Tag: Television

  • Friends, everywhere (Andor Season 2)

    Friends, everywhere (Andor Season 2)

    I should note before we get going that Disney+, the streaming service on which Andor is available, is currently on the BDS movement’s priority list of targets for boycott. I encourage you to investigate the BDS movement’s website and to consider cancelling any Disney+ subscriptions you may have.


    Andor takes aim.

    After Disney’s brutal dismembering of The Acolyte, the only other Star War in recent memory to do anything interesting, my desire to write about Star Wars kinda fizzled. I watched a bit of Skeleton Crew, which seemed charming but minor, and I found that for the first time I didn’t really have anything to say about it. The triumphal return of Andor is about the only thing that could drag me back though admittedly it was touch and go – not till the 9th episode was I sure I’d have a go. With only the horrible Mandalorian and Baby Yogu on the horizon and the promise of a second miserable season of Ahsoka yet to come, Star Wars is on seriously thin ice. In my brain, at least.

    We left off at the end of Andor‘s first season reflecting on how neat a bow that run of episodes had tied; a continuation was by no means assured and so the major jigsaw pieces of how Diego Luna’s cold-blooded rebel hero would end up as the pseudo-protagonist of Rogue One were already in place. Incipient acts of rebellion; coordination of multiple autonomous groups; support from those in the existing structures of power. A second go round, then, would be sufficient if it merely filled in the gaps. And the structure of this project matches this ambition – four feature-length runs of three episodes each skipping a year, which like the first season vary in affect between “this is just a movie” and “this is a tight 50 minute showcase” – episodes 8 and 10 being particular self-contained standouts.

    Andor remains an ambitious show however, and it can and does still aim high. There are perfunctory elements – I can’t say I was pleased to be reunited with sassy robot K-2SO, though the show makes some good (nasty) use of him as the Emperor’s designated replacement for the Jedi, a metallic Darth Vader who can be sent into the fray alone and hurl some bodies around. In a way it’s more of a testament to the narrow horizons of the rest of TV; Star Wars is ultimately a set of movies for children, so it’s acceptable that much of Star Wars is not so sophisticated as this; what excuse does everything else have?


    The distinguishing focus of Andor‘s second season is gender, launching in with a run of three episodes which deliberately marginalise the title character (locked up in an unfortunately cartoonish side-story about some less disciplined rebels descending into infighting). In his place are three vignettes, properly considered, about gender and class in this nascent Empire. Tony Gilroy, with the writing credit on these first three episodes, opts to take us on a history lesson as we see a Marx-inflected view of family relations play out on screen.

    The ethereal, earth tone looks of the Republic…
    …give way to the sharp lines and high contrast of the Empire.

    From the top, the main through-line here is Leida Mothma’s marriage of convenience to the weedy little son of new money crook Davo Sculdun. Mon Mothma’s struggle between advancing the cause of the rebellion versus protecting her bacchanalian husband and tradcath daughter was carried to conclusion last season, making this an extended coda where we see, step by painful step, how much it costs her – but also how much she has gained, what she is escaping from.

    The aristocratic traditions of Chandrila are drawn with a light touch: a string of expensive parties, a ceremonial pilgrimage noted to now be on public land, a gruesome ceremonial dagger taking centre stage at the ceremony. Sculdun repatriates a great stone statue evoking a maternity goddess, and claims it a victory for all Chandrila – but to remain in private ownership. It is in a word patriarchal. The elephant in this room is Mon Mothma, the woman politician, more comfortable in the corridors of the senate than at this grotesque display of wealth. Her agency always an unspoken wall between her and her husband, at the last second we see her make a heartwrenching appeal to her daughter to escape this society as she did. Leida just wishes her mother could be normal.

    The Republic, in permitting Mon Mothma to become a senator, has fractured these aristocratic traditions and with them the strict gender roles it enforces. The Empire is going to obliterate them. We get the first hints here of the Empire’s plan for the planet of Ghorman, as akin to Chandrila as Chandrila is to Naboo – the new Star Wars tradition of the same location in multiple instances in full effect, and Naboo itself does get a guest appearance in the final episodes as another Ghorman at another time. Ghorman, a producer of luxury goods with traditions as rich and complex as anywhere else, is to be mined for precious minerals. To do so, the privileged society of Ghorman must be dismantled. And to make this happen the Empire (in the person of a returning Ben Mendelsohn, of whom more later) has tapped up and coming intelligence supervisor Dedra Meero (Deborah Meaden should sue).

    On Ghorman, Trade Federation control ship stylings give way to a large Imperial triangle.

    Much of this season of Andor concerns the question of Ghorman, which we see first introduced by a star-shaped city with a central courtyard that blends the iconic Naboo Plaza de España with the Trade Federation control ship in a particularly pointed bit of visual metaphor. The new armory constructed as part of the plot to subdue the Ghor is in the triangular shape of a Star Destroyer. Ghorman is in this way the fully Imperially-integrated Naboo, Imperial presence at first in an uneasy alliance with local business interests – the fashion houses of Ghorman make cloth with an exclusive local spider in a manner that alludes to various real-life luxury foodstuffs and products, though as everyone in Ghorman speaks cod-French, let’s say wine. Continuing that theme, there’s even a tolerated cenotaph in that main plaza solemnly remembering the Ghormans killed in a crass bit of murder years earlier by top-ranking Imperial Grand Moff Tarkin, in an incident that evidently didn’t hurt his career much.

    In many ways the story of Ghorman is a re-telling of the story of Ferrix last season: repression creates the conditions for rebellion and a small problem for the Empire becomes a large one. But the details are all shuffled: where Ferrix was a working-class place with a strong community culture, Ghorman is individualist and bourgeois. M. Rylanz begins his rebellion coyly suggesting to Syril Karn (however cynically) that the true Emperor would surely be upset to hear his subjects were being mistreated so. And some elements are turned particularly bleak: the bloodthirsty Sergeant Linus Mosk, who on Ferrix was all too eager to crack skulls, is mirrored on Ghorman in the witless Sergeant Bloy, who doesn’t realise until it’s far too late that he’s being sent on a suicide mission with his squad of raw recruits.

    Like Rylanz, Chandrilan elite act and dress the in the accoutrements of the Republic: Jedi-like robes in rich golds and blues. The wedding ceremony features a prominent cutting of a braid in a manner which recalls the Padawan braid won by Obi-wan, Anakin and the younglings. The braid is worn here by the woman. Through the course of Andor‘s second season, we gradually see the ratio of appearances at the Chandrilan parties shift, beige, white and black Imperial uniforms taking up more and more room. The Empire is snuffing out this outcrop of republicanism as it will eventually dissolve the Republic senate, and with it will go the archaic ceremonies and traditions that form part of the institutional power that until now this class has enjoyed. Replacing it will be those uniform beiges, whites and blacks with career bureaucrats like Dedra and Syril inhabiting them. The relationship between Dedra and Syril is similarly without artifice, defying tradition. Eedy, Syril’s mother, in many ways embodies the morbid republic, a slightly decrepit, casually cruel vampire on her son’s neck who sees in Dedra a second victim to torment. Dedra, with the exact bearing of a Napoleonic-era captain, simply prescribes to her in curt terms the positive relationship they are to have, taken or left. Eedy concedes.

    Chandrilan blue, Imperial white.

    This is the Faustian pact that Dedra is making, unlimited power to sweep away old assumptions about social hierarchy and gender roles at the only cost of becoming complicit in Empire, of being the finger that pulls any trigger ordered. And that violence can be both impersonal, as with the droids released to indiscriminately smash the Ghorman crowds, or it can be deeply gendered. The other environment we see equitable gender relationships expressed is with Bix, hiding out on the farm planet from Rebel Moon with last season’s most valued players Brasso and Wilmon. The farm workers share communal meals, raise children in common, and occasionally verge on child-like innocence in how egalitarian it all is (notably, the workers have a positive relationship with the farmer). Unlike Dedra and Syril however, this is neither sanctioned by the Empire nor is it an expression of the Empire’s power. It is radical beyond comfort, pointing to a world of relationships where no one role is dominant whatever the gender. An Imperial patrol is sent to take census of the workers, in effect an immigration raid, and the ranking officer finds Bix alone and attempts to rape her. Gilroy writes a horribly true-to-life depiction of a man using his modicum of power to gratify himself with meaningless cruelty and we can all cheer when he gets hit with a big space-wrench. There is no point to the rape much as there is no point to the census overall; the use is merely to remind everyone involved of what is what. Empire on the one hand dissolves traditional roles and washes away gender; on the other, it uses gendered violence as a stick as hefty as any other to beat down with.

    The impact of these vignettes is cut off just slightly by some inattention later in the season. It’s unclear what we’re meant to take away from the scene where Cyril goes to strangle Dedra after learning that she’s betrayed him. Is she into it? Is he reverting to type? Similarly, Bix’s subplot over the next six episodes has her sinking into a depression, leaning into substance abuse, getting some therapeutic revenge with Cassian’s assistance, then getting into faith healing and leaving because of a belief in destiny? It’s unfocused and verging on cliche. Mon Mothma avoids this issue both by dropping her family connection entirely, the question of her as a woman and mother not returned to.

    The show never quite settles into itself either with Kleya, Luthen’s daughter, assistant and collaborator. She gets a highlight episode here, complete with backstory elements that place her on Naboo at a time of Imperial occupation (her superlative, melodramatic dress sense explained in one link to Padme Amidala) and hyper-competent heist sequence – it’s a highlight of the entire show. But despite the obvious affection involved for Andor‘s femme fatale – and the Star Wars grand prize of getting to remove the machine keeping your father alive1 – Kleya ends the season still something of a cypher, clearly crushed by the loss of her adoptive father but with only a tentative reconnection to Cassian and Kel to express it with. The defence of Luthen to the Yavin leaders placed in Andor’s mouth instead.

    All this said, while reviewers have so far contested the final image of the show, that of Bix standing in a field of wheat gazing at the sky, I did not mind it. To raise children is ultimately an act of faith in the goodness of the world, its capacity to improve. That goes for Bix and tiny Andor Jr. as it had previously gone for Marva and Cassian, Luthen and Kleya, Salmon Paak and Wilmon. It’s a literalisation of the chain of unconditional love that fuels the rebellion – the show certainly has not balked at non-standard family relations before this point. The communitarian society on Mina-rau is the closest thing Andor has to paradise, the figurative paradise that every rebel is working towards.


    We revisit Saw Gerrera in the second run of Andor episodes, commandant to the kind of guerilla cell that his namesake (you know the one) might have recognised: tight-knit, testosterone-fuelled, a brotherhood constantly on the move. Wilmon, the plucky bomb-maker from Ferrix last season, is sent by Luthen to advise Saw on the operation of some deadly fuel extraction technology. But instead of teaching his lesson and leaving, Saw effectively kidnaps him – and worse, intimates to the student that once the teaching is complete, Wilmon will be disposed of. The setup leans into the audience’s instinctual fear of rebel movements “going too far”, of charismatic leaders turning political coalitions into cults. Saw Gerrera as a second Vader, making unilateral life-or-death decisions on the performance of his underlings. The twist is that the opposite is true: Saw is a more effective operator than ever, deftly outmanoeuvring an Imperial plot to oust him. His apparent irrationality, he explains to Wilmon, is simply acceptance of death. He will burn brighter and live freer, no matter the cost.

    If I had an in with Forest Whitaker I’d probably find any excuse to put him in my show too.

    The irony here is that Saw and his old sparring partner, the new, more irascible Luthen, have converged: when Luthen reveals to Andor in the next run of episodes that he sees no way out for them other than a noose, the comparison is complete. Luthen does not have Saw’s lust for freedom, but the life of a spymaster is such that he is always looking over his shoulder, always rooting out hidden plots, always telling his friends less than they might want to be told. And like Saw, he is now being marginalised, the rebellion he has helped build coalescing into something that won’t need a spymaster with the ears of the Imperial senate. A rebellion that can fight in the open, for hearts and minds. A desperate Luthen tells Mon Mothma that he doesn’t have any evidence and he doesn’t know who or why, but the people she’s expecting to meet the next day are a danger to her and she’s just going to have to believe him. It’s not the kind of appeal you make twice. In the subsequent episode, a year on, Luthen rues mournfully to Kleya that they may have run out of ‘perfect’. Luthen, boxed in on Coruscant, accepts the inevitable, much as Saw with on Jedha shortly thereafter.

    I’m interested to revisit Rogue One and specifically the character of Saw, who was very poorly served by that film’s torrid production history. His featuring in Andor, which you have to assume has been limited by the amount of time they were able to retain Forest Whitaker for on any given day, has punched way above its weight – a character with real revolutionary fervour in a series much given to prevaricators, cynics and wide-eyed imbeciles (sorry Luke). Again like Luthen, Saw is a character who wants to win and knows what that will entail. Unlike Luthen, he is ultimately not willing to cede control to the bureaucrats and artistocrats who will ultimately form the New Republic.

    Cassian has another conversation shadowed with death, right at the end of the show, where a skeptical Bail Organa okays his mission that kicks off Rogue One. They discuss the abstract threat of the Emperor’s new weapon, unaware that in a matter of days it will have killed them both. This is the ultimate strength of Andor as a project, to draw these lines across decades of fiction, and something that simply could not be done without the Star Wars connection.


    The unfortunate Sergeant Bloy.

    A trend that particularly upsets me in lots of media lately is lack of discipline; this was particularly galling in Ahsoka, where any notion of belonging to a hierarchical organisation was functionally jettisoned for Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead to make some faces instead. But it goes beyond Star Wars: even in an ostensibly serious drama like Shogun there often was a casual attitude to hierarchy entirely at odds with the setting. Lesser shows often feel like remakes of the Onion article “Entire precinct made up of loose cannons”. Real life militaries run on discipline, historically brutal discipline. Real life bureaucracies run on hierarchy. Which is not to say you can’t have a Captain Kirk, going outside the stuffy rules of the Admirals to do what’s right, but that can’t be the rule – and the people present who do follow the rules have to behave accordingly. Watching recent Doctor Who episode ‘The Well’ there’s a scene where the number two relieves the ranking officer of command because he disagrees with her decision making; in the real-life British Navy that would have had him hanged.

    This remains an area Andor excels in. Throughout the second season we catch background glimpses of a structured rebellion that is going to outpace and surpass both Luthen’s spy rings and Saw Gerrera’s independent cells. What was disparate clumps of useless or dangerous individuals like the group who take Cassian hostage in the first run of episodes, by the climax of the ninth episode has become the rebellion of A New Hope, a full-blown military organisation with ranks and procedures that Cassian himself is starting to look like an odd fit for. Infamously, when the rebellion presents Luke and the gang with medals at the end of A New Hope, Lucas staged it by reference to shots from Triumph of the Will. It’s a parallel power structure to the Empire now, if a diminutive one, and there’s a great verisimilitude in seeing Alastair Petrie warn Cassian that mercurial disappearances and secret missions will soon have no place in this new organisation.

    The rebel bureaucracy is naturally a bagatelle compared to the Imperial one, and Andor‘s second season benefits from an increased role for Anton Lesser’s evil spymaster Major Partagaz. ISB head honcho Partagaz is the picture of senior leadership, prowling in circles around his cavernous meeting room, well aware of the fear he inspires in his themselves otherwise authoritative underlings. It’s instructive as well as practical, each officer bringing to their reports some form of the same intensity and cruelty. One of the stand-out moments in the season is Dedra and Partagaz debriefing an ebullent Syril, still labouring under the impression that his mission is related to the quest to capture Cassian Andor. Describing the Ghorman rebels he has been made double agent to, he calls them “inexperienced but eager”. Partagaz, looking directly at Dedra, deadpans “How often those attributes align.” If the message to Dedra wasn’t plain enough, he follows up once they’re alone with a direct warning that her involvement of the goofy Syril is a liability. They are not Andor and Bix; there is no balance of “what we’re fighting for” versus the fight itself. When push comes to shove, Dedra’s position – as Captain Kaido puts it – is to be a finger on a trigger, and to respect the chain of command. If the command is that inexperienced recruits are to be sent to face the angry Ghorman mob, so be it. If the command is that an imperial sniper is to provoke mass violence, so be it. And if Syril, who has always dreamed of heroics, is not content to hide in a back room with civilians and children then the failing is his alone.

    The uneasiest scene in an episode of uneasy scenes.

    This unwinds in the way any system that cannot evolve or compensate must die: the inhuman rigidity, the adherence to protocol, the competitive contempt between peers leaves the ISB unable to correct course as a string of bungled operations collapse into one another – Dedra’s desire to be the one to collar Luthen (‘Axis’, in their wonderfully Le Carre-esque dictionary) leads her to go it alone with minimal backup. This is to pip former protege Heert to the post, and as a true student he immediately turns around and does exactly the same thing in trying to bring in Luthen’s own protege Kleya.

    Syril of course, who only ever imagined himself to be in favour of the Empire, falls by the wayside dying in a Javert-esque farce, desperately trying to hide the massacre unfolding on Ghorman from himself by slapping the cuffs on an incidentally-present Cassian. “You didn’t seem to mind the promotions”, an indignant Dedra barks at him. But the idea that there was a quid-pro-quo at work is alien to the ultimate just-world believer, who has never been able to imagine that good people might break the rules or that bad people might make them.

    But Dedra hasn’t just doomed herself with this domino cascade: to keep up with Heert she’s been surreptitiously retaining documents she shouldn’t have access to, and when Luthen’s man on the inside of the ISB Lonni steals her access, he finds not only her plan to bring in Luthen but the details of the big secret itself, as yet unmentioned by name in Andor. It’s the Death Star, as an incandescent Krennic has Dedra stammer out, and this leak will go on to take out Partagaz (two subordinates dead, one imprisoned, his ‘resignation’ is asked for in terms he understands), Krennic himself (as per Rogue One) and the looming figure of Tarkin at the penultimate step of the pile (if you haven’t seen A New Hope, he dies when the Death Star explodes). The problem at its root is one of trust and faith: if the ISB supervisors could trust each other, they could collaborate effectively. Lonni’s spying is enabled by his ability to project himself as the rare friend around the ISB table. Luthen is utterly ruthless but at root what he does have is friends everywhere. The ISB supervisors have friends nowhere, the Empire ultimately as rewarding to Dedra’s faith in it as it was to the Ghor. Andor comes to rescue Kleya; no-one comes to rescue Dedra, who in a cheeky bit of cosmic karma ends up in a Narkina 5-style prison, presumably labouring to build a second Death Star.

    Dedra visually placed in a hierarchy.

    Andor‘s inarguable quality has been a catalyst for critical consideration of Star Wars, which is scarcely a positive outcome. Much better to be something quietly competent like Skeleton Crew than something that rouses the great beasts like The Acolyte! But yes, Andor has inspired comment, much of it of a kind – quickly summarised, that Andor is Star Wars done right, that Disney Lucasfilm will struggle to reproduce the quality of Andor, that Andor is not in fact Star Wars at all, and finally that George Lucas is a hack who not only cannot have inspired something like Andor, he probably also stole the reels for the original film from an editing bay in 1977. The last one demonstrates to me a startling lack of intellectual curiosity – akin to, on reading Naoki Urasawa’s masterpiece Pluto, declaring that you’re glad someone has finally shown Astro Boy to be so much garbage. Andor is not made by people who hate Star Wars, and so it cannot be made by people who hate George Lucas. The idea is childish. The alchemy of the approach is that Star Wars is for children, and always has been, but things that are for children can be valued and reinterpreted and played with. Star Wars permits Andor to reference a visual dictionary that the audience will intuitively understand. In this way the question of whether it is or isn’t Star Wars is moot. It is a Star Wars story.

    The nature of Andor – a complementary story about the lives of people who weren’t gifted with providence, who aren’t related to great leaders or born to great destinies, makes a fine companion to the original films. It makes text of subtext, improves on both, and provides an excellent counter-argument to anyone who ever suggested that Star Wars should have less intergalactic politicking.

    Which only leaves the question of whether something this good will come along again for Star Wars, a question the world politics of which are too unpredictable to answer. I hope so.


    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
    17. Andor: Season 2

    If you want to read something non-Star Wars by me try ‘The Cult of the Scan‘, about the attraction of bootleg 35mm film print scans. The new site has an RSS feed, you can also subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews if you see fit.

    1. I believe I stole this excellent joke from someone. If this is your joke please let me know. ↩︎
  • 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.