fevered.earth

Tag: Television

  • The Acolyte (episodes 1–8)

    Almost ten months ago now I was basically getting punked by Ahsoka. Spoilers here for all of The Acolyte.

    Me and the gang getting ready to log onto Disney+ and watch some more Star Wars.

    Once again, we return. It felt like a shame to not watch the new Star Wars TV show, especially in the anticipatory air that has swept in with the cessation of weird shareholder antics over at the Disney corporation: a fully armed and operational Bob Iger 2 will be anihilating entire cinemas in the near future, and all this TV nonsense will likely be swept under the rug, with only critical darlings Andor and The Mandolorian passing into memory. And for me, the era of misery-watching bleak tie-in slop that started back with Obi-wan and ran through Ahsoka may be tied off by — let me see — “The Mandolorian and Grogu”, coming to cinemas May 2026. I can hardly express my anticipation.

    Into the muted gulf of my attention is pitched The Acolyte, a startlingly late attempt by Disney to take the straightforward option: just do some regular TV shows, but stuff them full of cloaks, wipe transitions and laser swords. The Acolyte is theoretically free-floating, liberated from the need to tie in to any existing material. Set in what the greasy branding materials define as ‘The High Republic’ (a name presumably picked ex post facto by whoever described the original films as happening ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far far away’), the show can depict a unique setting which blends elements of Star Wars in among novel sci-fi concepts. By which I mean that it’s a cop show set five minutes before The Phantom Menace. They tried! But despite being on the face of it a poor testament to the infinite flexibility of the Star Wars setting, Acolyte does have one real trump card to play: it’s quite good.

    Sol has an almost Harry DuBois-esque incompetance to him. It’s charming, at first.

    The sequel trilogy was, of course, a sequel to Revenge of the Sith even if it struggled to live up to that mantle. Obi-wan was a sequel to the prequel trilogy. Andor was a prequel to Rogue One which was itself a belated prequel to Return of the Jedi. Ahsoka was something of an interlude — when that Thrawn film surfaces perhaps it will seem more like prologue. Into this tapestry we must weave The Acolyte, a show that more than anything seems imbued with the spirit of Attack of the Clones, set in and around the institution of the Jedi at it’s peak, as it slowly and inexorably heads towards its destruction. That movie laid the blame with institutional incapacity, incompetence, and arrogance. “Count Dooku was once a Jedi. [murder] is not in his character.” and all that.

    Acolyte opts instead to examine endemic failures: what sort of thing are individual Jedi doing, screwing up and covering up? After all, what is the failing Jedi order if not an organisation made up of failing Jedi? Very straightforwardly inspired by real-world stories of overreaching authority, most obviously the Waco siege, we learn the story of four Jedi who catastrophically screw up a basic assignment in a way that destroys the lives of two young girls. The Jedi aren’t grandly deceived, they don’t have true and pure intentions, they just do the wrong thing for selfish, poorly thought-out reasons, and people die because of it. Then the institution, as institutions are wont to do, merely acts to insulate itself from blowback. It’s simple but effective (six seasons of Line of Duty stand as testament to the story-telling power of ‘this goes all the way to the top’) and crucially well-executed. It’s well-made Star Wars.

    Does every Star Wars have to have a green bureaucrat in it now?

    Acolyte’s first strength is the cast, with Amandla Stenberg giving a competent dual showing as the sisters Osha and Mae against Manny Jacinto’s smoldering antagonist Qimir and Lee Jung-Jae’s bumbling Jedi Master Sol. There are various strong secondary players many of who, uh, take a sabbatical after the midway point, and Carrie-Anne Moss brings gravity to the crucial but brief appearances of Master Indara, whose inability to rally her underlings to her demands gives the flashback episodes something of a LinkedIn vibe to them at times. Beloved character of tie-in novels and comics ‘Vernestra’ has the unplesant job of doing the various ‘back at the ranch’ cutaways here. She’s played by Green Rebecca Henderson (the makeup still doesn’t look good), who isn’t quite as terminal a presence as Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but there’s not as much clear air between them as I’d like. In fact it’s quite odd how similar their scenes are structurally, with both characters having to cover for their wildcard colleagues — which is odd given that one of them is supposed to be a swashbuckling hero of the New Republic and the other is a corrupt, doomed administrator of the Old Republic. But I digress.

    Here’s our guy.

    Any true Attack of the Clones must have its Dexter Jettster, and here that’s definitely the elusive and mercurial Bazil, the rodent-like tracker the Jedi hire in episode 4 who quietly becomes the series’ answer to the droid mascot — but where the purpose of the droids has always been to sneak servitude and feudal mores in under the audiences’ noses, Bazil’s animal form actually makes it impossible to ignore his curious mezzanine set of rights. He has a name, he has a job, he speaks a language which can be learned. While ostensibly paying for his services though, the Jedi casually lose him in the evil forest. When he’s one of the three survivors of the clash with antagonist Qimir, Sol fails to acknowledge him at all when they’re back onboard his ship. In the finale, as Sol risks both their lives dangerously thrusting his ship into the asteroid ring, Bazil’s action to intervene receives the kind of blank expression you’d give a malfunctioning machine. Or Droid, even. This guy is obviously a person! But Sol, by this point in every way our perfectly fallen Jedi, can’t see him as human even as his actions contribute to Sol having to head down to the planet and to his eventual doom. When Qimir challenges Mae to kill a Jedi without using a weapon, perhaps this is what he means.

    Droids otherwise receive little attention here, beyond the pilot droids who are incapable of abandonning ship in the second episode and Osha’s ever-present personal assistant, whose Damascene conversion late in the series is only really a reflection of the exchange of places between Osha and Mae. Perhaps, like we’re supposed to think of the lightsaber crystal, the sheer hatred rolling about in the air turned the tiny droid evil. Or maybe it’s best to not be quite that literal.

    Qimir’s helmet is, noticably, much cooler than Kylo Ren’s.

    While I described it as a ‘cop show’ before, Acolyte is not structured like a procedural. Rather, it’s firmly in the prestige TV mold — not as structurally radical as the film/serial structure of Andor, but akin to something like True Detective: a single story explored over the season, with the decision sometimes made to weaken the structure of the overall story in order to deliver eight semi-contained episodes. This is worst for the two Rashomon-aping flashback episodes, already beleaguered as they are with child actor leads, which end up separating crucial revelations from the characters they are revelatory to; when Osha removes the sensory deprivation helmet in episode 8 we’re left to figure out for ourselves that she was probably watching episode 7 in there.

    Aside from this however the show — perhaps aware of the belligerence of the average Star Wars superfan — takes a confident if hand-holding tour through the ostensibly self-contained main plot. Centering on events on Mae and Osha’s home planet when they were children, we’re drip-fed details about how the Jedi fatally mishandled a situation such that they performed a home invasion, in the process killing their entire extended family of dubious witch-people. The hand-holding peaks with Mae and Osha’s mother, standing at the wrong end of a laser sword hilt, explaining to the audience that she’s good actually and was going to do the right thing had she not been murdered by the space police. But the twists and turns are coherent and logical, for the most part, and contain some genuinely exceptional moves for a Star Wars entry — the build of Sol into a sinister and deranged figure is slow but inexorable. Qimir’s easy company is allowed to lull the audience (and Osha) into forgetting that he’s wizard Rorschach. Even the stuff that’s really rough, like the mind wipe tree ending, is executed with such panache that you go along with it.

    Almost.

    Whether by chance or careful planning, some of the stumbling blocks that previous Star Wars TV shows hit are avoided entirely. The costumes never look bad (with the exception of Green Rebecca Henderson’s senate gown, which may well be deliberate), and the team are having great fun playing out Osha and Mae’s internal drama in fabric. The twin characters swap clothes, roles and pairings repeatedly through the story (think Luke in episodes 4 through 6) in a manner that artfully demonstrates the weakness of Sol’s late insistence on their magical nature making them more one person than two. “You’re not even sisters!” he exclaims, even as they straightforwardly behave in the most recognisable sisterly fashion. The sets and locations are solid as well, with the Coruscant scenes just about seeming like they might be taking place in some unpleasant cloisters just off-screen from Attack of the Clones and the inevitable Mos Eisley analogue not feeling like twenty extras milling about on a sound stage, as was the case for the entirety of Obi-wan.

    The hooks for additional seasons of story are appropriately integrated as well. Not here will you find Ahsoka’s ludicrous buck-passing cliff-hanger finale; everything promised in the first episode is paid off in the last one, with Sol and the gang all worm food, Osha getting into religion and Mae… well, Mae’s on the backburner for now. Qimir’s scar, the most obvious unopened box, is thematically coherent as-is — there is nothing strictly to be gained by exploring it except in so far as that could form part of a new narrative in the future, which is all you can hope for.

    Osha is so ruthlessly commited to Dialectics that she is constantly at war with the person she was two days ago, who is a clown and a coward.

    Needless to say, I did not want or need to like The Acolyte, but here I am. Somehow, the dead franchise — which I declared sick beyond all rescue at the end of Ahsoka — has returned. Will they be able to pull this off again? I certainly hope so, though Lee Jung-Jae’s absence would be keenly felt in a sequel season. Part of what made this first season so enjoyable though was the ability of the show to spin characters up in a handful of scenes such that their subsequent loss was felt more keenly; who knows which character actor they’ll have in to be the protagonist in a sequel.

    Previously:

    1. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 2
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. The Phantom Menace (video essay)
    8. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    9. “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (plus supplemental)
    10. Andor: Episode 7
    11. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
    12. Andor: Episodes 11, 12
    13. Ahsoka: Episodes 1, 2
    14. Ahsoka: Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6
    15. Ahsoka: Episodes 7, 8
    16. The Acolyte

    If you like my writing, watch my video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

  • Scott Pilgrim’s Tidy Past

    Spoilers for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

    Some works remain evocative of a time and place for you, even when the time and place they are set aren’t really all that similar to the circumstances you remember. Such it was for me and Scott Pilgrim, which I read on the cusp of the age it concerns, living nowhere with even the slightest similarity to Toronto. I was in fact somewhere between the ages of Scott, a 23-year-old serial moocher, and Knives, his inappropriately young 17-year-old partner with whom he’s kidding himself at the start of the books. It’s a terrible age to be.

    When I bought the first three books I was stuck in a rut, studying a terrible Maths degree at a university in a field outside of Coventry. When I bought the final three, I had (possibly for the first time) made a significant life choice that would ultimately change almost everything about me — not uncommon, I’m sure, for a 20-year old. I moved, I changed what I was doing, and I started to change how I thought. I bought a guitar, of course.

    The story of Scott Pilgrim is the story of a young man who crafts grand stories about his achievements and successes, set in a world which makes many of these things cheekily literal. When talking about their school-years romance, band drummer Kim Pine describes how Scott fought his way through a River City Ransom scenario, defeating hordes of fellow students in hand-to-hand combat to rescue her. When Scott fells each of Ramona Flowers’ evil ex-boyfriends, they explode into a handful of change commensurate with their social standing. And when Ramona vanishes towards the end of volume 5 and his friends are either too busy or too far away to participate in his heroic pursuit of her, Scott enters something like a period of depression, drifting from place to place and struggling to put his self-image back together. When he does, it’s by recognising that his actions have always depended on and had an impact on others. Rescuing Kim was a great triumph for him, but their relationship always sucked for her.

    Much of the subtlety of Scott Pilgrim is lost or muddied in the collective memory because it was omitted from the 2010 Edgar Wright film, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. The film was a necessarily condensed retelling that was scripted before the final book was even written, packing six books-worth of plot into a 1h52 runtime. And there is lots of subtlety to be found in the books, despite the bombast and the action and the video game theming — it may be hard to imagine now, but at the time the concept of a story being embellished with elements of video gaming was novel and exciting. The film sticks with this world of heightened metaphor, having the climax being Scott approaching the same scene twice, once as the embodiment of heroic love and once as the embodiment of a more mature self-respect. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s less emotionally complex than the long, drawn-out ennui Scott experiences over the final two books.

    Scott has always assumed that he will be the hero in whatever story he’s living. If he’s dating a high schooler it’s okay because it’s him, even if he’s dating a high schooler. If breaking up with Envy Adams made him feel bad then she must have been at fault, because it’s him and he’s feeling bad. What changes him is the realisation that he was prioritising fighting the evil exes — prioritising the story — over his actual relationship with Ramona. Ramona’s affection is not determined in a fight between Scott and a bunch of third parties. To reach that place though, he has to go through the breakdown of this assumption of default heroism.

    When I think of the Scott Pilgrim books, I think of those passages between volumes 5 and 6 where Scott is at a low ebb, feeling useless, propped up by his parents and failing on his own standards as well as anyone else’s. That’s much how I felt when I was reading them, having notably at one time scored a straight zero on an exam paper. It wasn’t even that I didn’t show up — I showed up, sat with the paper in front of me for the mandatory minimum thirty minutes, then left. What was happening, which I didn’t recognise at the time, was that despite whatever aptitude I had for the subject, I didn’t have any affection for it. I didn’t want to learn Maths. I’d just assumed for my whole life that I would. Questions like “Who do I want to like me?” are unanswerable if you’ve always assumed that anyone who knows you will like you.

    I don’t know if I always viewed myself as the hero in any story, but like most people I viewed myself to some extent as the protagonist, or someone whose job was to fill the role of the protagonist. What changed for me was the realisation that I could choose to do things in my life that I enjoyed. It’s an obvious realisation — but everyone has to make it once. With the help of my friends, much like Scott, I did just that. Brian Lee O’Malley has an earlier book, ‘Lost at Sea’, about a young twenty-something who goes on a road trip with some friends she belatedly realises have invited her along by accident, but has a great time with anyway. O’Malley has a real talent for capturing the young adult mix of absolute confidence and unbearable self-doubt.

    All of this is prologue to discussing how Scott Pilgrim is back. O’Malley, along with BenDavid Grabinski, has penned an eight-episode follow up series for Netflix, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, that apes the best elements of other legacy sequels like Matrix: Resurrection and Rebuild of Evangelion. The show starts as a direct adaptation of the books before veering off into an alternate sequence of events where Scott is out of the picture for much of the period of the original plot and Ramona instead is forced to reckon with her wants and responsibilities. Ramona of course was never so much of a fantasist as Scott, and so her story — while goofy, adorable and action-packed — is more easily resolved. She apologises to the exes who were unfairly hurt and the others simply find other relationships to obsess over. It’s a breath of fresh air with much in common with Matrix: Resurrections’ handling of Trinity, another female character who while she wasn’t underserved in her original appearances was still forced into a particular kind of role by the story having one set hero who wasn’t her.

    Scott has to return of course, and when he does it’s with the gimmick of time travel. Future Scott, a thirty-something with an impressive beard (and a coat he really should have thrown away by now) has hit a rough patch in his relationship with lifelong-love Ramona and decided that the only way to heal his broken heart is to reach into the past and have the relationship never happen at all. It all gets a bit silly from here, with the desire to give Ramona the agency in resolving this plot at odds with the fact that weird, buff, forty-plus Scott is the climactic villain. But the basic idea is sound: what would a character as flawed as Scott be doing in his thirties, if things had gone badly for him? Searching for the fault in his stars is as sound a choice as any. Catastrophising any blip into a grand narrative of failure. The positive side of always seeing yourself as the hero in any story is never seeing yourself as the victim. Future Scott realises — or is forced to realise, really — that his mistakes are his own doing and not some cosmic contrivance that could have been avoided with the benefit of hindsight.

    It’s an interesting approach to the question of what these characters went on to do which avoids — to some extent — the trap of writing a new dramatic arc with characters who already completed their story the first time round. It’s necessarily unsatisfying if Scott and Ramona actually lived happily ever after. It’s necessarily bleak if it all went wrong for them. The need for conflict in a new story means sequels and revisitations tend towards the latter — I’ve heard many complaints about the unkind future Dial of Destiny proposed for the character of Indiana Jones, left sad and alone after his many adventures. But neither route obviously leads to a compelling narrative. What’s needed is a new story, which is something that could always really be better tackled with new characters rather than the baggage of old ones. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off splits the difference: the future characters are speculations, what-ifs. The present characters have the interiority. Even if all the people who read it have grown up, Scott will always be 23.

    For myself, I don’t regret the path my life took to reach the point it’s at now. I hope that’s true in ten years time and I hope that’s true in twenty years time. And selfishly, I’d like to find myself able to revisit Scott Pilgrim and the gang again, if it’s as thoughtful (and funny) as Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. But if I don’t it won’t be a big deal. There was a time and a place where Scott Pilgrim meant a great deal to me, and while it’s nice to visit it I don’t want to get stuck there. I don’t want to go to war with my younger self, like Scott does. It’s a good lesson, but as with all the lessons Scott Pilgrim has to offer it’s sure to feel straightforward in retrospect.

    If you appreciate my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

  • Ahsoka (episodes 3, 4, 5, 6)

    Last time we picked up the tale of Ahsoka Tano, former cartoon.

    Hayden Christensen, star of Obi-wan, makes his on-screen return.

    Look I’m sorry — I really am — but I’m struggling to care about Ahsoka. Despite my initial optimism, born of a desire to come to any work of art without preconception, in a state of pure innocence, my interest just hasn’t sustained. Part of this blame can rightly be portioned out to the show itself, which in a call-back to the dire days of Obi-wan spent a good three and a half episodes spinning its wheels (the plus points of those first two episodes quickly passing out of memory), followed by a passable but slight subsequent two and a half following. Part of it must sit with me.

    The good then, in brief: Thrawn is a passable villain. He has been introduced far too late in the game, and yet we were never allowed to be unaware of him, muting the possibility of the other villains (and this show is stacked with them) taking the fore. The Lord of the Rings planet is novel and spooky, though the proto-Hobbits were laying it on a bit thick and the action scene where Sabine fought the space-Orcs was dry. The threat of additional space-Orcs is dryer still. And the laser sword fight between Ahsoka and Ray Stevenson was delightful — bizarre that it was in the same episode as the placid duel between Sabine (motivation: have her opponent hang around a bit) and Shin (motivation: have her opponent hang around a bit).

    The bad, well: Let’s consider.

    I’ve failed to mention of course the triumphant return of Hayden Christensen, who is apparently allowed to be in these things so long as he doesn’t hang around too much. His episode-long ‘A’-story in Ahsoka’s mind palace hits all the nostalgia notes for Episode II, and were I structuring these essays in a sensible and planned manner this would be a prime time to tackle that film and Christensen’s performance therein.

    Hint I have however, with my use of the television-land language of ‘‘A’-story’, at what is ultimately bothering me about Ahsoka more than anything. It’s television. This is the most crushingly unfair of complaints, but at the root it’s what is turning me off. Obi-wan was never sure whether it was a diced-up movie or a cinematic miniseries, but Ahsoka is teevee, capital-T Television, with the ‘A’-story and the ‘B’-story and the self-contained episode plot always in an uneasy truce with the grand plot arc, in a way TV writers think was finally solved by Buffy the Vampire Slayer but it really wasn’t. Thrawn gets mentioned all the time because it’s foreshadowing, not because I should be expecting him to appear onscreen. There’s filler episodes because TV needs filler episodes. Ahsoka is what it aims to be and what it aims to be just isn’t for me. The same was true (but more recognisable) in Mandolorian. I’d be better off picking off standalone exceptional episodes than trying to take my medicine weekly like I have been.

    To me, Star Wars is cinema — the grand image, the swelling score, the single most important story that has ever been told playing out on screen in front of you. There’s no room in my Star Wars for day-to-day trials and tribulations. There’s no room for forty minutes of Ahsoka training Sabine. When Sabine is finally reunited with her lost paramour Ezra (no relation), she seems… pleased. Andor fooled me into thinking that I could watch a Star Wars TV show by being not Star Wars and not being really a TV show. More fool me.

    The show recognises that akin to Vader in Rogue One, Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma can only appear in the same room as the cast of Ahsoka as an image, a representation, a spectre.

    I have fairer complaints. Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead has graduated from pebble-in-your-shoe to millstone-around-your-neck in terms of frustrating characterisation. You fought a war, Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead! You should be able to compellingly navigate a bureaucracy! You should be able to put your own contact lenses in!

    The decision to cast a different actor for young Ahsoka in the scenes opposite Christensen is really baffling. Dawson as Ahsoka hasn’t exactly been stretched by the demands of the role, among other tasks spending the entire Episode 6 reclined in a chair, so giving the scene with all the emotions to an (admittedly talented) newbie puts in a weird distance between the main actor and the scenes.

    There’s some real bite in the images of fallen Clone Troopers here, which flow into the next episode’s guerilla Stormtroopers.

    The space whales are a particularly baffling piece of errata brought over from the cartoon. Structurally in the episode, interacting with them is the reward of the wisdom Ahsoka gains from confronting her personal demons and facing Anakin/Vader. Why facing down Vader permits you to talk to a whale is left by the show as an exercise for the viewer. It’s a nice visual though.

    I’m typing this out shortly before a new episode (7 of a total 8) is released. Perhaps it will sew this all together into one suitably grandiose narrative. Or perhaps it will cement my concern that this is all just marketing pre-roll for an upcoming return to movie theaters, with nothing of consequence being concluded: a final shot of a freed Thrawn vowing revenge on the galaxy, eight episodes to build what Rise of Skywalker achieved with a single Fortnite tie-in. Or perhaps it will be more jigsaw pieces settling themselves into the big patchwork board of Dave Filoni Star Wars TV shows, of interest to some (and very validly so, I should add) but maybe not, in the end, to me.

    George would have fixed this in post, that’s all I’m saying here.

    Previously:

    1. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 2
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. The Phantom Menace (video essay)
    8. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    9. “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (plus supplemental)
    10. Andor: Episode 7
    11. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
    12. Andor: Episodes 11, 12
    13. Ahsoka: Episodes 1, 2
    14. Ahsoka: Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6

    If you like my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

  • Mr Andor-son (Andor Episodes 11, 12)

    Last time I thought a lot about sentimentality as Andor escaped from space-prison.

    “Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

    This is how Andor leaves us for now, and it’s in a typically idiosyncratic fashion. These final two episodes are more of a coda than a climax, as most if not all of the remaining tensions of the previous ten episodes are released and the main story is pared back to where it was nine episodes ago: Andor is leaving Ferrix and all his material attachments behind, to join the Rebellion with Luthen. Like Luke in A New Hope, Andor has been radicalised by the actions of the Empire and his personal loss, and is ready to give his life to the cause this bearded mystic represents — and so he does.

    Having watched (until now) the indicated groupings of Andor episodes in batches, I watched these two week-to-week, feeling like the serialisation of the show had finally broken banks and flooded. I’m not sure if that’s the case, if Andor is now more TV than film, but I still wish I’d watched these two together. Episode 11 is mostly moving the pieces into place to make Episode 12 happen, with the exception of Luthen’s high tech escape from the tractor beam, a small moment of traditional Star Wars cool that’s almost (but not quite) in danger of spoiling Andor’s low-stakes mood.

    Andor himself is mostly out of the way across the two episodes, listening to a beautiful rendition of Chapo Trap House on his space-iPod and getting trapped in a sticky white web by some aliens whose car he was trying to space-hijack. He has learned that his mother has died, though, and against advice heads back to Ferrix for the funeral. Diego Luna has had ten episodes in which to teach us the face Cassian Andor makes when he is in pain, and that effort pays off here.

    Like that.

    The big finale of these two episodes is the funeral riot on Ferrix, which proceeds in a true-to-life fashion from a mood of elevated tension, elite contempt, over-policing and flashpoint violence, before immediately becoming a mad dangerous crush. The Empire tactically loosened its grip on the people of Ferrix, and pays for it in all the accumulated retribution and resentment that are hurled back, alongside a pipe bomb. The industrial construction on the Death Star, glimpsed in a somewhat superfluous post-credit sequence, is mirrored here in the unsteady hands of a young man piecing together this improvised explosive, the explosion of which is another triumph in Andor of making small-scale action impactful and terrifying.

    Having assembled all our main characters here, instead of having them play off each other we simply see how they react to the chaos, with (by turns) Luthen being distressed by it, Cinta taking it as the cover for tactical violence, Imperials of all stripes making terrible mistakes and misjudgements — most notably the officer who sends a single man to take a spiral staircase bell tower, but also Dedra in particular is unprepared for a situation in which she has to self-preserve. Syril on the other hand, despite all his other wretched qualities, takes the opportunity to be a hero of sorts. Andor, who has been in this situation far too often lately, sticks to the plan. Mon Mothma is blissfully unaware of any of this.

    The marching band sequence that leads up to the funeral and speech, and disorder thereafter, is striking and beautiful, drawing on the shared culture of real-world mining communities and treating them with respect. In the heist episodes we saw how Empire’s power can be brought to bear to clear people from their historic land and exterminate their culture; here we see the action through which a culture can reassert itself back against Empire.

    Ferrix is very well-realised.

    In the final episode the show lurches to a halt whenever it has to cut back for the remaining Coruscant scenes, brief though they are — though Mon Mothma suggesting indirectly to the ISB that her husband might be the cause of all that missing cash is a typically smart story moment, and her daughter running a Mishima-esque traditionalism cult for her schoolmates is deeply funny.

    The other notable scene on Coruscant is also strong. Dedra having found herself exactly where the action isn’t in the fight against the rebellion is funny, follows the dog-eat-dog rules we have seen in force at the ISB already, and is neat foreshadowing for how badly her show of force is about to go. Dedra and Syril both came to Ferrix to conquer and leave it bruised. Best for your career prospects to stay in the Imperial centre and watch from afar.

    Time gives the ability for a character to blossom and Dedra’s villainy is stronger for having had the time over these episodes to first pull you in with her girl-boss rise to acclaim and then push you away again with the reality of the character’s underlying fascism. It’s true that great movies can establish a character with such depth in a handful of scenes — it’s also true that the worst ones try and fail. Andor has luxuriated in the time taken to flesh out these characters.

    Andor’s mother, too, benefits in this way. It would be rote for a character who we only saw passive in life to speak posthumously of revolt. It would be better to see her feel that first spark of rebellion, so that we know what motivated her to want to fight back. But in having the time allocated to a TV show, Andor can have us know Maarva first, know the aspects of her character, and have us realise along with her that she has always been in rebellion. And that she’d want her cremated remains in the form of a brick be used to take someone’s face off.

    The hotel’s faux-Imperial stylings have all been building up to this shot.

    I was pleased that the “Luthen wants Andor dead plot” was both not compromised on (he really did want him dead) but also not dwelled on, set up only for the crushing final scene in which Andor, like Kino just a few episodes ago, has nothing else. One way out. Through the rebellion, or death.

    The strand of plot between Vel and Cinta is thus left to lie, with a few scenes stressing how Vel’s pampered mores are clashing with Cinta’s fervour but not much else, save for a stunning shot of Vel running into the chaotic fog of the funeral uprising which in all honesty justifies their presence all by itself. It’s an odd loose end for a show that has otherwise avoided them at all costs though.

    Andor is over then, for now. I’ll be interested to see if it can remain this good in the wake of critical success — I’m certainly hoping so. Much of my writing about Star Wars over this year has been grappling with the idea of what ‘good Star Wars’ is or should be, and this season of Andor is the most compelling argument that it can exist at all.

    The fashion in which the series leaves off here is sufficient that it could lead into the (hacked, chopped up) events of Rogue One just fine. It’s always been enough to just place Andor in the company of characters in the nascent Rebellion and say “that’s how it happened”. So it comfortably allows a second season to succeed or fail on its own merits, unnecessary as a continuation of this story. Andor has, stray plots aside, come to a conclusion here.

    Me, waiting for more Andor.

    Andor being good has catastrophically unbalanced my ranking system so I’m going to abolish it.

    Chronologically, if you want to follow me on my Star Wars adventure:

    1. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 2
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. The Phantom Menace (video essay)
    8. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    9. “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (supplemental)
    10. Andor: Episode 7
    11. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
    12. Andor: Episodes 11, 12

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