I finished watching "Andor" last night.
Tony Gilroy deserves a little more attention.
Partly due to the looming expiration of my access to Disney+, but mostly because this show was far better than anything I’ve watched in a long time, I blitzed Andor until I couldn’t keep my eyes open last night. I was sketching stuff for my next book but really, I was watching this show.
The Overall Story
The show wanders, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s absolutely going towards its necessary ending: Cassian Andor will be a major Rebel player, and this show is the story of how he became the Indispensable Man.
He was born on a planet called Kenari, not unlike the Amazon jungle, which was being strip-mined by the Republic/Empire when he was a child. He and a few others from his village went to check out a crashed spaceship near the mine; the others were killed, and he was abducted by some scavengers who were actually doing him a favor; if the Republic had found him, they’d just have shot him.
Now adopted by the scavengers, he was given a false origin story because Something Bad happened over on Kenari (I didn’t pick up on what, I feel like they’re saving that). Throughout the years on a planet called Ferrix, he picked up some basic smuggling skills, and now that he’s an adult he’s hopping around different planets looking for his sister, who he left behind on Kenari that fateful day.
The search takes him to a planet where he runs afoul of a couple of drunk corporate enforcers who try to mug him. Things go south and he kills them both, then returns to Ferrix. The issue would get swept under the rug by the local police chief, but unfortunately there’s a spergie on the staff who won’t let it go. He pulls at the thread until it leads him to Andor on Ferrix, but the attempted capture ends up with numerous corpo-cops dead, and the spergie is fired.
Andor draws attention from a local Rebellion mastermind named Luthen, who recruits him for a job. At first, it’s just that: a job. Andor wants to get paid so he can clear his debts and get his adoptive mother off of Ferrix. The job requires robbing an Imperial vault on another planet. He succeeds, but a lot of the heist crew dies. He takes his payout and leaves, but when he tries to get his mother off of Ferrix, she refuses to go on the run. Annoyed, Andor takes a vacation on a beach planet, but while he’s out and about he gets arrested by a group of overzealous shoretroopers, and then imprisoned by a kangaroo court.
Right here I want to say that the show ALMOST started to feel like Forrest Gump in space—a guy just walks around and big things happen to him for no reason. Where the story went from here was critical, though, and I give Tony Gilroy a ton of credit for tying all these threads together in the way that he does.
While Andor is in the prison, he gains a greater appreciation for just how big and bad the Empire is. They’re enslaving people through the prison system on the most trumped-up charges ever, all so they can force them into producing equipment for the Empire. The purposes of these pieces aren’t immediately made clear, but you find out at the end that they’re components for the Death Star, which tracks for the timeline.
Andor is key to leading a prison revolt, though it takes three episodes (a hallmark of this show is how slowly it moves, because it’s thorough). When he get backs to civilization, he finds out that his mother died on Ferrix. The Empire’s secret intelligence police—who’ve been trying to find him this entire time—use his mother’s funeral as bait to draw him out. This brings everything to a head in the final episode, which I won’t spoil in detail, suffice it to say that it cements his status as a reliable power player in the Rebellion. His motivation for the future is secure, his ties to the past are severed, and now you understand why this guy works so hard to take down the Empire.
Superb writing.
The Characters
None of that even touches on the side characters, all of whom are well-written, well-acted, and well-done. Luthen Rael is like Han Solo with more money and fewer Fs to give, portrayed to perfection by Stellan Skarsgaard (I have NEVER seen this dude turn in a bad performance).
Mon Mothma plays the Senate game, and she’s also trying to fund the Rebellion while hiding her activities from Imperial auditors. This forces her to team up with seedy characters and make extremely hard decisions for her family, including her only daughter, who already doesn’t like her.
Syril Karn is the spergie corpo-cop who, even when fired, can’t let the Andor thread go, and he ultimately helps ISB Agent Dedra Meero track him down. Meero, for her part, is an incredibly ambitious and dangerous ISB agent who believes in the Imperial cause and has a cutthroat way of doing things.
But as far as the side characters go, my man-of-the-match has to be Kino Loy, played by Andy Serkis, who’s a human Swiss Army Knife of acting. He’s got a three-episode arc in the Imperial prison where he goes from believing in the system to completely turning it on its head. I was cheering hard for him in his final episode.
You get the picture. Nobody phoned it in on this production, at any level.
Connection to Legacy
Let me say first that nobody even mentions Tatooine, lol. Freaking finally. Yes we have a stealth Death Star reference, but that’s relevant for the timeline, as well as Andor’s final mission in Rogue One. They needed to address it somehow. It was there, and then they got back to doing their own thing.
They didn’t break any real canon, they only enriched it. More of that, please.
Production Quality
Very high. Score was fine, the set was amazing, there was a lot of attention to detail. Good cinematography and effects.
Does it have…tHe MeSsAge?
No. There was a slight hint of something with the Space Lesbian characters, when one of them asked if she was looking for a husband and she got all quiet, but they didn’t go down the road of “UGH THERE ARE OTHER OPTIONS” like you’d get in basically anything else.
I also wondered where the hell they were going with the rapid-imprisonment-kangaroo-court storyline until the reasoning became clear in the Imperial labor jail. Story took precedence over anything else.
How’s the casting?
Just awesome. They all took it seriously, they thought about their parts, they gave the performance nuance at every turn. I salute them.
Just look at Skarsgaard in this scene. He’s talking to an asset who wants out of the Rebellion, because he’s got a child now and doesn’t want to endanger her. Up to this point, Luthen Rael has more or less come off as a hardcase tough guy who pulls the strings at the top. Rich, connected, dangerous. But when he peels back the curtain and you see what he is inside, it’s raw and real and you can see the depth that was put into him.
The writers understood the soul of a rebel, and the actors brought it to life. I’ve never watched a story like this where you get the real origins of a rebellion. It’s brutal and visceral and powerful.
The Future
There’s supposed to be a second and final season next summer, the writer strike has apparently affected it. I think this season—if it somehow ends up being the only one—works fine on its own as a lead-in to Rogue One, but I wouldn’t hate a second season if the same people were in charge.
Conclusion
While my subscription is done, I could see myself buying another month of it in the future once season two is all wrapped. We’ll see if the Mouse pulls its head out of its rear-end long enough to keep making at least one thing that’s good.