Plus, there's just too much Star Wars already. Do something new, for heaven's sake.
Recently, for no particular reason I decided to give it another go, perhaps having had a sufficient break from Star Wars and seeing occasional glowing recommendations in my social media feed. And I'm very pleased I decided to give it a second chance... provisionally. This is a tale of two halves if ever there was one, and I can't have a proper rant without spoilers. I'll try and keep these to a minimum (I mean come on, you guys know about the Death Star... right ?), but if you really don't like knowing anything in advance, then consider yourself duly warned.
Right, season one. Wow ! This was amazeballs. I have essentially nothing bad to say about this one at all. It's an incredibly smart re-imagining of the Star Wars universe and succeeds at something I'd normally think impossible : going beyond the happily-ever-after. Or more generally and more accurately, trying to put a gritty gloss over what's fundamentally a fairy tale. Trying to tell a realistic story in a universe set up to be deliberately unrealistic is usually a Bad Idea.
In fact I'll go further and say that Star Wars is, if anything, not just a fairy tale but almost a pantomime fairy tale : the goodies are happy-go-lucky adventurers and the baddies are so evil they get a menacing theme tune just for entering a room. You see them committing atrocities but in a family-friendly way that has an emotional impact when you're a kid but isn't going to leave you scarred for life. It may have planetary genocide, but Watership Down it isn't. The emotional stakes are low and excitement is high. It's full of space wizards and talking robots and it's absolutely goddamn great.
The second reason I wouldn't expect something like Andor to work is probably more subjective. To me the Star Wars universe exists solely to facilitate the escapades of its main protagonists, to tell that story and nothing else. You can expand upon the central plot but only by telling stories connected with it. There's nothing especially interesting in the universe itself; it is, to a large extent, just making shit up. It isn't obviously expandable as Star Trek is. True, Rogue One succeeded, but mainly through that connection to the Main Plot. Telling the backstory of someone created as a supporting character for a supporting movie still seems like something... inadvisable.
And yet the first season of Andor is nigh-on perfect. It starts off feeling so different to Star Wars that you forget it's even supposed to be in the same franchise at all and can appreciate it on its own merits. Its social and political commentary on the nature of Imperial tyranny is razor sharp and immensely topical. The visual aesthetic is an absolutely brilliant update on the original movies : essentially the look and feel of the Empire is identical but far less cheap. Uniforms look like things people would actually wear, not costumes. Computer interfaces have a combination of smartscreens and physical buttons that make me think "I want one of those" rather than being an easy backdrop of randomly-blinking lights only put there to fill up screen space.
The plot is also intensely focused and the characters serve its purpose without being wooden or one-dimensional. Andor himself is usually a sidekick in his own series, which works perfectly well because everyone else is at least as interesting and often more so. The story is told from the point of several different main characters, all of whom feel like they're the hero, in their own minds, of their own narrative. In particular this is used extremely effectively for two of the main Imperial agents, one of whom feels like the worst aspects of Tom Cruise crossed with a micro-manager I once endured, and the other was clearly Liz Truss' personal understudy. Acting is of a uniformly excellent standard and there's quite a few headliners in there.
It is, to be sure, serious. But this works because the parallels to contemporary politics is bang on point. If the Star Wars you grew up with had the Empire in place of the Nazis, in Andor the Imperials have assumed the role of the American government. And yet, it doesn't venture into bleakness porn. It's still family friendly. There's still a sense of fun to it, still cool stuff that happens just because come on we're having space adventures here. There's spectacle and excitement and visually beautiful scenery and special effects. It's also incredibly tight, with almost nothing superfluous ever happening to anyone. There's great political speeches of the rebels, dark charismatic figures on the Imperial side, and a relentless, compelling, absolutely gripping sense that you need to know what's going to happen next to everyone. Even the characters you hate.
And then we come to season two. Spoilers will grow steadily more substantial from here on in.
Disney... who hurt you ? What happened ? I wish I could say it was a broken masterpiece or a hot mess, but it's.... well, just a broken mess, really. Now to be fair there's still some great stuff here. The development of the Empire from feeling like a inconvenient (if domineering) presence in the lives of the ordinary folk, to a full-on sadistic villainy, is nicely done. Again, we get some powerful political statements along the way. That most people are content to just make do and get by in such a system is handled with some subtlety, as is the tendency of the hierarchical Empire's distrust of its own personnel to carry a self-destructive streak (even if one character's suicide is rather too sudden, in my opinion). The development of Cassian's cool sidekick robot is also very nicely done indeed, providing good, solid fun without being crude or tacked-on comic relief.
The problem is that everything else is all over the place. Pacing is way off, wasting a good three or four entire episodes dealing with the wedding of Mon Mothma's pointless daughter. Pointless ? Yeah. The wedding serves an important political purpose, to be sure, but we don't need to see Mothma getting drunk out of sheer despondency. The fate of the main instigators of the wedding itself is never revealed, and when Mon eventually flees to Yavin, we're not told what happens to her daughter. This comes at the expense of much more interesting potential storylines, like how Mothma is working behind the scenes to help organise the rebellion, the growth of the Yavin base itself, or... well, anything really. Even the personal tension with her daughter is totally lost because we never hear of her ever again after the wedding. It's backstory of the very worst sort.
There's a lot one of one year time jumps throughout this season in which apparently an awful lot happens the viewer would actually quite like to know about, and in like fashion, far too much is left unstated. There's a pointless episode featuring some utterly feckless rebels on what turns out to be Yavin, but the development into the main rebel base is skipped over as unimportant. The principle rebel leader from the first season is now "revealed" to have been crucial in setting this all up, somehow, but for some reason everybody now both hates and fears him. Sure, he does questionable things for the cause, but good grief, he's a rebel. Of course he's going to do some, well, rebellious things. Quite why he's treated like the spawn of satan is a bafflingly-omitted major plot point.
There are weird minor issues too. There's one very short scene, interposed between two unrelated shots, in a which a character asks who owns a particular weapon. Somebody answers that it's theirs and that's it. It's exactly the sort of pointless scene you expect to find in the Deleted Scenes in the extras, as though there was originally some plan for a side-plot but they dropped everything else except this one random bit.
Pacing also has minor as well as major issues, with the rescue sequence of one rebel being implausibly drawn-out for the sake of utterly pointless dialogue. Given that we're aware the Imperials have knocked out security, shall we make a speedy getaway ? No, we'll spend ten minutes whining about how nobody on Yavin will be her friend. Yay.
Another major sub-plot is also woefully mishandled. The Empire needs access to a mineral on Ghor (a wealthy, popular, influential planet) so spends some considerable propaganda effort in depicting its citizens as terrorists. This is well done, but the finale is lame. One of the main Ghor rebels is badly inconsistent, but worse is that the destruction of Ghor would have been a perfect opportunity for the spectacle that the second season is badly missing. This wouldn't have had to be anything extreme; we could see it from space rather than dwelling on what happens to the individual citizens. But it would have been a powerful final completion of the Empire being an essentially hidden evil in everyone's life to something of more naked villainy. We could also have seen the Death Star's development as the final act in the desperation and insecurity of tyranny rather than an expression of its power : this concept is very nicely explained on screen, but the specific link to the Death Star itself would have made this all the better.
What we actually get for the ending is pure dogshit. We get no clear message, no finale of any sort. We just get... Cassian flying off into space. That's it.
Presumably this links directly to Rogue One, which I do plan to rewatch imminently. Fine. But the series could and should have easily been at least partially self-contained, giving more depth to Andor (and various other characters in Rogue One who have some screen time in the series) and filling in some interesting details to present a new spin on things. A direct link to the movie isn't necessary, but even in choosing this, we could have had a better more rounded ending. As it was, it barely classes as an ending at all, more of a sort of weird break point. Without doubt, it's one of the worst endings to a series I've ever seen.
Oh well. Season one is still worth watching on its own, an unexpected delight which rekindled the old Star Wars magic in a whole new way. But season two robs it of what should have been a slam-dunk triumph. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... not since The Hobbit movies have I seen someone snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in quite such a spectacular fashion.
I therefore partially withdraw my opinion that the Star Wars universe isn't interesting enough to expand. In fact, it presents a fine vehicle for some extremely important contemporary themes. But as with all series, without good writers it's a dead duck.
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