Tag: Television

Dream a little dream, Andor (Andor episodes 8, 9, 10)
Last time we pondered the Gungan.

The insignia mirrors the room, mirrors the job, mirrors the uniform, mirrors the doors and tunnels. Trapped at every level.

Andor flickers back on forth on the boundary between being better treated as a serialised narrative and better treated as discrete stories, even accounting for the all-serial episode 7 which ended with effectively a prologue for this run. Having waited two weeks to watch all these episodes together, after the first one I felt like I’d have been better splitting them over the weeks, not least because the ongoing stories with the characters on the fringe of the current story were gelling better (at first) than the new cast of incarcerated workers.

Serkis is a real treat.

By the end of the second episode however I didn’t care, idle thoughts about the formal structure of the show swept away by a solid 50 minutes of man’s inhumanity to man. One of Andor’s great strengths is in avoiding sentimentality, a habit that dogged Obi-wan, a show which was full of doe-eyed tributes to the inspiring sacrifice of the Rebels and future Rebels yet to come. Even the great climactic prison break isn’t lingered on. There’s no scene of the prisoners hoisting a new flag over their floating prison. They just escape by force and leave by the first means available to them, even if it is a nightmare plunge into an unknown sea.

As well as the prison — which doubles as a factory (didn’t spot Foucault’s name in the credits but I’m sure it was there) — we get a string of supporting characters ensnared in various scenarios where they have to choose to be rational over idealistic or compassionate — but without sentimentality, or the sort of nihilistic fatalism that is the flip side of it. Mon Mothma engages with a grotesque aristocrat whose (unknowing) support for the rebellion is pending on her handing her daughter over to the kind of relationship that has made her miserable. The up-and-coming ISB agent has to turn to torture to extract the information she needs, but the show is not so squeamish as to have her prevaricate over it nor so dull as to linger on it for longer than necessary. And we get a delightful guest appearance from Forest Whitaker, reprising his character from Rogue One in a barnstorming cameo which makes his truncated appearance in Rogue One all the more upsetting. Here he’s Luthen’s equal, sparring with him over plans and funding and refusing to be drawn or baited with the kind of revolutionary logic Luthen engages in. I’m hoping he makes a return.

He’s so good! Why wasn’t he this good in Rogue One!

If the show indulges in sentimentality anywhere, it’s ironically in the baroque misery of Luthen, whose grandiose monologue about sacrifice closes out this block. Skarsgård plays it fine, and there’s an implication that it may be more deliberate smoke and artifice than deep-seated agonising, but it’s still in sharp contrast to the episode’s highlight: work group supervisor Kino — played by Andy Serkis — as he delivers the message over the prison PA to the other prisoners that a break is in progress and the guards are no longer in control of the prison. Kino is unsure of himself, starts out meandering, steals lines that Andor and the other prisoners have been saying to him. He’s not struck by the moment and infused with the holy spirit of speechmaking, nor is the deep personal sadness that Serkis brings to the character lingered on. Luthen is just having too much fun with it all even when it’s not going his way; he comes across strung out and grumpy, not hollow from years of loss.

Luthen claims to be ‘using the tools of his enemies’, here doing a sterling Vader impression.

The finest scene, to my mind at least, is the one that closes out the second episode, where the prisoner Ulaf, who has been struggling and often confused at the work desks, has a stroke while heading back to the cells. As above, there is no sentimentality here. Ulaf doesn’t get to deliver a final speech, rousing his friends to action. It’s not even clear that they have a friendship other than the basic compassion shared between human beings. Conversely, there’s no cartoonish unpleasantness. No-one gets shocked or zapped or punished because the old man collapses. But it’s still horrible. The inhumanity of the institution fills the whole scene. There is no compassion for the man’s coworkers to see that he is taken care of. There is no time to lift him from the floor where he has fell. There is no interruption of the standard routines, either to bring help faster or to avoid the people caring for the old man from having to raise their hands to their heads. The doctor, another prisoner, barely has the time to learn the dead man’s name. When he dies, Ulaf is placed in a bag on a gurney and rolled straight out. The other prisoners never see him again. It’s deeply sad — I found it deeply sad.

The relationship between Andor and Star Wars continues to fascinate. It’s very good, which sets it apart from most (if not all) the other Disney Star Wars projects. But it’s good beyond being good Star Wars, and yet it determinedly is still Star Wars and is in a deep conversation with the rest of Star Wars. The Senate chamber makes another appearance here, and the prison institution resembles nothing so much as the cloning facility on Kimono. When Andor says “we’re cheaper than droids and easier to replace” the comparison is explicit. Saw Gerrera talks about Separatists and New Republicans. The space wizards are absent for now, but Star Wars hasn’t gone anywhere.

Oh, and Andor finds a small but crucial opportunity to shoot first here, keeping up the run of once per episode block.

Up next:
Ranking, best to worst:
1. The Phantom Menace
2. Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (supplemental)
3. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
4. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
5. Andor: Episode 7
6. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
7. Obi-wan: Episode 5
8. Obi-wan: Episode 3
9. Obi-wan: Episode 1
10. Obi-wan: Episode 6
11. Obi-wan: Episode 4
12. Obi-wan: Episode 2
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11 November 2022
Andor think to myself, what a wonderful world… (Andor Episode 7)
Last time we considered whether Andor could save the world.

It does seem like the whole room was built just for this.

At the risk of eating my words in three weeks time, this felt like the odd one out in the season so far. Not, as I saw predicted, a self-contained story but a grouping of some excellent scenes that didn’t quite fit into any of the preceding episodes. It’s enough, I think, to say that the scene with Fiona Shaw was the absolute highlight, a heartbreakingly tragic farce where Andor’s actions in the previous six episodes have alienated her from him in a way he cannot explain. I had full expections that the show was going to go with the trite old ritual of “Oh, I’m secretly ill/infirm/otherwise unable to come with you by virtue of being old” and what happened instead was really good. Special mention as well to the Imperial bureaucracy scenes, a stunning mash-up of the original trilogy’s Imperial Officer scenes with a modern-day KPMG internal presentation.

The whole building bears a passing resemblance to the ancient club Luthen keeps handling.

With that out of the way, we can get down to the one absolutely critical question this episode raises (and a minor corollary to it). That is: when are we going to see Senator Binks?

Jar Jar Binks was so ferociously maligned on the release of the Phantom Menace that his role in the subsequent prequels was trimmed down considerably, but Lucas did retain for him a critical role. Binks is the Senator who — in a repeat of the events of Phantom Menace where Padme played this role — proposes that the Senate grants the Chancellor emergency powers, that he then uses to create the Grand Army and ultimately elevate himself to the position of Emperor.

Small cog, big machine.

Since Mon Mothma’s original intrusion into this series the Coruscant content has only been creeping up. We’ve seen the Senate, the speeders, the endless political hokum. Not noted enough is how much this content, which is of a high quality with much of the rest of Andor, draws almost exclusively from the prequels. Indeed, the spectre of the Emperor which hangs over many of the Coruscant-set scenes can only be understood as the conniving, sophisticated Chancellor Palpatine rather than the seething space wizard from Return of the Jedi.

Andor does diverge — as noticed in droll fashion by twitter commentators — from the stage-like dialogue style of the George Lucas films, instead going for a somewhat naturalistic style, though far from the hyperactive modern blockbuster sensibility the sequel films ended up with. It would be hard to imagine Anakin and Padme’s romantic exchanges intercut with scenes on Ferrix. Jar Jar however, despite having his own dialogue controversy, does not speak in particularly romantic terms. Indeed, given what would be his now long departure from his home world of Naboo for the life of the senator, a broadening of his speak would make sense — one fewer ‘meesa’ here and there.

Below-level Coruscant looks a lot like Heathrow airport, the quintessential British dystopia.

If you’re wondering how the character of an aging politician who has done little in their political career other than inadvertently vote for terrible things might be portrayed, might I suggest the array of colourful characters in the British Parliament.

But perhaps that would be too cynical for poor Jar Jar, who retains a childlike innocence through his appearances that parallels him with Anakin, the other ‘stray’ adopted by Qui-gon Gin during the course of The Phantom Menace. Both Anakin and Jar Jar have a wide-eyed approach to politics that allows them to be manipulated by Palpatine, and while we know that Anakin is enmeshed into the Imperial apparatus long into the future, it would be very neat to see a comfortable Senator Binks do the grunt work of the new Emperor in the Senate — perhaps engaging in some light menacing of Mon Mothma. Alleline, the US-aligned up-and-comer who takes over MI6 in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy isn’t a villain — just someone too unaware to know when he’s being played. That’s how I’d fit Jar Jar in here.

Mon Mothma’s husband is a fascinating character. I hope he ends up doing a Mishima coup or somthing.

Anyhow, idle thoughts.

The corollary is (of course) are we going to see Sheev himself? But I think the answer to that one is “probably, yes”.

The best scene in the episode by some distance.

Up next:
Ranking, best to worst:
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22 October 2022
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
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23 September 2022