilroy originally planned. Imagine what Gilroy could have done with two seasons on Ghorman rather than six episodes, or with years to depict Cassian and K-2SO (Alan Tudyk, also returning from “Rogue One”) learning to trust one another. By and large, the season doesn’t suffer for its truncated story, but the things left to implication are rich enough to fill many more hours. Better to leave them wanting more, I suppose.
Only one other thing keeps this from being a perfect season of television: the final shot (spoilers follow).
In season one, Cassian’s childhood-friend-turned-ex-turned-friend-again, Bix (Adria Arjona), was a businesswoman quietly making her own moves to assist the rebellion by giving Luthen any intelligence she stumbled across. After torture at the hands of the Empire, she flees her home planet of Ferrix, and, sometime between seasons, she and Cassian reheat their romance. Arjona is a fine actress, if not as technically skilled as the likes of O’Reilly or Lesser, and Bix is a fine character, yet the minute she becomes tethered to Cassian in season two, all momentum comes screeching to a halt. She, most of all the characters, is hurt the most by Gilroy’s decision to trim the show down to two seasons, because what could have been season-long arcs become mere blips that feel like a desperate attempt to give her character rather than genuine growth. Haunted by her torture on Ferrix, she develops a drug addiction that never leads to anything other than her staring bleary-eyed out of the window as she waits for Cassian to return. It’s implied that she has her own thorny relationship with Luthen, yet he never makes use of her. She works up the courage to kill her torturer, but we never see the buildup or payoff of that.
The most interesting thing Bix does is in episode nine: she leaves. She leaves because Cassian has threatened to quit the Rebellion (now, since the years have passed, with a capital “R”) to keep her safe, and the Rebellion is more important than her own well-being. It’s an enormous act of courage, though slightly dragged down by the fact that we hardly see Bix care about the Rebellion at large before she sacrifices her relationship for it. This dangling thread—this constant “what if” that will dog Cassian the rest of his (admittedly short) life—is yet another reminder of what must be sacrificed for the fight, and an infinitely more interesting way of writing Bix (who doesn’t appear in “Rogue One”) off than death or a simpler breakup.
Then, all this intrigue is undone by the final shot in the show. The music swells, we see Cassian fly off to Kafrene, where he will begin in “Rogue One,” and then we cut to Bix standing back on Mina-Rau, the planet from the first three episodes, a baby in hand.
It’s not a bad thing for a woman to want calm and a child amidst war. But did Bix express a desire for this before? No. She and the baby are mere symbols to show peace and tranquility. It’s not really Bix; she is just any other woman waiting with her child for the man to return so they can enter domestic bliss. The woman and her child remind the fighting man what he is missing, waiting in the wings to welcome him back when he’s done with battle, of which she could never partake on account of being too sensitive and womanly. Any trauma she might have had has been cured by the baby, because a quiet life farming with a babe on the hip is what every woman wants.
This is complicated somewhat by the fact that we know Cassian dies, so this is not quite the happy domestic life it might seem, and that “Andor” features a slew of other women who do not fall prey to tropes—but in a way, the excellence of characters such as Mon, Kleya, and Dedra plus the typical refusal of “Andor” to go the lazy route make this sting worse. Gilroy has said that he wanted to end the series on an image of hope, but why must that involve this particular image? Surely there are a myriad of ways to represent hope that don’t involve foisting a child on a woman who has been jerked around all season with no clear goal in mind. Why reduce Bix to this and retroactively make her decision to leave much less interesting? Are the only symbols we have for peace and quiet a woman with a baby?
This single shot that soured the finale for me, less so because of how egregious it was (though make no mistake, I hated it) and more because it was so anathema to how the rest of “Andor” operated. “Star Wars” has done worse things (let us all remember Padmé randomly losing the will to live after all her interesting content was cut from “Revenge of the Sith,” leaving her merely as the long-suffering wife whose fate it is to die so her death can provide man-angst), so in that, I suppose it’s a compliment that I reacted so poorly to it. Had the rest of the show been lesser, then this might have only been a blip on my radar. So bravo, Tony Gilroy, for making me so mad that I nearly threw my remote across the room.
In all seriousness—what an odd feeling, to care so much about “Star Wars” once more. I doubt we will ever have “Star Wars” as good as this again. I even doubt there will be a television show as precise and unflinching as “Andor” this year, and perhaps for quite some time. But, as they say, rebellions are built on hope, so maybe it’s time to hope for excellence again.
“Andor” Season Two Trailer
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