Thanks for an interesting and more critical take on Andor. I think reading this has helped me be a little more grounded in my appreciation of the show as a work, even though I fully intend to remain obsessed with it.
You covered a lot of ground, so I'll just try to react/respond in broad strokes.
I think the pacing is more to my taste as I tend to enjoy long-windedness. That said, I wholly agree that the Cassian orphan planet backstory ended up being basically spurious, though I like that the sister is unresolved. To me, that reads not as something missing, but as Cassian dedicating himself to the real people, community, and purpose he's found, instead of the ghosts of the past.
I think Cassian fits best as a Forrest Gump type character; he's inexplicably always present at the crux of major events, a fact that the show notes/explains with its few allusions to the Force. Poor Cassian gets a much rawer deal from destiny than Luke. This format is at its best when Cassian is on Ghor, both times, and worst with the Mya Pei brigade.
Regarding Cassian's "will he, won't he" with the Rebellion, I think that the intended framing is: Post Narkina V prison planet/Rix Road revolt, Cassian needs to fight the empire, and devotes himself to Luthen. However, sustaining that impulse is hard-- Cassian is constantly torn between his commitment to his ideals and his commitments to Bix, Wilmon, etc. So it's less about the uncertainty in the outcome than understanding the journey. That said, this doesn't quite land for me due to the heavy handedness of Bix' departure making the choice for him, which may have read better with more seasons of development.
Ultimately, Cassian is charting a course from self-interested motives to galactic selflessness. (I want to find my sister -> I'm going to die for the galaxy's chance at freedom), and its these added stakes to the character that make him much more compelling when rewatching Rogue One.
I actually disagree with you regarding the necessity of showing the evil of the empire in detail compared to the OT. Andor evolves the empire from self-evidently evil because of manichaean evil Dark-Side tendencies, to a functioning bureaucratic state that many people live under, that does grinding, inexcusable evil in a way that the Syril's and Dedra's and Partagaz's of the galaxy can assent to as good. This is a much more mature and realistic kind of villainy, and it poses and then answers the question: what does it take to break out of such a system when you don't have a lightsaber?
Also, this is mass media. As a rule, if you think something is too heavy handed, there's a million viewers who still completely missed it.
You raised some good points with the character of Vel, who I think is a victim of "telling not showing." Luthen describes her and Cinta as top operatives, but we only see them on two missions that go awry. To Vel's credit, she and Mon have the least to lose of any of the characters; they have the familial wealth to simply post-up on a remote planet and ignore the empire for the rest of their lives. I think Vel is meant to ask the viewer "Why would someone who has access to the good life give it up to go live as a shepherd/guerilla on Aldhani?"
Unfortunately for Vel, Mon Mothma does a better job framing those exact questions, your questions about Chandrilan politics notwithstanding.
I won't rehash your praise of the many great performances in the show except to second them.
Per the interview you linked, Tony Gilroy has been studying authoritarianism and revolution for a long time. I think a lot of the power of this show stems from its ability to distill this history into a single coherent instant. In a media environment that is mostly fragmented noise, Andor rings clear:
"Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest."
I don't think I've quite said everything I want to, or said what I have as well as I'd like, but your essay provoked me to think more deeply about the show, so thank you.
Thank you for such a considered comment! To be clear, I don't disagree that showing the Empire's evil in detail was a misstep - as I say, I think that the Ghorman genocide, the rape, the prison sequence, the depiction of the ISB etc. are all indispensable parts of the show, and make it a far more raw, honest, and impactful depiction of a dictatorship than anything SW has shown us before. My gripe is more with the Cassian story's slow pacing and (imo) bloat at the expense of other plotlines. I definitely hear what you are saying about him, and I understand what they were aiming for with the character: maybe it not appealing to me is a matter of personal taste as much as anything, clearly it landed for millions of people, including many who are intelligent and articulate, and I'm not going to say all those people are objectively wrong.
In general, I'm very much a sucker for efficiency, and doing a lot with a little (ironic, given the length of my posts...), which is probably a major reason why I seldom click with long-form multi-season TV dramas: The Terror is more my vibe. It's also why I found characters like Dedra and Syril so much more compelling than Andor himself - they were so well drawn with only a fraction of the screen time.
I’m somewhat more forgiving of dangling threads given the inherent uncertainty of how much show Gilroy was going to be allowed to make, although I agree that Andor got more flashbacks than necessary. Honestly all the Saw stuff felt more unnecessary. Yeah he’s an interesting character but nothing he does actually impacts the plot of Andor. Even his interactions with Wilmon don’t seem to change the Wilmon-Cassian-Bix dynamics in any meaningful way.
The Cassian “will he won’t he stay a Rebel” struck me as a missed opportunity, because with a few tweaks it could have been a question of whether he would ultimately become a Luthen true believer or strike his own path as a more humanist rebel. I honestly thought that’s where it was going, until the out-of-the-blue Bix abandonment. Why did he want to abandon the Rebels entirely, vs finding another role with a different leader? All the other Rebels low key hate Luthen too! Working with Draven to start the Rebel version of the OSS would have been an option.
Bix was an awkwardly tied up plot - they had to put her on a bus because she’s not there in Rogue One, but it’s like they ran out of time to come up with a good reason. So she bails on Cassian (after apparently getting pregnant with what’s implied to be his baby) because she cares so much about The Cause, but then she just goes and hangs out on a wheat farm safe house raising a kid? Her whole conflict with Cassian was that she felt undervalued and wanted a more active role where she wasn’t always being protected! I’m guessing with more seasons, a more “satisfying” tragic end to their relationship could have been arranged.
For me the biggest missed opportunity was that they never really engaged with the fact that *Cassian was absolutely right about the Ghorman resistance*. They were hotheaded and incompetent and ultimately played right into Imperial hands, accomplishing nothing but making it easier to sell the massacre as justified. You’d think Cassian would at least *mention* this. But Luthen was right too - Ghorman did burn bright. The show does a great job portraying the evil of the Empire, but it lets the Rebels off a bit easy - after all, the ISB and Luthen were essentially on the same side on Ghorman, intentionally ramping up the temperature to force a confrontation. They had different ultimate purposes, obviously, but both believed that the Ghorman massacre served their interests and considered the Ghormans themselves as little more than pawns for that purpose.
The show doesn’t really engage with this, which should have been a real crisis point between Cassian and Luthen (and the various factions they represent). Instead Ghorman just gives a reason for Mothma to give a speech directly to the audience and then we move on to the Death Star plot. Ultimately the writers do the same thing to Ghorman that the Rebels and Imperials did - use it to drive the plot and then lay it aside once that purpose is served.
Hard agree on all points! I did like seeing Whitaker's version of Saw again, but he is definitely superfluous. His whole planned raid plot pretty much went nowhere, I liked the speech with Wilmon but there's very little follow-up beyond Cassian and Bix expressing mild disapproval of Wilmon's offscreen terrorist antics. It's kind of similar to the TIE fighter plot, we're just supposed to take it for granted that this is important enough to justify the limited screen-time. Wilmon's also faintly ridiculous re. the Dreena subplot, where he not only hooks up with but forms a lifelong bond with this woman in the space of circa 24 hours and on the threshold of a massacre, no less.
Also re. Bix, I didn't go into this in the review, but I have to say that I do feel she's kind of an 'old-fashioned' female character, insofar as she's defined almost entirely in terms of her relationship with Cassian, and how what's she's going through affects him. Also, given how much older than her Luna looks by the end, I couldn't help but think of old movies from the 40s and 50s where you have gorgeous young women with much older men.
I also agree that it's very weird to have her run away to commit herself to the cause instead of Cassian, only to instead commit to raising his child by herself, which is clearly incompatible with the cause and does just represent another way of choosing Cassian over the cause. If anything, I think you could reasonably argue that Bix would be far more likely to abort, in order to commit herself to the Rebellion, but I guess that would piss a lot of people off. But I've done enough controversy for one post without getting into pro-natalism as well...
And yeah, the conflict between Cassian and Luthen over Ghorman is definitely a high point for Cassian's character, and a point when I found myself sympathising with him and rooting for him (despite my hater credentials), but it should have been developed further. Even just one definitive 'break-up' scene between Cassian and Luthen might have done wonders.
Honestly I think Bix was a character they didn’t know quite what to do with. In Season One she’s kind of just the female version of Cassian - a criminal living on the margins who is loyal to her friends/family then gets unwittingly pulled into the Rebellion when the Imperials crack down on her unnecessarily brutally. (This actually proves your point about the superfluity of the baby Cassian flashbacks - we know what the version of the character without all that looks like, because it’s Bix).
In Season Two, she’s a mess. Is she:
A) a more ideologically committed but less suited to wet work version of Cassian, who resents getting sidelined because Luthen has more use for Cassian?
B) a broken person traumatized by her torture who spirals into self-destructive addiction?
C) an “old fashioned female character” who represents the peaceful life Cassian ultimately wants but can’t have until the Rebellion is won?
The writers try to make her all 3 and it doesn’t really land. Personally I think C actually works - the show has a wide variety of female characters and centering one who just wants to do what she needs to live a normal life would actually be refreshing, I think.
Because a weakness of Andor, especially Season Two, is that it does an excellent job of showing what the Rebels are fighting *against* but not what they are fighting *for*. All the main characters are miserable in their pre-Rebellion lives! The Empire is making the galaxy worse, but we get the sense that it was kind of a shithole for most people anyway (as observant fans have noted, the “Imperial Kinder Block” orphan Dedra was in would have had to be a *Republic* orphanage for the timeline to make sense).
Andor and Kleya are orphans, Bix is scraping by as a criminal, Mothma and Vel are in golden shackles. I think they undermined Luthen a bit by making him a disillusioned Imperial sergeant. If he was actually a wealthy, posh antiquities dealer who had to abandon a life of luxury and comfort to fight, that would be more poignant. But it turns out that was just a cover all along.
The people who are actually satisfied and comfortable in their lives but choose to fight anyway are all secondary. Bail Organa, the head dude on Ghorman, and, most tragically, Tay Kolma. Poor Tay nukes his own wealth and marriage to cover Mon’s ass, and the only thanks he gets is being portrayed as faintly ridiculous and naive by the showrunners and getting whacked offscreen.
(As an aside, Mon Mothma is a bit of a moral monster. She’s clearly bothered by Chandrilan hyper-conservative culture, but doesn’t do anything about it because it might upset her privileged apple cart. She’s critical to the Rebellion, and does take some serious personal risk, but every time she’s really under threat, she lets someone else do the dirty work and then resents them for it. Hell, she even makes her hubby do all the work of maintaining the social calendar that serves as her cover. She leaves a trail of destruction in her wake but basically comes off unhurt and with clean hands)
There is definitely a perennial issue in SW whereby they kind of massively fumbled by having Organa and Mothma as both a) Republic senators, representing the corrupt old oligarchy and ludicrous privilege, and b) Rebel leaders. Bail was Alderaan's senator for like 30 years in canon, happens to be the queen's husband, and is immediately replaced by his teenage daughter. You cannot tell me this guy believes in democracy.
Mon, meanwhile, has been senator since she was fifteen (and apparently both of her parents are high-ranking politicians). It's ridiculous to have these characters presented as caring about democracy, especially when both the prequels and the EU stuff all strongly alludes to the Republic being a corrupt oligarchy that was already 80% of the way down the fascist pipeline. It kind of looks like these leaders only care about freedom and democracy because the Emperor is gradually dismantling the Senate and making them obsolete.
All of this makes it very hard to write a good political story in SW, because unfortunately the rest of SW gets in the way. It definitely makes it hard for me to get too excited about the Rebellion as presented in Andor, because these unresolved issues are kind of elephants in the room.
Re. the 'kinder block' timeline issue, people are doing mental gymnastics claiming that Dedra calls it that because she's a nationalist and the memory of the Republic has been blotted out. I don't buy this, I think they just 'kind of forgot' and liked the Nazi-ish language of 'kinder block.' It's a minor issue and the character still works, but I don't think that the show's writing is quite as polished and thought-through as some have suggested.
I think it works fine as a political story, just not one that maps nicely to the 21st century notions of democratic idealism. When they lean too far in that direction, it’s awkward for reasons you point out.
The relevant Republic analogue is not America, but Rome. That actually maps pretty well, with Mothma and Organa fitting nicely into the role of optimate senators.
I'm only vaguely familiar with SW, having only watched the original trilogy years ago, but all the hype around this show piqued my interest. This is the first time I see any negative criticism for it, and the points you bring up look like the kind of stuff that would really annoy me. It still looks interesting, but I think I'll put it off for now. I totally agree with you on how the idea of Andor being revolutionary and good enough to "force" Disney to change their ways is kinda silly. As with anything that proves to be financially and critically successful, it's not going to change the system which created it, Disney is just going to try and reproduce this success.
"Prestige TV" is a very loaded phrase, and I feel that many shows get called "mature" or "deep" far more than they deserve. Like you, i rarely watch any of those shows, and i fear that most of them wont live up to the hype if i do get around to watching them. However! I do have one recommendation if you are looking for a show that kinda falls in the prestige tv category, but because it wasn't very popular (and didn't get much mainstream recognition at the time), it got away with being very political and anti-establishment: Black Sails. I think you would find the writing quite satisfying.
Thanks for reading! I'm not sure whether you would like Andor; some people really really love it, although the response to S1 was far more tepid, especially its opening episodes. I sort of tried to do a re-watch to see if I felt differently in light of the new season (which is better), but the story takes so long to get moving I quickly realised I wasn't going to enjoy it more.
It's very much SW made by and for people who don't particularly like SW, as Tony Gilroy has admitted, and that has sometimes been a great thing in the past (because SW is, above all, an incoherent dumpster fire), but the results are kind of mixed here.
Have heard a lot of praise for Black Sails, and I thank you for the recommendation!
Thanks for your insights. I personally really enjoyed watching Andor and thought it was far better than a lot of recent Star Wars films/shows, but I was interested to read a different perspective and don't begrudge anyone who thinks differently to me. I also was beginning to notice that Cassian himself seemed to say he would quit the rebellion every episode but never did.
Thank you for reading! I would say that I enjoyed the show overall, and it is definitely light-years ahead of the rest of current SW in terms of quality; really, the Cassian plot is my main gripe. I just wish they'd made it about a new character, and maybe called it 'Star Wars: Rebellion' or something, so that they did not have to keep spinning out this character with conflict that we know won't going anywhere. I'd be less annoyed by it if everything else about the series wasn't so good!
Curious that you see the Imperial genocide on Ghorman as an Israel analogue when the Ghor are a wealthy people in full possession of their land. I have no problem seeing Israel as the Empire but I have every problem seeing the Ghor as Palestinians.
Andor is tough to criticize. People are content to watch trash these days and any drama that is competently executed gets unwarranted praise, especially if it's Disney. I'd throw about half of the series on the cutting room floor as bad or just unnecessary, Andor's back story, the fighter, Saw Garrera's mad ravings. But the high points of the prison drama, Luthen and Lonny, Dedra and Siril, and the Ghorman massacre are some of the best sci fi ever, and we have to give credit for that even if the overall average quality of the series is much lower.
It's surely not a 1/1 equivalent: as you say, the Ghor are far better off to begin with. But I think it's very obvious that's what they were alluding to re. the use and suppression of the term genocide, which in 2025 conjures up very specific associations. Also, the whole background that the Empire systematically dehumanises these people because it wants their land, and the repugnant talk about 'our Imperial martyrs' and revenge rhetoric. It's all rather familiar.
You can stress Israel if you want. But the Ghor are painstakingly crafted to mimic the French resistance versus the Nazis right down to the previous work of the actors they hired. And this setup is much more like Tiananmen, Maidan, and the various color revolutions, or what is happening in Los Angeles right now, than anything that has occurred in Palestine since the first Intifada.
The Empire absolutely does not want the people’s land. You’re shoehorning that Israeli parallel in and it does not fit. The Empire wants the particular mineral in the ground as a strategic resource. It could care less about land in general. It wants total control of society and to make the average person’s thoughts and desires align with the Emperor’s will to the maximum extent possible. Land, or territory, or even whole star systems don’t matter unless they increase the number and dedication of Palpatine’s followers.
Don’t get me wrong. I am no fan of Israel and I would love to see a drama that engages with the Palestinian cause in a serious way, but this is not it.
Part of me would like to argue this further, but I think we'll just end up going round in circles, so I shall have to agree to disagree. Thanks for reading in any case!
Thanks for an interesting and more critical take on Andor. I think reading this has helped me be a little more grounded in my appreciation of the show as a work, even though I fully intend to remain obsessed with it.
You covered a lot of ground, so I'll just try to react/respond in broad strokes.
I think the pacing is more to my taste as I tend to enjoy long-windedness. That said, I wholly agree that the Cassian orphan planet backstory ended up being basically spurious, though I like that the sister is unresolved. To me, that reads not as something missing, but as Cassian dedicating himself to the real people, community, and purpose he's found, instead of the ghosts of the past.
I think Cassian fits best as a Forrest Gump type character; he's inexplicably always present at the crux of major events, a fact that the show notes/explains with its few allusions to the Force. Poor Cassian gets a much rawer deal from destiny than Luke. This format is at its best when Cassian is on Ghor, both times, and worst with the Mya Pei brigade.
Regarding Cassian's "will he, won't he" with the Rebellion, I think that the intended framing is: Post Narkina V prison planet/Rix Road revolt, Cassian needs to fight the empire, and devotes himself to Luthen. However, sustaining that impulse is hard-- Cassian is constantly torn between his commitment to his ideals and his commitments to Bix, Wilmon, etc. So it's less about the uncertainty in the outcome than understanding the journey. That said, this doesn't quite land for me due to the heavy handedness of Bix' departure making the choice for him, which may have read better with more seasons of development.
Ultimately, Cassian is charting a course from self-interested motives to galactic selflessness. (I want to find my sister -> I'm going to die for the galaxy's chance at freedom), and its these added stakes to the character that make him much more compelling when rewatching Rogue One.
I actually disagree with you regarding the necessity of showing the evil of the empire in detail compared to the OT. Andor evolves the empire from self-evidently evil because of manichaean evil Dark-Side tendencies, to a functioning bureaucratic state that many people live under, that does grinding, inexcusable evil in a way that the Syril's and Dedra's and Partagaz's of the galaxy can assent to as good. This is a much more mature and realistic kind of villainy, and it poses and then answers the question: what does it take to break out of such a system when you don't have a lightsaber?
Also, this is mass media. As a rule, if you think something is too heavy handed, there's a million viewers who still completely missed it.
You raised some good points with the character of Vel, who I think is a victim of "telling not showing." Luthen describes her and Cinta as top operatives, but we only see them on two missions that go awry. To Vel's credit, she and Mon have the least to lose of any of the characters; they have the familial wealth to simply post-up on a remote planet and ignore the empire for the rest of their lives. I think Vel is meant to ask the viewer "Why would someone who has access to the good life give it up to go live as a shepherd/guerilla on Aldhani?"
Unfortunately for Vel, Mon Mothma does a better job framing those exact questions, your questions about Chandrilan politics notwithstanding.
I won't rehash your praise of the many great performances in the show except to second them.
Per the interview you linked, Tony Gilroy has been studying authoritarianism and revolution for a long time. I think a lot of the power of this show stems from its ability to distill this history into a single coherent instant. In a media environment that is mostly fragmented noise, Andor rings clear:
"Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest."
I don't think I've quite said everything I want to, or said what I have as well as I'd like, but your essay provoked me to think more deeply about the show, so thank you.
Thank you for such a considered comment! To be clear, I don't disagree that showing the Empire's evil in detail was a misstep - as I say, I think that the Ghorman genocide, the rape, the prison sequence, the depiction of the ISB etc. are all indispensable parts of the show, and make it a far more raw, honest, and impactful depiction of a dictatorship than anything SW has shown us before. My gripe is more with the Cassian story's slow pacing and (imo) bloat at the expense of other plotlines. I definitely hear what you are saying about him, and I understand what they were aiming for with the character: maybe it not appealing to me is a matter of personal taste as much as anything, clearly it landed for millions of people, including many who are intelligent and articulate, and I'm not going to say all those people are objectively wrong.
In general, I'm very much a sucker for efficiency, and doing a lot with a little (ironic, given the length of my posts...), which is probably a major reason why I seldom click with long-form multi-season TV dramas: The Terror is more my vibe. It's also why I found characters like Dedra and Syril so much more compelling than Andor himself - they were so well drawn with only a fraction of the screen time.
I’m somewhat more forgiving of dangling threads given the inherent uncertainty of how much show Gilroy was going to be allowed to make, although I agree that Andor got more flashbacks than necessary. Honestly all the Saw stuff felt more unnecessary. Yeah he’s an interesting character but nothing he does actually impacts the plot of Andor. Even his interactions with Wilmon don’t seem to change the Wilmon-Cassian-Bix dynamics in any meaningful way.
The Cassian “will he won’t he stay a Rebel” struck me as a missed opportunity, because with a few tweaks it could have been a question of whether he would ultimately become a Luthen true believer or strike his own path as a more humanist rebel. I honestly thought that’s where it was going, until the out-of-the-blue Bix abandonment. Why did he want to abandon the Rebels entirely, vs finding another role with a different leader? All the other Rebels low key hate Luthen too! Working with Draven to start the Rebel version of the OSS would have been an option.
Bix was an awkwardly tied up plot - they had to put her on a bus because she’s not there in Rogue One, but it’s like they ran out of time to come up with a good reason. So she bails on Cassian (after apparently getting pregnant with what’s implied to be his baby) because she cares so much about The Cause, but then she just goes and hangs out on a wheat farm safe house raising a kid? Her whole conflict with Cassian was that she felt undervalued and wanted a more active role where she wasn’t always being protected! I’m guessing with more seasons, a more “satisfying” tragic end to their relationship could have been arranged.
For me the biggest missed opportunity was that they never really engaged with the fact that *Cassian was absolutely right about the Ghorman resistance*. They were hotheaded and incompetent and ultimately played right into Imperial hands, accomplishing nothing but making it easier to sell the massacre as justified. You’d think Cassian would at least *mention* this. But Luthen was right too - Ghorman did burn bright. The show does a great job portraying the evil of the Empire, but it lets the Rebels off a bit easy - after all, the ISB and Luthen were essentially on the same side on Ghorman, intentionally ramping up the temperature to force a confrontation. They had different ultimate purposes, obviously, but both believed that the Ghorman massacre served their interests and considered the Ghormans themselves as little more than pawns for that purpose.
The show doesn’t really engage with this, which should have been a real crisis point between Cassian and Luthen (and the various factions they represent). Instead Ghorman just gives a reason for Mothma to give a speech directly to the audience and then we move on to the Death Star plot. Ultimately the writers do the same thing to Ghorman that the Rebels and Imperials did - use it to drive the plot and then lay it aside once that purpose is served.
Hard agree on all points! I did like seeing Whitaker's version of Saw again, but he is definitely superfluous. His whole planned raid plot pretty much went nowhere, I liked the speech with Wilmon but there's very little follow-up beyond Cassian and Bix expressing mild disapproval of Wilmon's offscreen terrorist antics. It's kind of similar to the TIE fighter plot, we're just supposed to take it for granted that this is important enough to justify the limited screen-time. Wilmon's also faintly ridiculous re. the Dreena subplot, where he not only hooks up with but forms a lifelong bond with this woman in the space of circa 24 hours and on the threshold of a massacre, no less.
Also re. Bix, I didn't go into this in the review, but I have to say that I do feel she's kind of an 'old-fashioned' female character, insofar as she's defined almost entirely in terms of her relationship with Cassian, and how what's she's going through affects him. Also, given how much older than her Luna looks by the end, I couldn't help but think of old movies from the 40s and 50s where you have gorgeous young women with much older men.
I also agree that it's very weird to have her run away to commit herself to the cause instead of Cassian, only to instead commit to raising his child by herself, which is clearly incompatible with the cause and does just represent another way of choosing Cassian over the cause. If anything, I think you could reasonably argue that Bix would be far more likely to abort, in order to commit herself to the Rebellion, but I guess that would piss a lot of people off. But I've done enough controversy for one post without getting into pro-natalism as well...
And yeah, the conflict between Cassian and Luthen over Ghorman is definitely a high point for Cassian's character, and a point when I found myself sympathising with him and rooting for him (despite my hater credentials), but it should have been developed further. Even just one definitive 'break-up' scene between Cassian and Luthen might have done wonders.
Honestly I think Bix was a character they didn’t know quite what to do with. In Season One she’s kind of just the female version of Cassian - a criminal living on the margins who is loyal to her friends/family then gets unwittingly pulled into the Rebellion when the Imperials crack down on her unnecessarily brutally. (This actually proves your point about the superfluity of the baby Cassian flashbacks - we know what the version of the character without all that looks like, because it’s Bix).
In Season Two, she’s a mess. Is she:
A) a more ideologically committed but less suited to wet work version of Cassian, who resents getting sidelined because Luthen has more use for Cassian?
B) a broken person traumatized by her torture who spirals into self-destructive addiction?
C) an “old fashioned female character” who represents the peaceful life Cassian ultimately wants but can’t have until the Rebellion is won?
The writers try to make her all 3 and it doesn’t really land. Personally I think C actually works - the show has a wide variety of female characters and centering one who just wants to do what she needs to live a normal life would actually be refreshing, I think.
Because a weakness of Andor, especially Season Two, is that it does an excellent job of showing what the Rebels are fighting *against* but not what they are fighting *for*. All the main characters are miserable in their pre-Rebellion lives! The Empire is making the galaxy worse, but we get the sense that it was kind of a shithole for most people anyway (as observant fans have noted, the “Imperial Kinder Block” orphan Dedra was in would have had to be a *Republic* orphanage for the timeline to make sense).
Andor and Kleya are orphans, Bix is scraping by as a criminal, Mothma and Vel are in golden shackles. I think they undermined Luthen a bit by making him a disillusioned Imperial sergeant. If he was actually a wealthy, posh antiquities dealer who had to abandon a life of luxury and comfort to fight, that would be more poignant. But it turns out that was just a cover all along.
The people who are actually satisfied and comfortable in their lives but choose to fight anyway are all secondary. Bail Organa, the head dude on Ghorman, and, most tragically, Tay Kolma. Poor Tay nukes his own wealth and marriage to cover Mon’s ass, and the only thanks he gets is being portrayed as faintly ridiculous and naive by the showrunners and getting whacked offscreen.
(As an aside, Mon Mothma is a bit of a moral monster. She’s clearly bothered by Chandrilan hyper-conservative culture, but doesn’t do anything about it because it might upset her privileged apple cart. She’s critical to the Rebellion, and does take some serious personal risk, but every time she’s really under threat, she lets someone else do the dirty work and then resents them for it. Hell, she even makes her hubby do all the work of maintaining the social calendar that serves as her cover. She leaves a trail of destruction in her wake but basically comes off unhurt and with clean hands)
There is definitely a perennial issue in SW whereby they kind of massively fumbled by having Organa and Mothma as both a) Republic senators, representing the corrupt old oligarchy and ludicrous privilege, and b) Rebel leaders. Bail was Alderaan's senator for like 30 years in canon, happens to be the queen's husband, and is immediately replaced by his teenage daughter. You cannot tell me this guy believes in democracy.
Mon, meanwhile, has been senator since she was fifteen (and apparently both of her parents are high-ranking politicians). It's ridiculous to have these characters presented as caring about democracy, especially when both the prequels and the EU stuff all strongly alludes to the Republic being a corrupt oligarchy that was already 80% of the way down the fascist pipeline. It kind of looks like these leaders only care about freedom and democracy because the Emperor is gradually dismantling the Senate and making them obsolete.
All of this makes it very hard to write a good political story in SW, because unfortunately the rest of SW gets in the way. It definitely makes it hard for me to get too excited about the Rebellion as presented in Andor, because these unresolved issues are kind of elephants in the room.
Re. the 'kinder block' timeline issue, people are doing mental gymnastics claiming that Dedra calls it that because she's a nationalist and the memory of the Republic has been blotted out. I don't buy this, I think they just 'kind of forgot' and liked the Nazi-ish language of 'kinder block.' It's a minor issue and the character still works, but I don't think that the show's writing is quite as polished and thought-through as some have suggested.
I think it works fine as a political story, just not one that maps nicely to the 21st century notions of democratic idealism. When they lean too far in that direction, it’s awkward for reasons you point out.
The relevant Republic analogue is not America, but Rome. That actually maps pretty well, with Mothma and Organa fitting nicely into the role of optimate senators.
Eye-opening thread. I'm very glad I read it, very interesting takes here.
Thank you for reading and sharing, and I'm glad you enjoyed!
I'm only vaguely familiar with SW, having only watched the original trilogy years ago, but all the hype around this show piqued my interest. This is the first time I see any negative criticism for it, and the points you bring up look like the kind of stuff that would really annoy me. It still looks interesting, but I think I'll put it off for now. I totally agree with you on how the idea of Andor being revolutionary and good enough to "force" Disney to change their ways is kinda silly. As with anything that proves to be financially and critically successful, it's not going to change the system which created it, Disney is just going to try and reproduce this success.
"Prestige TV" is a very loaded phrase, and I feel that many shows get called "mature" or "deep" far more than they deserve. Like you, i rarely watch any of those shows, and i fear that most of them wont live up to the hype if i do get around to watching them. However! I do have one recommendation if you are looking for a show that kinda falls in the prestige tv category, but because it wasn't very popular (and didn't get much mainstream recognition at the time), it got away with being very political and anti-establishment: Black Sails. I think you would find the writing quite satisfying.
Also thanks for the shout out :)
Thanks for reading! I'm not sure whether you would like Andor; some people really really love it, although the response to S1 was far more tepid, especially its opening episodes. I sort of tried to do a re-watch to see if I felt differently in light of the new season (which is better), but the story takes so long to get moving I quickly realised I wasn't going to enjoy it more.
It's very much SW made by and for people who don't particularly like SW, as Tony Gilroy has admitted, and that has sometimes been a great thing in the past (because SW is, above all, an incoherent dumpster fire), but the results are kind of mixed here.
Have heard a lot of praise for Black Sails, and I thank you for the recommendation!
Thanks for your insights. I personally really enjoyed watching Andor and thought it was far better than a lot of recent Star Wars films/shows, but I was interested to read a different perspective and don't begrudge anyone who thinks differently to me. I also was beginning to notice that Cassian himself seemed to say he would quit the rebellion every episode but never did.
Thank you for reading! I would say that I enjoyed the show overall, and it is definitely light-years ahead of the rest of current SW in terms of quality; really, the Cassian plot is my main gripe. I just wish they'd made it about a new character, and maybe called it 'Star Wars: Rebellion' or something, so that they did not have to keep spinning out this character with conflict that we know won't going anywhere. I'd be less annoyed by it if everything else about the series wasn't so good!
Curious that you see the Imperial genocide on Ghorman as an Israel analogue when the Ghor are a wealthy people in full possession of their land. I have no problem seeing Israel as the Empire but I have every problem seeing the Ghor as Palestinians.
Andor is tough to criticize. People are content to watch trash these days and any drama that is competently executed gets unwarranted praise, especially if it's Disney. I'd throw about half of the series on the cutting room floor as bad or just unnecessary, Andor's back story, the fighter, Saw Garrera's mad ravings. But the high points of the prison drama, Luthen and Lonny, Dedra and Siril, and the Ghorman massacre are some of the best sci fi ever, and we have to give credit for that even if the overall average quality of the series is much lower.
It's surely not a 1/1 equivalent: as you say, the Ghor are far better off to begin with. But I think it's very obvious that's what they were alluding to re. the use and suppression of the term genocide, which in 2025 conjures up very specific associations. Also, the whole background that the Empire systematically dehumanises these people because it wants their land, and the repugnant talk about 'our Imperial martyrs' and revenge rhetoric. It's all rather familiar.
You can stress Israel if you want. But the Ghor are painstakingly crafted to mimic the French resistance versus the Nazis right down to the previous work of the actors they hired. And this setup is much more like Tiananmen, Maidan, and the various color revolutions, or what is happening in Los Angeles right now, than anything that has occurred in Palestine since the first Intifada.
The Empire absolutely does not want the people’s land. You’re shoehorning that Israeli parallel in and it does not fit. The Empire wants the particular mineral in the ground as a strategic resource. It could care less about land in general. It wants total control of society and to make the average person’s thoughts and desires align with the Emperor’s will to the maximum extent possible. Land, or territory, or even whole star systems don’t matter unless they increase the number and dedication of Palpatine’s followers.
Don’t get me wrong. I am no fan of Israel and I would love to see a drama that engages with the Palestinian cause in a serious way, but this is not it.
Part of me would like to argue this further, but I think we'll just end up going round in circles, so I shall have to agree to disagree. Thanks for reading in any case!