And Or

In case you were wondering what the "premiere Star Wars Blog of 2014" thought before making your decision, yeah, you should watch Andor. I think most of you know about it already, and hear it was good. If you haven't watched it, go do that thing. It's worth subscribing to Disney+ for a month. The rest of this post is analysis and highlights assuming you've seen it.

Oh, also a 1970's intro sequence for the show.

• Andor is the first "Prestige Television" media for the SW franchise. Mandalorian was of course a good SW show, but it was a call back to episodic 80's shows and cowboy/Kurosawa style story-telling, with just 1.5 persistent characters who go to another locale and another adventure each episode. It was a fresh reminder of how something can be enjoyed outside the modern prestige format. But Andor is replete with the sprawling world and relationships and non-discrete storylines that bleed from episode to episode and "realistic" dialogue instead of Saturday serial heroism. It's about politics with skullduggery and severe costs, about heroes who don't want to be heroes, and especially about war at the ground floor where everything is chaotic and dirty.
  
  
• It's incredibly class aware, functioning at the level of "Attack of the Clones." We have plot lines with the super rich Senators shuffling around money and playing at dilettante terrorist or neo-traditionalist NRX, depending on their whim today. We have working class laborers, spending all day in the mines salvage yards and living in dusty shelters and converting their bodies to bricks when they die. We even have prison-labor, giving us a close view of factory production for three episodes.
  
  
• It strays from many of the themes and tones of classic Star Wars, but then remixes those tropes in different ways. There has been zero mention of the Force or Jedi so far, let alone that the Emperor is a Sith Lord. But in terms of what is drawn by the images, it depicts a young rebellion that is being contested by both the Dark Side and Light Side for control. Luthen morally acts like and appears like a Sith Lord, draped in shadows and black robes while talking about all the evil sacrifices he's made for victory. Which is contrasted by Maarva post-mortem speaking through a blue hologram projected from a droid, about the need to rouse ourselves from sleepiness and fight the Empire. (Blue holograms and force ghosts of the dead being a common way light-force users are depicted in the Original Trilogy.)
  
  
• Luthen, played by Stellan Skarsgard, is holy shit so good.
  
  
• The plot/episode structure is interesting. The season (of which there will be two) is 12 episodes long, but the first three and second three episodes are broken up as separate arcs on specific locales that end on a cathartic battle. So it more leans towards a serial of 4 movies. (Annoyingly the third arc starts in episode 8 instead of 7, breaking this pace up.) I've said before that of the release methods of shows on streaming services - on the spectrum from 1 episode a week to the entire season binged at once, I prefer things like Arcane where they release 2-3 episodes weekly, giving you a reliable "chunk" of narrative to consume at once.
  
  
• Fascism. A lot of media, especially comics related, tries to be "an exploration of fascism" these days, without understanding what that means except "right-leaning authority." Andor really gets into the bureaucracy of fascism, highlighting several characters and their motives and ambitions and how they respond to the threat of chaos. They're down charismatically enough for us to enjoy their scenes, but never so morally neutral that we root for them over the rebellion.
  
  
• Concomitantly, it shows throughout the series that the real threat to the Empire is "there are many, many more of us than you." In all four arcs, the Empire has secured stability through the use of force... but if the ruled populace decided to fight back all at once, they would wipe out the imperal force present.
  
  
• The visuals. I don't think I can do justice describing them, but they are well thought out and executed (like Rogue One's.)
  
  
• Representation. There's good racial representation (including a hispanic leading actor), but it has much less alien presence than other SW works, which have always stood in for the ethnic minorities in the human-white-male dominated Empire.
  
  
• There are a ton of non-main characters who are well written and acted. But Sybil the failed fascist is in particular such an endearing loser that you're glad to see him crash early on, then curious to watch him try to climb back afterwards.