Review: Andor Season 1

The film Rogue One worked despite itself or rather despite the premise being a bad idea. It really is of no consequence how the Rebels got the plans to the Death Star and we know that because part of the fun of Star Wars IV is that it leaps the viewer into a story that has already begun. That opening worked for literally decades. Yet, Rogue One did work and not because we all really wanted to know how Darth Vader’s star-destroyer came to be chasing Princess Leia’s ship.

With the Andor mini-series, we ostensibly have an even worse sin against storytelling: a prequel to a prequel in which we learn how Cassian Andor got to the point where he was near the star of Rogue One. A derivative of a derivative as part of the Disney IP commercialisation engine determined to squeeze as much cash out of the Star Wars concept as possible. It is an inherently cynical exercise, creating show after show with confidence that each one just needs to avoid putting people off watching further iterations of the same thing.

However, there is a crucial point to remember. Disney’s motives (in so far as we can regard a corporation as a thing sentient enough to have motives) are not the same thing as the motives of the writers, directors, actors or countless other people who work on a show or movie. So instead of Andor being the thinnest scraping of an overused film concept, we end up with a genuinely interesting show that is neither a rehash of Star Wars nor even a rehash of Rogue One. Paradoxically, it also not divorced from Star Wars either. Watch a brief segment and you’ll see blasters and stormtroopers and Star Wars‘ signature run-down, almost steam-punk-like high technology. There’s a cute robot! There’s a floaty motorbike thing! There’s that alien who you saw once in some random corner of a Star Wars wiki!

These are the costumes that Andor wears but the key characters are each very much about hiding their true nature. Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is a senator on Coruscant, posing as a wealthy liberal do-gooder, critical of the Empire but working within the system — yet secretly funding a far more radical network of radical anti-imperialists. Luthen Rael pretends to be an antique dealer, trading in the looted artefacts of Imperial expansion and yet is in truth a ruthless killer and coordinator of armed resistance in the galaxy. Meanwhile, Cassian Andor doesn’t even really know who he is, hiding even where he spent the formative years of his childhood.

The Imperial characters and in particular Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) know who they are or at least they think they do. I don’t know if the writers were pulling from W.B.Yeats’s The Second Coming but the first verse feels apt:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

George Lucas picked the term “Rebels” for the people fighting the Empire. It’s a term that is not inherently radical. Sure a revolutionary is a rebel, but America’s founding fathers were also rebels and in the US the term is even more strongly associated with the slave-owning Confederacy. You can rebel against freedom, you can rebel against justice and people often have. Right-wing libertarians can see themselves reflected in the Luke Skywalkers and the Han Solos — to a degree, although they may prefer the rebellion of Captain Mal Reynolds and the Browncoat’s lost cause.

Andor takes a different tack. The rebels we meet are unambiguously revolutionaries rather than formless individualists kicking back against the baddies. We meet people going through a process of radicalisation in the face of the inherent brutality of the Empire. This is not a particularly didactic ideological depiction. It isn’t that the revolutionaries are using rhetoric that is very different from the calls for freedom that you’d see in Star Wars proper but what we are seeing is a process of revolution. There is a mix of determined people seeking to strike against the Empire (often fruitlessly) with ordinary people finding ways to push back against the brutality. The left v right coding largely comes from the existing fascistic style of the Empire. As I’ve somehow brought W.B.Yeats into this already, it’s worth noting his support for Irish independence from the very real evil empire of Britain was rooted in a type of nationalism that would become overtly fascist in his later life.

I’d actually been looking up Yeats because I thought there was a quote from his poem Easter 1916 which was relevant but I’d misremembered it. That poem was in response to the Irish republican insurrection in Dublin in 1916 which was brutally put down by British forces. The poem doesn’t recount events but instead talks about various people and their lives: a woman who liked to argue, a man who kept a school, a vainglorious lout. People whose lives were caught up in a bloody act of resistance.

Andor uses the central character as a thread by which we get to meet multiple people: Cassian’s adopted mother, his friend Bix, the idealist rebel Karis Nemik writing a manifesto, the prison-factory floor manager Kino Loy trying to work out his sentence. Each one we are given reasons to care about as events lead towards the gathering chaos that the Empire both creates and is attempting to contain. It’s a very effective storytelling approach where Cassian is not so much a protagonist but an unwitting catalyst of events that were already partly in motion.

I’ve watched plenty of streaming series and enjoyed many of them but the vast majority of them, even the best ones, have at least one episode which is little more than a show spinning its wheels. I don’t think Andor had a single episode like that, OK maybe the penultimate episode which had to spend most of its time moving the characters into position for the finale but I don’t begrudge that. By having a series of three-episode long mini-arcs, the plot managed to keep moving and take us around different aspects of how the Empire was becoming systemically worse and increasingly doomed.

There is a second season coming, which will conclude the story by bringing Cassian to the point where we meet him in Rogue One. I suspect it won’t be as good as this season has been but only because I enjoyed this one so much that it seems unlikely another season could be better.