Did Andor RUIN Star Wars?

0:03 I think we're cash, folks. I think we had the best and now it's gone. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and by that I mean Burbank California 2017, Disney's once and future CEO Bob Iger announced The Mouse and Lucasfilm would develop a catalog of TV series in the Star Wars universe. In 2018, with the streaming service Disney Plus on the horizon due to launch in November of the following year, Lucasfilm announced that one of the series in development was a prequel series to the prequel spin-off movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This show would focus on the early Rebel days of Rogue One's secondary lead, Cassian Andor. I was confused. I know a lot of people like Rogue One, and look, the rampant fan service wasn't entirely lost on me. I still have an inner child. His

0:50 name's Johnny. He's over there. But in my humble opinion, the movie, not unlike all of the Star Wars movies thus far in the Disney era, really suffered on repeat viewings for relying far too much on said fan service and winky esoteric Rick Dalton memes. Help. Diego Luna's Cassie and Andor was certainly the most interesting part of Rogue One. But to say it was really dubious of a spin-off to a spin-off would be an understatement. We'll be all right. Imagine my surprise then that not only was Andor a completely different kind of Star Wars series to all the shows that had come out prior, but that it was maybe the best Star Wars thing since the original [Music] trilogy. The second and final season of

1:35 Andor wrapped up a couple weeks ago. I spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of each episode over on the podcast Laser Focus, which you can watch here on YouTube or listen to wherever you get podcasts. Plug, plug, plug. And while you can argue whether season 1 or two of Andor is better, that's like arguing whether an Eminem flurry is better than an Eminem Blizzard. It's still the best you're going to eat today. Andor is soing good. It's incredible. And maybe it's too good. It fills you with two conflicting feelings. One, I can't believe Star Wars can be this good. And two, I'm pretty sure it will never be this good again andor may have ruined Star Wars for the rest of time. Harsh, perhaps reactionary, definitely

2:22 incorrect. I don't think so. Star Wars has always been a franchise desperately attempting to mash up science fantasy, swashbuckling adventure, political intrigue, and thematic social allegory. Anyone who tells you anything else is a fool and a coward. But even the staunchest defender of Star Wars as a whole will tell you the quality varies wildly depending on the era and project. The high water mark generally considered the Empire Strikes Back, while the Nadier is usually the Phantom Menace or maybe the theatrical Clone Wars animated movie. It's It's pretty bad. What? No, no, no, no, no, no. There must be some mistake. But variety is a spice of life. No, that's not a Dune reference, Matt. Everything is a Dune reference, Kyle. I'm not here to rank everything or tell

3:07 you why a movie or show you love is very bad, actually. But like the kid in class who ruins a curve on a test by getting a 99 when everyone else gets a 70, Andor raises the bar to such a startling degree, it makes the rest of the franchise look worse. Are you going to fail? Cuz I could fail, too. So, why is Andor so good? It's a number of factors. First and foremost, we have to look at the era in which the series came out and how everything else was getting made at the time. As I said before, Andor came about as a reaction to the success of Rogue One and Disney's desire to pack their nent streaming service with recognizable IP. But Andor was by no means the first of these Disney Plus shows to air. The first season was made during the COVID lockdowns. By the time it actually premiered in 2022, the Skywalker saga had been over for a few

3:53 years with no new feature film on the horizon anytime soon. We also had four seasons of live action series, not to mention a number of animated endeavors. The biggest hit of the bunch was undoubtedly The Mandalorian, Disney Plus's flagship Lucasfilm offering. It premiered right around the time of The Rise of Skywalker and almost totally overshadowed the big screen thing. I'm not going to pretend here. The first season of The Mandalorian is really, really good. This is the way. This is the way. It featured the kind of one-off adventures I've always wanted in the Star Wars universe. Not only is it a space western meets space samurai series, but it featured a bounty hunter who for all intents and purposes at the time gave us a Boba Fett dopamine hit. The Mandalorian armor is awesome. We love to see it, don't we folks? This is

4:38 the way. The series had greater implications for the Star Wars universe, specifically in a time period we hadn't spent a ton of time yet. Post Return of the Jedi pre the Force Awakens, the New Republic era. The show had canon references to a lot of things from the animated universe, specifically the Clone Wars series, which I thought was pretty fun at the time. Honestly, the thing I like the least about The Mandalorian season 1 is that we didn't get more Verer Herzog. I still say bounty hunting and grief Cara like him. The droids are not beeping so much as they are screaming in agony. It's great stuff. Less than a year later, we got the second season, which started to indicate a trend that I

5:25 found and continued to find troubling. After giving us a compelling lead character and his adorable Toyota surrogate son, The Mandalorian chose to spend a good half of its second season tossing characters from books and animated series at us. And like, don't get me wrong, some of those were fun. I think in isolation that Ahsoka Samurai Western was dope, but it was also inescapably set up to a spin-off series we all expected would happen. And the season ended with the infamous deaged uncanny valley ass Luke Skywalker because everything has to be connected again. It's like poetry sort of they rhyme. Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one. There's also no escaping the Boba Fettness of it all. Tamira Morrison returned to play Boba Fett, who did not die in the Sarlac pit, became a

6:10 major character on the Mandalorian season 2 and got his own spin-off series, The Book of Boba Fett, which famously does not feature a book. Naturally, everyone's mileage may vary, but the Robert Fetachini Show is, to me, to date the absolute bottom of the barrel of Star Wars in the Disney era. No one respects you. Oh, this is the first I'm hearing of it. Just uninspired, super in the weeds, wheel spinning that actively felt like it was keeping anyone not intimately familiar with the universe and its myriad spin-offs at arms length. Stories need to be able to exist on their own for their own merits, regardless of where and how much they fit into overall continuity. Robbie Fetty is the biggest offender of this possibly ever. It's only seven episodes long and after the first four obscenely boring episodes, unceremoniously and without flagging it

6:56 to fans who might have checked out, The Book of Boba Fett turned into The Mandalorian. And not only that, but really important Mandalorian story moments. Like without watching it, you would be confused by time the Mandalorian season 3 started. That is inexcusable. Finally, we get to 2022. That year saw two live action series, both prequels of a sort. Hello there. Obi-Wan Kenobi saw the return of Ewan McGregor as the titular Jedi. Hello there. Living in seclusion after Order 66 forced to get involved again. Goodbye. The second was Andor. Believe it or not, I was way more excited for Obi-Wan than Andor. I always thought McGregor's performance was the best thing about the prequels. Hello there. I had always had this dream of a Shane style western scenario where

7:43 Obi-Wan has to save a town full of farmers or whatever from gangsters and try his damnedest not to get spotted by the Empire. That isn't really what we got, unfortunately. What we got was yet more fanervice with Obi-Wan having to save child Princess Leia and going up against characters from Rebels and of course Darth Vader. Even though that completely undoes the impact of their meeting again in A New Hope. When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master. I'm not bitter about it. Not to mention the message Leia sends in A New Hope says, "Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars." As though she wouldn't go, "Remember when you saved me when I was a precocious young ling?" Also, I don't really think Obi-Wan served Borana. It doesn't matter. But like the second season of the Acolyte, that is neither here nor there. Needless

8:28 to say, I ended up fairly disappointed in Obi-Wan the series. Star Wars began to feel like simply referencing things that happened in other movies or TV shows or at best fully catering only to the people who'd seen and read everything. And here's the thing, I had done those things. I was fully in the loop. It doesn't make it good automatically. Being in on inside jokes is one thing. Only having inside jokes is completely another. Hello there. So then in September of that year, me fully barereft of excitement andor began. It was a slow burn at first. Immediately impressive were the colors, the clear location work, and the fact that our ostensible hero, the show's titular character, murders two people within the first 5 minutes. But it took a little while for me to get on board with the show's slow but propulsive pace, its

9:15 quiet internal struggle punctuated with moments of intense action and the focus on, of all things, real people in a fictional universe instead of archetypes and stock characters, shock and awe. andor was created, produced, and headwritten, if that is a term, by Tony Gilroy, writer and director of taught thrillers like Michael Clayton and the Born series. Gilroy had famously come on to the production of Rogue One to oversee the rewriting, reshaping, and re-shooting when the original version wasn't working. It's all falling apart. It was he who beefed up Cassie and Andor's place in the narrative, and in whom embodied the more clandestine aspects of the naent rebellion. I've been in this fight since I was 6 years old. Who are the people in the shadows making moves to help overthrow this horrible totalitarian regime? What kind of sacrifices would those people have to

10:02 make in order to get the spark of hope to light the blaze to bring down an empire? I didn't know it or didn't have faith, I guess, when Andor began that it was precisely that aspect of Rogue One that would be the series main focus and its biggest achievement. Why didn't I have faith? Could it be because Star Wars had been so whittleled down over its Disney years as to have almost no edge? Could it also be that Rogue One for all the parts I did enjoy felt pretty hashed together and the final act felt supremely member this? Yes, yes, and my heavens yes. But so the opposite of Andor, the series began and the plot unfolded and we got to meet more than just Cassie and Andor. We got to spend much more significant time with Mon Mafma, who collectively in the movies had like what definitely under 10 minutes of screen time, but who was

10:48 incredibly important to the cause. We also got to meet new characters like Bixs, Khen, Marva, Andor, Luan, Rail, Clea, Wilman, Braso, Vel, and Nek. These were real people with real depth and whose plight and place in the galaxy stand on the precipice of collapse under the Imperial boot. Those boots in the series are worn by equally interesting characters like Dedrairo, Sirill Ka, Major Partagaz, and several other members of the Imperial Security Branch, the counter intelligence unit fighting the wouldbe rebellion, not aware they're simply helping it grow. Also, there was this guy buckets. The Imperials in this series are never once on the right side of things, and yet we often feel something approaching empathy for them on a human level. Their actions are evil, but there's no mustache twirling here. That's why we're bringing in

11:34 officers like you. Cassian or Clem. Clem. Clem. Clem joins a heist on the planet Aldani of Imperial Supply Hub Payroll. Who is he? He's Clem. He's here. That's all that matters. And this mission unfolds over the course of several episodes. It ends with the loss of many characters we'd only just started to like or distrust entirely. In the case of The Thing from the Bear, that scheme. These episodes feel exceptionally uneasy. Nobody trusts anyone and kind of nobody should. Through his interactions with Nek, Cassian starts to see that there's more to life than survival. There's a higher purpose and ethos. And through scheme, Cassian sees how so many, himself included at the time, want to exploit the unrest for their own greed. 40 million a piece, split up the winnings.

12:21 The Aldani episodes are terrific, but they immediately pale in comparison to the arc on Narina 5. Cassian takes his money and runs after the heist and ends up getting unjustly arrested for something super minor and with little to no real due process ends up on a prison station where he and hundreds of other inmates, many of whom are completely innocent, are forced to make machine parts at a fever clip until they reach an unattainable number or die. It's a supremely grim set of circumstances, and Cassian rightly starts to realize this place is the end of the line for everyone. Kinoy, played by Andy Circus in top form, is the level's inmate enforcer. A prisoner himself, he gets a modicum of power and tiny perks for being the Empire's lackey. As the arc goes on, Cassian begins to stir discontent as he sees it's live or die

13:08 for all of them. They have to escape. Kino finally sees the truth and delivers one of the best speeches in modern sci-fi. A speech so good, it's actually kind of surprising it's in Star Wars. There is one way out. They have to escape or die. and Kino knows it's the latter for him. It's incredible stuff. I think it was at this point during the Narina 5 arc that people realized how special Andor was. The series took its time and made it to a peak that never let up. This wasn't about mystical space wizards and laser swords or bounty hunters with cool armor. This was about real people in the immediate throws of an everrowing fascist regime. How do the everyday people deal with such an empire? How does the empire deal with the unrest at hand? Pockets of fermenting. The end of season 1 sees the bluecollar workers of Faric strike back

13:54 against the Empire thanks to the postumous rallying cry from Marva. The Empire. It's a triumphant explosion after the aching tension of the leadup when all of our main characters on both sides of the conflict converge. I legitimately can't say enough good things about this final episode. It's it's incredible. It's a masterpiece. It's what I always wanted from Star Wars media. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy gave Gilroy full creative control over the series. And I think one of the things that makes Andor so good is that Gilroy did things differently. The series uses real sets and locations, which sounds so minor. But thanks to the 360° virtual stage known as the volume, most of Star Wars from the Mandalorian forward is people in front of screens.

14:39 No matter how good the volume looks and it is an incredible piece of technology, your brain still recognizes it as people standing in front of screens. It feels fake even if it doesn't look it. But Andor is tangible even in its most outlandish and otherworldly scenes. And that includes the characters who all feel real. We have married characters, characters in romantic relationships where they have actual for real sex. What did he say? Which shouldn't be as revolutionary as it is. The Empire isn't cartoonishly evil. They're insidiously evil in an all too believable way. The rebels are flawed, and certainly people like Lutheran are much darker than they are light, but they feel of a piece with the reality of what would happen and did happen in Earth's recent past. Ultimately, I think what makes Gilroy the perfect person to run a Star Wars

15:25 series is that while he respects the franchise and its history, he's not slavishly devoted to every moment of it. Like the best creators do, he took what others did before him and he explored new facets of it. Again, it's like poetry, sort of. They rhyme. It still fits neatly into canon. It's still firmly within the much tread Skywalker saga time frame, but it shows us aspects even the best spin-off media hadn't quite delivered. So, that was season 1, a success by any metric. We knew a season 2 was coming. Again, it would be 12 episodes, and we knew that that would be it. In the interim, we got tons more Star Wars. The maker help us all. Oh, no. Season 3 of The Mandalorian premiered in March of 2023, about 6 months after Andor season 1. It felt like night and day. We were back to the

16:11 kind of Star Wars that we'd gotten in abundance over the past several years, but even more fixated on furthering storylines and continuity that began in the Clone Wars nearly 15 years earlier. And look, I don't want this video to sound like Tony Gilroy good, Dave Fona bad, because I honestly really loved both the Clone Wars and Rebels. But there is more to Star Wars than that. and Andor had proven it in spades. I think The Mandalorian season 3 is a mess. It's barely about Dingjarun and Grou anymore. Instead, focusing on Bokeutan and her trying to retake the mantle of leader of the Mandalorian. I would be hardressed to remember many of the individual episodes. Oh, except the one with Jack Black and Lizo, but not for any particularly good reasons. The are they doing in that show? This vein of storytelling would continue later in 2023 with Ahsoka, a continuation of Star

16:58 Wars Rebels, but in live action. I loved Rebels. Ahsoka the series did not work for me. We know it's going to continue in a second season, plus a file verse movie to wrap it all up. Yay, I guess. 2024 gave us the acolyte. And look, I don't want to talk about it any more than you want to hear me talk about it. It had some good stuff. It had some bad stuff. I wasn't a fan. The absolutely wrong kind of people were very vocally against it. It got cancelled. And I didn't watch Skeleton Crew, but I heard it was pretty funny. My guts, they're everywhere. Also, I didn't really watch The Bad Batch, in case you were wondering. I Nothing wrong with it. I just forgot it existed. Sorry. But then we returned to Andor just this past April. Would it live up

17:43 to the grandeur of the first season? Would it feel satisfying even though we know exactly nearly beat forbeat what happens immediately after? Yes, obviously. It's the whole thesis of the video you're watching. You know this one. Meta. Again, you can get full arcbyarch breakdowns of Andor season 2 in our full podcast discussions here on youtube.com/nerdist. But needless to say, I think this season, while different in approach and structure, delivered just as hard, felt even more tragic and still delivered some of the tensest moments in Star Wars history. We spend a great deal of time in season 2 with the plight of the people of Gorman, a planet of great importance to Star Wars lore and indeed the Empire's plans in universe. Spiders are not the most unique thing in

18:30 Gorman. We learn the people of Gorman are proud, full of rich traditions and resources and art and music, but they happen to have a rare mineral the empire needs to finish Death Star construction. So begins the methodical dismantling of Gorman from propaganda with the Empire feeding a nent resistance so they can justify wiping them out and occupying the planet. Even people like that worm Sirill K see how messed up this is, how much they've been manipulated. And we know if we know Star Wars that Gorman gets massacred and that's what leads to Monothma's speech decrying the act and calling out the Emperor as the vile villain he is. If Genevie O'Reilly doesn't get an Emmy nomination for this season, there is a problem with everyone at the TV Academy. She's so stinking good it kind of makes me mad. This character who was

19:16 basically a haircut for decades became one of the best in all of Star Wars thanks to that writing and that performance. But everybody's good. Diego Luna, Stellin Scarsgard, Denise Goff, Kyle Solar, Audrea Arona, Elizabeth Dao, Anton Leser. I mean, just look at the cast list and pretend I said them all. Can I speak now? No. As Cassian walks in slow motion in the final episode, we see the fate of all the characters we'd spent two seasons watching, and we know he is on his way to his death. It's at once cathartic and deeply sad. He, like Luan, will never see the fruits of all of his efforts. But we know a blonde nepo baby from Tatooine will succeed. Andor was about the singing of the unsung, the underdogs, the middlemen, the people impacted by the Star Wars. And I think

20:04 the biggest achievement of Andor is that it knew when to end. We're done here. 24 episodes. Thus far, the most of any live-action Star Wars series saved the Mandalorian. And it did more for restoring my love of this universe than just about any of it. While the movies felt like a corporation furthering a franchise, and many of the series felt like continuity hounds furthering a mythos, andor felt like people bringing their best to telling stories about people doing their best. Andor will never be replicated. We can be sad it's over or happy it happened. Or I guess nitpick the inconsistencies. I see you on the message boards, Rodney. If you liked Andor as much as I did, sound off in the comments below. If you could also please subscribe to my podcast, Laser Focus, wherever you get your podcasts. I interviewed Tony Gilroy about Andor and it was pretty great. But until we meet

20:50 again, whatever galactic skirmish we next get from Star Wars, keep it glued to nerdis.com. Beam me up. That's a different one.