Star Wars: Andor Season1

2022, Disney+ - 12 episodes
created by Tony Gilroy

Back in 2016 when Rogue One hit the theatres, I was in the pocket for Gareth Edwards.  I had quite enjoyed Monsters and I thought his Godzilla was pretty great. The rumours that swirled around the trouble behind the scenes of Rogue One I thought, certainly, were in spite of his efforts, and that the film that resulted was still largely his film.  But the rumour was that Tony Gilroy, screenwriter of the Bourne Series and writer/director of Michael Clayton, had extensively rewritten and reshot the film, and that it was largely a success because of his efforts.  I thought Gilroy an imposter.  I had heard he wasn't a Star Wars fan, that this was just a dispassionate work-for-hire gig for him, and so there's no way this guy, with no great love for the property, could have contributed anything great, right? 

Feed me all your crow, I'm ready to eat it.

Gilroy has masterminded not just an amazing Star Wars show, but a mature drama that's a perfect entry for the new golden age of television. It's a sweeping ensemble drama that could very well be an Earth-based political thriller but with half the intensity and likely a fraction of the viewership.  There's something very potent about using something like the Star Wars universe as a platform to tell a story about fascism, tyranny, oppression, complacency, subversion, resistance, and rebellion, and the impact such dramatic systems have on so many different types of people affected by them.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is our titular character, and the de-facto lead, but there are so many other characters who have their own journeys that never directly engage with him.  Cassian, searching for his long lost sister, runs afoul of local law enforcement.  Their harassment leads to the accidental death of one officer, and then the outright murder of the other.  The death of these officers is the first domino in a chain reaction that splits off into muliple factions that spiral and climb and zigzag in such surprising directions all while examining the reality of what the Star Wars galaxy was like just as the Empire was at it's height, 5 years before A New Hope came along.

Cassisan's friend Bix (Adria Arjona) has been a fence for his stolen Imperial goods for years.  He's caught the attention of Luthen (Stellan Skarsgard), who is sort of the secret puppeteer of the rebellion behind closed doors.  Not yet a definite collective force against the Emprie, but rather a series of independent operators, Luthen is maybe the only one who knows who all these players are.  He wants Cassian as a new recruit, but Cass is too jaded, and a little to self-reflexive, so instead he's hired as part of a crew for a job, which is to steal a regional cachet of credits from the Empire.  

While Cassian meets his new crew, all as wary of him as he is of them, and they sort of put each other through their paces in preparing for the job, things back home are getting worse.  An attempt to capture Cassian by the regional security force went horribly awry. Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), the morally righteous deputy inspector who led the assault, finds himself severly tested when he loses everything as the Empire takes over and the entire security force is shut down.  Syril goes back to living with his mother (Kathryn Hunter) who approaches Syril with sugar in one hand and lye in the other.  Their scenes together, perhaps the most gloriously pedestrian ever in a Star Wars production, are also some of the series best.  It just goes to show that, for all the high drama of family dynamics of the Skywalker Saga, there are just normal parent/adult child relationships in this universe, full of backhanded compliments, bitter truths, and sarcasm.  Plus in these scenes with Syril and his mom, we get to see just every day mundanity in Star Wars...what people eat, how they act when they're just getting on with life, making do in this shitty galaxy.

Syril's debacle on Ferrix yields one small nugget, a stolen piece of technology which catches the attention of the Imperial Security Bureau, the special investigative service of the Empire that sniff out the problems big and small for the Empire, and crush them... a galactic KGB if you will.  One agent, Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) has to navigate fierce competition within the bureau, as well as some intense bureaucratic protocols that make it really hard to do her job, but she's piecing together that maybe a lot of the small acts of sedition against the Empire on different planets across the galaxy are perhaps not unrelated, and that the thief Cassian Andor may be the key to unravelling it all.

On the other side, senator Mon Mothma (a returning Genevieve O'Reilly), an opulent, erudite crusader for the well being of not just her constituents, but all of the galaxy, is more than aware that the senate is just a farce, with many of her colleagues utter toadies of the Emperor's and whatever resistance she puts on in Senate chambers is merely a show that is being allowed to happen, so that it can't be said the other side is not represented.  She, however, is back-channel funding resistance fighting through Lucien, but is finding moving her money around much more difficult with further Imperial lockdown as a result of the heist upon the Imperial reservoir Cassian was involved in.

The heist at the mid-point of the series, is an intense climax to a slow-burn lead-in.  From Cassian's perspective, it did not go well, but he got out alive.  From Lucien's perspective, it was a success whether or not it succeeded.  Just the mere attempt would result in a over-reactive response, which Lucien knows will further tamp down on individual rights and freedoms and shake people out of their complacency about the Empire and the evil its spilling across the galaxy.  If Lucien wants to build a serious rebellion, he's going to need people who are motivated to fight, bodies to throw at the front lines and smarter bodies to do the dirty work that needs doing in the background.

Star Wars, for years, had been so black-and-white, good guys versus bad guys.  The prequels introduced the ideas of a political reality that lead to this structure, a political nature where one man saw a broken system and was conniving enough to exploits the cracks to ultimate power.  Slowly over time, things change, the grip tightens and control becomes ultimate. But those structures are not simple ones, it's not just the oppressed and the oppressors, rulers and resisters... there's whole systems of middlepersons who grease the wheels and keep the machines of rule and rebellion going.  Nothing happens without money, without conviction, without belief in their causes.

There's no doubt that the Empire is full of work-a-day people just doing jobs, fearing for their life if they don't perform up to snuff.  But there are also believers, those that think that no matter how the work is done and costs that result, it's justified, a cause of galactic peace and order worth every sacrifice, including one's own conscience.  And we see the same in the mirror of the rebellion, of men and women who know that the only avenue to defeating the enemy and liberating the people from their tyranny is by relieving themselves of their conscience in order to meet them on their own playing field.

Gilroy understands the human side of this star war and he drills right down into it.  He wants us not to focus on the biggest picture, but the mosaic that makes up the bigger picture.  There's only so many small stories he can tell in the time he's given, but his ancillary characters all seem to have an inner life in a way that so many peripheral characters in Obi-Wan Kenobi or Book of Boba Fett did not.  Those other Disney+ series struggled with their storytelling, which felt like stretching a film over multipe hours and episodes to no superior effect, and no additional rewards in their telling.  Like Oshea Jackson Jr. turned up in many scenes in Obi-Wan but there was no character there, no sense that he exists outside of those moments that need him to exist.  Here, every character feels a part of something, living a life outside of the story or stories that intersect or impede upon what they were doing.

The sprawling nature of the show comes at an expense, and that's a dramatic lack of elaborate aliens.  There's not the usual diaspora of life in this Star Wars entry as we're used to, and there's multiple ways to think about that.  It's an opulent, expensive show...it looks fantastic and can not have been cheap to construct all those sets, all those wardrobes , and all those extras (the Volume, the 360 degree digital screen environment built for The Mandalorian, which seemed to confine Obi-Wan extensively and much of Boba Fett, seems absent here, and if it is used, is not at all obvious), so the concession was likely a drastic reduction in the number of creatures and special effects needed.  There are a few of each, but sparing.  At the same time, this is a very human tale, and a lack of aliens really roots it in that humanity.  Sometimes in-story there is a logical reason for it to be all humans (prisoners separate by their homeland, for instance, to reduce conflict and communication problems) as well as the never-spoken-but-we-all-know-it fact that the Empire, space Nazis that they are, believe a human race the superior race and have no problem with genocide.  If anything, the lack of aliens raises awareness of the lack of aliens..it's noticeable, and should be noted.

I cannot gush enough about this series.  Each episode left me wanting more, and eagerly anticipating the following Wednesday when more would come.  I would sit watching with a big, dumb smile on my face, reveling in the little details but also the joy of having a really adult Star Wars show that has something to say about these human, political and economic structures that confine us.  There's a definite rise in fascistic mentality in the world in recent years, a lot of fear displaced into reactionary conservative politics, handing power over to people incapable of utilizing if for the betterment of anyone but themselves.  For all the efforts of The Force Awakens, that type of simplistic revisionism that descends into and action and spectacle heavy production doesn't inspire one to think too much about the structures that lead to tyranny and complacency about tyranny.  Here, it's front and center, in every moment...the parallels to real life can be drawn at almost any moment.  Hopefully it's inspiring, but at the very least it's thoroughly compelling.

A second/final season is in pre-production and can't come fast enough.  This may not be STAR WARS of the flash-bang space-wizard laser-sword variety, but it definitely has its place.  The hope is that this is just the first of stories like this, not the only.  More than any other Star Wars, it's the riskiest endeavour, its most challenging to the status quo of what we Star Wars fans know and will accept, and I will happily take more.