Let Andor be Andor
Andor is a very, very good show that deserves better than to be strapped to the side of the lumbering beast that is Star Wars canon.
In 1977 a samurai space western leaped onto the silver screen with the brash sounds of brass horns and gold text explaining that the Nazis won the war, got the bomb, and were using it to crush dissent by lobbing it at entire planets. And the only way to stop them was for a teenager to team up with an old retired wizard, a criminal, his sentient teddy bear and a pair of camp robots and go lob a glowing ball down a drain.
(Yeah. Star Wars sounds a bit silly when you put it like that, huh? Anyway…)
45 years later, a precursor TV series by the name of Andor sauntered into the Disney+ platform and oh boy it’s great. It’s a powerful, moving, chilling reflection of social and political struggles that have reared their ugly heads again recently, and has an earnest sincerity that I have wanted from a sci fi show for ages. The themes it explores are largely contiguous with the original Star Wars movie (A New Hope), albeit without the space wizardry and bombast, and it is a prequel to the original movie.
Unfortunately, in between these two works of fiction coming out, Star Wars has been subjected to decades of Lucasfilm and Disney expanding the universe, with books, shows and movies that wander a wide path between “pretty good” and “nigh unbearable”. So this new work, rather than slotting neatly in as a really good precursor to a really good story, is alongside a slew of works that would have been forgotten had it not been for the “STAR WARS” insignia painted across their flank.
As a result, Andor has become a shining beacon in a sea of mediocrity that is the Star Wars canon. People love it, I love it, and so much of the praise it gets is because of how different it is to everything else.
I watched season one when it came out, and I was struck by this difference, as everyone was, but the more I watched it, the more I thought the story could be told without needing to tie it to Star Wars. Andor’s story is about the rise of tyrannical regimes and the radicalisation of forces that oppose them. It’s about the human cost of fascism and the tactics employed by those who seek power for power’s sake. There’s so little about the force and the Jedi and lightsabers and the usual trimmings that Star Wars has. There’s a big reveal that, admittedly, focuses on one of the most iconic set pieces in Star Wars, but I think that even that can be achieved better without gesturing to knowledge gained elsewhere in the franchise.
Everyone keeps talking about how great this show is, and how much of a breath of fresh air it is for Star Wars, but I can’t help but look at it the other way around. Andor is a Star Wars show, but what is Star Wars bringing to the table? The more I dig into this, the more I question it, the more I come to a conclusion.
Andor makes Star Wars better, but Star Wars makes Andor worse.
This discussion features spoilers for basically all the Star Wars things I’ve ever seen, but especially Andor, Rogue One and the Original Trilogy.
Consider ye warned.
Clearing the Air
Andor is a triumph. Really. I’m a long time enjoyer of space adventures and grounded science fiction, and Andor scratches the kind of itch I haven’t been able to get to since I finished reading The Expanse.
It doesn’t have the quippy self-aware dialogue that marbles through so much of the rest of the franchise. It’s focused, telling a specific tale about a specific movement in a fictional universe, and it speaks so clearly to any number of ideological manifestations in real life. What’s more, even if you choose not to engage with all the political commentary and blatant criticisms of power, it’s still a great sci fi thriller story. I also liked Rogue One, the (now) interquel movie that serves as connective tissue between Andor and A New Hope.
I’m going to tell you something. Clear my throat, as it were, to let you know about the biases I’m carrying into this analysis. Here we go:
I don’t like Expanded Universe stuff.
I’m not just talking about Star Wars. Marvel, comics, the whole bit, I’m just not a fan. If it is your bag, great. I don’t want to say that you can’t enjoy a thing, and I know that millions of people love fanfic and metastories and gigantic piles of lore and everything that comes with it. But for me, I like a story to end, and I think the way franchises like Star Wars lend themselves to metatextual join-the-dots does a disservice to the stories within it.
I like to visit a universe, to see inside a creator’s head, and think about the themes and story that the world was built for, and then do it again somewhere else. I don’t even, as a rule, like sequels and prequels.
So my lack of love of an Expanded Universe is undoubtedly colouring my opinions on Andor, but they are at the very least declared.
I’m going to start with the big problem I see in any prequel. I’m not sure if there’s a proper term for it, so I’m going to refer to it as:
Threat Annulment
I think you know what I’m talking about. In a given movie, you don’t know who is going to survive, or indeed anything that is going to happen to them. The tension comes from not knowing what’s going to happen, because once it happens there’s no more tension: you’ve found out. This problem of threat annulment occurs when you’re writing a prequel to a story that is assumed knowledge for its audience.
It’s the “bomb under the table” problem that Hitchcock talks about, but expanded outside the text. If you’re watching a movie where people are sitting around a table and a bomb goes off, there’s no tension. However, show people sitting around a table, and show the audience there’s a bomb under the table? Now you’re freaking out. There’s a bomb! Do something! Please, somebody notice the bomb!
Now, imagine that you’ve done this well in a story you wrote. Six people are going to dinner, you show the bomb and build tension and at the end of the dinner and the movie it goes off. The story does well, everyone loves it, they want more, so you release a prequel called “On the Way to the Dinner.”
It’s so hard to create tension in this story. We know all the six characters in the original story make it to the original story. We know that anyone who isn’t one of the six characters doesn’t matter to the overall arc of both movies… so what do you do?
Unlike in some examples of more expensive but less good shows I could mention coughringsofpowercough, Andor manages this by having the tension in the show usually be about how Andor navigates others through situations, rather than being in direct threat himself. But even so, we know his ultimate fate, so the threatening moments are less threatening than they otherwise could be.
This is true of almost all the characters in the show. Mon Mothma is surrounded by her tradwife daughter, divorced friend who needs five bucks, and idiot husband, but we know she’s in the rebellion by A New Hope so it’s fine. Andor dies in Rogue One, so he’s fine for now. Krennic isn’t going anywhere because he needs to Ben Mendehlsohn all over the set at Scarif in Rogue One. Anyone who shows up in Andor or A New Hope isn’t ever in real danger because otherwise how would the movie happen? Conversely, anyone who hasn’t appeared in any media before? They’re probably fucked.
Luthen Rael? Dead man walking. Meero? Gone. Lonni, Maarva, Tay, Vel, Cinta, Brasso, anyone who we know isn’t elsewhere is either dead by series end or unimportant enough to just disappear from the show. Instead, the wonder and mystique the audience feels gets diverted away from the story being told and to the location the story fits into.
Wiki-fication
Andor’s final episodes were dedicated, as they were always going to have to be, to moving the characters around like chess pieces so that they’re in the places they need to be for the start of Rogue One to make any sense. Characters spent the last three episodes ping-ponging across the galaxy and getting haircuts so they look the same and are in the same place as they were in that one movie from a decade ago. Every single article I’ve seen about Andor talks about how great it is, and then talks about the implications for the greater lore. Here’s a couple of headlines that popped up on Google:
People aren’t talking about the work. They’re talking about the metatextual context it sits in. They’re treating it like a piece of stone that they have to rotate and jam into a wall they’ve constructed, where the mortar is their ability to draw connections between disparate parts of the franchise and the stones are all the other TV shows with the same logo in the corner. It reduces characters to toy soldiers being shoved around on a map, and the show to an exercise in chronicling instead of experiencing.
To me, the cool thing about Andor isn’t that it changes something that happened in a movie that came out in 2005. It isn’t that it reveals who found out about the Death Star first (the answer, in case you’re wondering, is “Some Guy”). It isn’t about how Yavin Four got its funding. It isn’t about the fact that there’s a headdress in Luthen’s antiques shop that comes from Naboo (something I found out while checking out what was being written about Andor elsewhere), and it certainly isn’t anything about the conditions the actors did or did not appear under.
Andor is about the power of continuing in hopeless conditions. It’s about the difficulties flawed people face when fighting totalitarianism. It’s about the yoke of cruel power being tightened, and the people who stand up. None of this reads well on a wiki, I’ll admit, but this ability to take a complex human experience and distil it into twenty-four episodes is what storytelling is for.
The point of a story isn’t to worldbuild. The point of a story is to talk about how you see the world. And Andor is telling us how it sees the world.
When too much energy in a story is expended trying to understand where it fits into a larger canon, the story itself starts to get lost, and the load-bearing elements of the tale become the things that it reaches for from other pieces of the setting.
Hey, it’s that guy!
The way that Star Wars has become an game of “I know who that is!” is already the subject of a lot of scorn. Glup Shitto, a fake character, was invented to make fun of just this phenomenon. This tendency is annoying, but in a show like Andor that is as serious as it is about its subject matter, it just comes across as inappropriate. What’s more, the sillier elements of the setting invade an otherwise very seriously constructed piece of fiction.
Like, I’m watching this story that’s showing the birth of a radical rebellion movement. I’m watching commentary about imperialist colonialism and the destruction of indigenous relics and tribes. I’m watching a depiction of the sexual violence committed against migrant workers. I’m watching the way dissent is propagandised and weaponised through an unwitting populace. I’m watching systematic power being wielded to disenfranchise entire people to the point of Genocide, and then it hits me.
Jar-Jar Binks is around somewhere.
This show is so good that it occasionally has to remind us that we’re in the Star Wars universe at all. Every now and then it’ll wheel out an alien, or show a guy watching podracing, or make some comment about Grand Moff Tarkin being a murderous maniac. It feels almost self-conscious whenever it happens, too. Like the show is kind of looking over its shoulder and saying “See? See? It’s here! Are you happy?”, but it feels out of place.
Sometimes it’s okay. The Grand Moff Tarkin namedrop was there and gone and it was in a part of a discussion about the Ghorman history of dissent from authority. It’s a key part of the story we’re in, and it’s important because then we understand why the Ghor are so quick to form a rebellious front. Chucking the Moff’s name in doesn’t add anything to the story other than connective tissue to the rest of the franchise, but I don’t really think takes away from it either. So, sure, whatever.
But then there’s the other times. In one episode, a force sensitive woman (the first time anything about the force has shown up in the show… four episodes from the end) stands over Andor and tells him he’s Important and rubs his shoulder for a couple of minutes. Another couple of protracted scenes involve the backstory of K2-SO, the droid from Rogue One voiced and mo-capped by Alan Tudyk.
Neither of these moments matter to the story in Andor. At all. The K2-SO scene only exists so that he can be there in Rogue One.
The Force sensitive woman is even more egregious. The show grinds to a complete halt for a weird religious moment. She walks up to Andor and says “Your most important days are in your future ooOOOOooo” and walks away again. Now, if you’ve seen Rogue One, you know that’s true, and why. But if you’ve seen Rogue One, you already knew that was true. And if you haven’t seen Rogue One, you have no idea what this woman is talking about. So why the fuck is it in the story? It’s a completely superfluous scene in a show that feels like it’s already struggling to move around everything in time for its conclusion.
I’m watching this show, which I must again stress, is one of my favourite shows ever, and keep getting pulled out of the story by these moments. The addition of the wisecracking robot from Rogue One feels really out of place in a season of television where only a couple of episodes earlier a woman was forced to murder someone to avoid being raped. Or even within the same arc, where that same robot had been rolled out as part of a genocidal death squad. Alan Tudyk is great, but the tonal whiplash doesn’t serve Andor well.
The constant drive to connect the franchise to its larger roster of characters goes all the way up to the broadest implications of the story. At this point, the threads to the other stories stop feeling inappropriate and begin to modify the ability for the story to even have the impact it’s intended to have.
Hey, it’s that Signifier!
One of the defences I’ve seen about the reason that this show in particular had to be about Star Wars was because, you know, it’s about the Death Star! And the Empire are people we already know are the bad guys!
The Empire being the bad guys isn’t what I have a problem with. The problem is that the Empire were already a signifier for real life bad guys. The stormtroopers were an allegory about fascist power (they’re called stormtroopers, for fuck’s sake). As for the uniforms, well…
The Empire in A New Hope are so transparently the Nazis. They are goose-steppin’, reactionary, violent, vile, infighting fascists with all the military might of Hitler’s Germania come to life, writ in blaster fire across the galaxy. The Death Star is the atomic bomb, and their callous dispatching of the last remnants of the republic was The Night of the Long Knives. And in 1977, the war was close enough in the collective memory that everyone got that.
The thing is, Andor isn’t commenting on World War Two. It’s talking about modern disinformation campaigns, modern genocidal movements, modern totalitarianism, and modern colonial projects (It is… difficult… not to think of Gaza during the Ghorman massacre).
I’m not against using signifiers in stories, as a matter of fact, I think you absolutely have to in sci fi. But you soften the point if you use a setpiece as iconic as Stormtroopers or the Death Star. By using these now half-century old signifiers, each reified and removed from their context to the point where they mean little more than “bad guys”, you add another layer of abstraction to the signifier. You’re obfuscating what these bad guys signify.
An example of this is the reveal in season one. During the prison arc, it’s revealed that the endless detention and insufferably high workload that causes the prisoners to keel over for fear of electrocution or death is in aid of building… the Death Star.
It’s a cool moment, honestly. The fact that Andor has a hand in the thing that will ultimately lead to his demise in Rogue One? Pretty neat. Nice little bookend to his character arc.
But I dunno, are we going to be impressed by pretty neat? I don’t think my media diet can survive on a whole franchise groaning under the weight of pretty neat.
The thing that I had been taking away from the prison arc prior to that reveal was already horrifying. A prison with no walls that keeps people under constant threat of death by electrocution? The systematised and deliberately broken judicial system that allows people to get locked away forever in slave labour camps?
That’s the creative, terrifying, otherworldly science fiction I want to see. The threat of the Empire is driven home by the fact that they are able to implement this system and nobody even knows about it. The demonstration of pure control despite the laziness of the guards and the crass, idiotic confidence in their technological terror. To be frank, I don’t care what they’re building, because being stuck in a prison labour camp with no way out is about the worst life I can imagine.
The whole show is so full of these wonderful moments of brilliant science fiction, and the way it has to kowtow to the signifiers of the franchise weakens it so much. I think that with only the slightest tweaks, Andor could have extricated itself from this referential malaise and been even better than it already is.
Let Andor be Andor
When you think about what would have to change to make Andor stand on its own, you really don’t have to do much. Change the names of characters, change the name of places. The vast majority of it could be done with Ctrl-F.
The aesthetic would barely have to change. It’s a compelling retrofuturistic cyberpunk aesthetic and it’s varied enough that it works. Obviously, stuff like stormtroopers would have to go, and it would probably do well to call the Empire something else, but it’s a tweak more than anything else.
The biggest change would have to be the Death Star. But here is where I think you have the best opportunity to improve the show.
Instead of having the scene in the first season where the part that Andor is making is revealed to be a part of the Death Star… have it not be the Death Star.
Do everything else the same. Show it being slotted into some enormous spacebound thing, sit with the size and scale of the construction, but don’t tell the audience what it is. Just let them sit with the enormity of it. Let the size of the industrial operation be its own type of horror.
After that, the show proceeds. The Ferrix rebellion, the clamping down of security, the planning of the Ghorman massacre, the whole lot.
That way, when Lonni reveals in season two that the Energy Plan isn’t an Energy Plan but the construction of a superweapon, it can hit the way it’s supposed to. The realisation that every step we’ve taken in this show, every single planet that’s been desecrated, every people that have been displaced, everyone who has died, and every moment of security were in aid of this gun, pointed at the head of the universe.
Show the thing again. Hit the audience with the scale. The way that humanity has been brought to its knees for the sake of something so destructive. The pure death seeking of the totalitarian state, wrought among the stars.
Show me that.
Because as it stands, while it’s true that Lonni says “It’s a weapon” and everyone in-universe freaks out, the same doesn’t happen with the Audience. Everyone watching just goes “Oh yeah, the Death Star. Of Star Wars fame. I know about that.”
Take yourself back to the first reveal of the Death Star you ever saw. Try to remember the first time you heard “That’s no moon... It’s a space station.” Now think of that scene coming out of absolutely nowhere, and told in the earnest, powerful way that has made Andor so popular.
I think it would go so god damned hard.
Personally, I think it’s even fine if this alternate story hearkens to Star Wars. Lots of my favourite sci fi wears its influence on its sleeve. Star Wars references Dune, as does The Expanse. Dead Space is basically Resident Evil 4 IN SPACE, everything cyberpunk ever looks like Blade Runner and Neuromancer, and I think being proud about your influences is one of the great things about a broad church and lineage of storytelling influence. It’s fine if people look at the gigantic weapons platform and think “ah, it’s kind of like the Death Star!” Art should build on what came before it, but god damnit, it doesn’t need to literally be attached to it.
Let the average fade away. Let the brilliant stand alone.
One of the main things about Star Wars that make it so appealing for writing stories in is that tonally, it’s all over the shop. Even in the original trilogy we have the bombastic space adventure of the first movie, the dark retribution of the second, and the teddy bear Viet-Cong stand-ins of the third. The Film that brought you a man getting choked on a table for insubordination (in front of his colleagues) also brought you a genre of music called “Jizz”. And that’s left a lot of room for creative expression, for better or worse.
Star Wars has made plenty of forgettable shows. The entire sequel trilogy is a mess. The Obi Wan show was more a collection of memes than a writing department. The Mandalorian is being held together with sellotape and Baby Yoda’s cuteness.
At the end of the day, most of these shows will be average. And that’s fine. I’ve watched and read and (frankly) produced enough average art to understand that it just fades away when that happens. It’s not that the people who created it weren’t trying, or that they’re bad at art, or they failed in any serious way. As a piece of expression, they’re still valid, they just aren’t one of those pieces of work that resonate through cultural consciousness. Who cares? It’s the case for the majority of working artists, for all of history.
But because these average shows have the name of one of the most influential pieces of media in the last century attached to them, they don’t get to enjoy the quiet retirement of anonymity with the billions of artworks that have disappeared over the years. Instead, they are subject to constant scrutiny, endless tier lists, the indecent chronicling obsession by those who see Star Wars not as a story but as a puzzle, a set of interlocking names and dates and details of a place that, at the end of the day, will never truly exist. They can’t ever be allowed to fade, and that’s a little sad.
I think it’s even worse for truly great pieces of science fiction like Andor, though. Andor, in my opinion, should become one of those pieces of art that inspires a generation, the way the works of Jules Verne or William Gibson or Suzanne Collins did. In fifteen years I’d love to see interviews where new artists are telling stories and saying “I saw Andor when I was twelve and it inspired me to write serious, cutting, political, powerful work.” I want it to have a thousand lesser imitators and, eventually, something that surpasses it in new and interesting ways.
Maybe it will, I don’t know. But based on the commentary I’ve seen about it, I fear that Andor will become a notable entry into the Expanded Universe, and nothing more than a guidebook on how to do a prequel well. And that would be a damn shame, because I want more stories like Andor’s.
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I love Andor! Spot on 🍿