Friday’s Rag-Tag Crew: Rogue One

Having finished Andor I did what a lot of people do and rewatched Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Just as Star Wars itself doesn’t entirely match the sub-sub-genre of the gritty/wacky adventures of a rag-tag crew of an iconic ship, neither does Rogue One but Rogue One gets close in most ways aside from two key ones.

• The story is named after the ship. That’s not obligatory but it helps. Technically it is named after a made-up call sign for a stolen Imperial transport ship when it is stolen for a second time by the same people. The ship not being wholly legitimately acquired is a plus as well.
• The crew is absolutely a rag-tag one, with dark and troubled pasts. We only get to see Jyn Erso’s back story in the film but Cassian Andor has a dark backstory (which we’ve now seen). We also have Bodhi Rook, a defecting Imperial pilot, K-2SO an ex-Imperial droid and Chirrut & Baze, displaced disciples of the force.
• They are a maverick operation – doubly so. They are Rebels who disobey the orders of Rebels.

The film departs from the template in two ways. Firstly, the ship itself isn’t iconic but bog-standard. True, the Serenity in Firefly is also meant to be a type of generic ship but that series doesn’t show us lots of other Firefly-class ships.

Secondly, the point of the sub-sub-genre is the crew have repeated adventures in which their unlikely combination of skills and foibles eventually come together to turn them into a cohesive crew. Rogue One cuts this adventure short with even more grim finality than a prematurely cancelled TV show.

Alan Tudyk may be wary now of roles in which he gets to pilot a spaceship but it isn’t mortality that is the issue here. After all, Blakes 7 (arguably the original rag-tag crew in space) also ended with everybody very dead. The issue is that the brutal end for the Rogue One team means they never get the whole adventure but instead fast-forward to the inevitable demise. I don’t begrudge that end for the film. It makes a lot of sense both dramatically and in terms of slotting into the broader film series.

In isolation the Blake’s 7 connection is thin. Revolutionaries in a spaceship who all end up dead at the end. However, the background of the Andor series and the vaguely 1980s Britishness of that series, make that connection feel stronger. Blake’s 7 itself on an episode-by-episode basis would often drift off into a more generic sci-fi show with wobbly Doctor Who sets but the broader framing and early episodes were more overtly anti-authoritarian. The oppressiveness of the setting is key to forcing the disparate group of people together.

The film brings the familiar elements together, a ship and an unlikely crew at odds with authority and sends them off on their one and only mission (there are multiple missions in the film but only one mission where all the elements are together). That promise of adventure helps power the impact of the final act of the film.