Tag: Andor

Andor nother thing (Andor Episodes 4, 5, 6 supplemental)
Last time we re-introduced ourselves to Cassian Andor, Rogue One’s most dead character.

Love this guy and the set he appears in.

Critically interrupted this week by the venerable Blood Knife swooping in and taking all my grand, abstract thoughts about Star Wars following the conclusion of this trilogy of Andor episodes. Go read that first! It’s the official post of the week. I do have a handful of stray thoughts to sit here though, for anyone for who that wasn’t enough.

Dragging ourselves miserably back to the world of Star Wars, it would be remiss not to mention that having showed us that it could be a better Obi-wan, Andor doesn’t miss a beat in showing us that it could be a better Solo — the tight-knit group of proto-rebels lifting improbably defended Imperial resources being the middle act of that film. It’s a very well executed heist movie, giving us the full Ocean’s 11: here are the cast, here are the pieces, here’s half the plan and here’s one or two wrinkles.

In a fashion that feels ludicrously expensive, the show introduces more new characters for this run of episodes than appeared in Obi-wan in total: for our heist squad, there’s the bossy one, the uptight one, the sleazy one, the intense one, the double agent, and the communist. For the opposition: the double agent (again), a rake of subordinates, the squalid provincial governer, a prestigious colonial administrator on a visit, and a plucky comms officer who is going to be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.

Stay outdoors, my dude. Going back to your station is not going to go well for you.

Some interesting formalisms at play too, with episode 5 following the spread of different characters through a single extended day, breakfast to dusk — all apparently in the service of a pretty good joke where off-the-board player piece Karn, the antagonist of the first run of episodes, appears to spend the entire day miserably eating one bowl of cereal. Karn’s position in the plot is usurped by a run of scenes of bureaucratic intrigue in the Imperial Spy Ministry (or some such), a larger, snobbier version of Karn’s treasured corporate police.

In an impossibly charming move (in a show that is coming to be defined by the quantity of charming moves it cares to pull off in each episode) the scheme is explained to us over a scale model of the target base, which gets a ceremonial burning the night before the mission that manages to evoke Darth Vader’s funeral pyre.

Interesting is the extent to which the show is happy to play on our pre-knowledge of the character of Andor — obviously as the protagonist he was always going to be likely to have some kind of heart of gold, but the specifics go further. The scene where he reassures the other proto-revolutionaries that tensions always run high the night before a mission seems almost to position Rogue One prior to Andor in the running order. We know this character has experience with rebel missions: we’ve seen him steal the Death Star plans. Cassian’s run of shooting first continues unabated too, all the more pointed with the similarities to Solo.

Skarsgard gets to flex his acting muscles and his facial muscles in his mirror life as the smiling curiosity shop owner — the show again cannily shying away from exactly why such a profession might be prudent for a rebel agent. These scenes introduce Mon Mothma, a vintage Star Wars character who has never really had one, except possibly in the extended universe of books that I never read. These scenes are also set on a returning Coruscant, speeder cars and dining chambers looking every bit as grandiloquent as it was depicted in the Prequels. There’s even a scene in the Imperial senate, which was always an incredible bit of visual design and I was thrilled to see it return. We don’t see who is in position on the centre podium, alas.

Oh crap we do see! Where’s Mas Amedda?!

Up next:
Ranking, best to worst:
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19 October 2022
Ando Calrissian (Andor Episodes 1, 2, 3)
Last time turmoil engulfed the Galactic Republic as we discussed episode -3 of Obi-wan, The Phantom Menace.

They better not try and make a big thing out of that Quake logo Rebel Alliance symbol again. I will snap.

So once again we return to these damn Star Wars. It does feel like a joke. Following Obi-wan I swore blind that I was done dipping my toes in the Disney Star War pool, the life-giving waters were certainly all dried up and gone by the time I watched Kenobi face Vader on the exceedingly dark planet of the stalagmites. The problem — it seemed — was that there was simply nothing more to say on the subject of Star Wars. You can pass some time making do-overs, like the sequel trilogy, you can last a while doodling in the gaps as with Solo and Rogue One, and Mandalorian probably warranted a look-in from me eventually but there’s an awful lot of it. Disney’s four-billion-dollar purchase was running along on borrowed time. At some point they were going to try something — like interpolating an alternative follow-up to the prequel trilogy where Vader has some kind of evil daughter who menaces baby Luke — and have it just not work. And so it was.

I found Andor to be a baffling announcement for a series anyway, in the fashion of Michael Bluth hearing about his son’s girlfriend. Really? Him? Don’t get me wrong, Diego Luna was perfectly pleasant in Rogue One, his chemistry with protagonist Felicity Jones papering over any number of cracks in the shooting script. Despite that, he wasn’t an obvious candidate for the extended universe treatment, not just because — spoilers abound — he pops his clogs in the climax of that film, sacrificing himself to the rebel cause. There’s little obvious scope for expanding his story in preference to any of the rest of that cast, many of who were underserved in Rogue One. It almost seemed ridiculous to hope that, even absent the pressure of dealing with a prominent legacy character like Ben Kenobi, the series might flourish. The most we could hope for was that in a post-Obi-wan world, it might be a safer bet to take on characters and relationships that aren’t dripping with potential — if only to save us all the heartbreak.

Him?

I speculated in writing on that series that Obi-wan was an attempt to make a new sequel to Revenge of the Sith in the way that Rogue One had been an attempt to make a new prequel to A New Hope. The insertion of Andor into this genealogy forces us to consider Rogue One instead as a new Return of the Jedi, the terminal end of a series that’s about to be filled in backwards. This is, inarguably, a George Lucas move. From the prequels to the Clone Wars to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, George Lucas loves nothing more than starting a series in the middle somewhere. Could this be an authentically positive omen for Andor?

Getting it out of the way straight off, it’s good. I hate it and I wish it weren’t the case but it’s really good. The genius of Andor, at least in this first trilogy of episodes, is that it doesn’t even try. It’s barely Star Wars. Where it could reference Star Wars it often doesn’t — when antagonist Arnold Rimmer addresses a crack team of extremely unpleasant security agents in the second episode, it could be a pastiche of Darth Vader addressing the bounty hunters in Empire Strikes Back, but it isn’t. Instead its Lieutenant Gorman from Aliens trying to give a pep talk to the cops from The Fifth Element. The first episode opens with the titular Cassian Andor (last seen sleepwalking through that terrible reshoot scene for Rogue One where he lets a man climb halfway up a wall before shooting him) in a greasy, grimy neon city that’s Blade Runner by way of Attack of the Clones but separate and distinct from both.

This feels mean.

It seems implausible that we actually see less of this future neon city than we do the party drug planet from Obi-wan given how much more vibrant and coherent it feels — in what will become a running mark of quality, there’s an extended scene of the club bouncer patting Andor down and giving him the house rules before he heads in. These small moments and subtle characters count tenfold in making the setting compelling, and Andor has them in spades: the busybody on the space transport who thinks everything’s crooked, the town bellringer who takes immense pride in his work without saying a single word, the guy who Cassian owes money to who has hired a local shark man to lightly menace him (yes, a loan-shark). These things could all easily be on the cutting room floor, and a persistent complaint I had about Obi-wan was that they invariably were, giving the impression of a world where people only ever talked when they wanted to muse about starting a rebellion.

This is just Wall-E.

The introduction sequence ends with the inciting incident for the plot of this run of three episodes: Andor shoots first. Framed for a crime he totally committed, he desperately tries to get off-planet while paying his debts and looking after his suspiciously sassy mother. A droid that looks like Wall-E to such an extent that Disney would surely sue if this weren’t being made by Disney pleads with him to stay, but no dice, he’s getting his friend who works on pod race engines to ring up Stellen Skarsgård immediately. Interspersed are flashback scenes in which we see that Andor himself comes from a tribe of presumably-indigenous humanoid scavengers on an Imperial planet. That is to say, he is an Ewok.

The antagonism is provided by Inspector Karn, who as I’ve mentioned draws on no-one so much as Red Dwarf’s Arnold Rimmer, a cripplingly insecure, incredibly tedious busybody who serves as deputy inspector for the sub-Imperial corporate police force. He is an absolute delight in every scene, especially once paired with Alex Fern’s toadying fascist sergeant. I can only assume we’re going to see him get promoted to the highest ranks in the course of his Javert-like pursuit of Andor (who, I should note again, is totally guilty).

Boo! Hiss!

It’s not all roses (well, it’s mostly roses). The 40-minute episode format, while I personally prefer it to the prestige TV standard hour makes little sense for a set of three episodes that feel like nothing more than an episode of Sherlock, a show that hugely benefitted from its feature-length runtime. The ending of the second episode is particularly odd, showcasing some dramatic walking that has the air of being test footage. I’m going to try and consider the show to be a run of movies as best as I can, a series of four features. If they’d released it all at once I’d probably have gone back to my old tricks and started at the end.

The action sequence that takes up most of the third episode falls a little flat in places, such as the multiple uses of “a rope coil has suddenly detached from a pillar” maybe making sense from a logical point of view but perhaps not a dramatic one. Much in the tradition of classic Doctor Who however, the bread and butter of the acting is just good enough to make up for it. Watching Skarsgård and Luna bicker over who gets to be mysterious and aloof to who is well worth the price of entry.

Not another one!

The ending of the third episode, where Andor leaves with Skarsgård, is somewhat muted only because we’re having such a great time with the characters established on Ferrix (the name of the planet). I didn’t want to see them go, but I also can’t see how the plot could return to Ferrix without being contrived. We’ll see. Plenty of time to mull things over in the weeks to come.

The tricky thing with Star Wars is, everyone wants to have a lightsaber. You want to have a lightsaber. I want to have a lightsaber. The people making Andor want to have a lightsaber. How long can they maintain the trapeze act of making Star Wars that isn’t primarily influenced by Star Wars? That’s what we’re going to find out, I guess.

Up next:
Ranking, best to worst:
1. The Phantom Menace
2. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
3. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
4. Obi-wan: Episode 5
5. Obi-wan: Episode 3
6. Obi-wan: Episode 1
7. Obi-wan: Episode 6
8. Obi-wan: Episode 4
9. Obi-wan: Episode 2
If you like my writing, please subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now.
23 September 2022

Tag: Andor

Andor nother thing (Andor Episodes 4, 5, 6 supplemental)

Ando Calrissian (Andor Episodes 1, 2, 3)