labingi

My overall take: it’s excellent, and my chief feeling at the end was “disappointed.” This is only partly the series’ fault. It’s partly the inevitability to ending up at Rogue One, which is melancholy. It’s partly that it was a long three years’ wait with high expectations, and there’s no way a handful of episodes could live up to those fantasies.

The series falters in its own right due to its compressed timeline. You can tell it was four seasons’ worth of storytelling compressed into one. It reminds of seasons 4 and 5 of Babylon 5: it’s clear they had a good plan, and they had to pivot hard to align it with a different production timeline. They couldn’t quite pull it off, but they came about as close as anyone could. I hope there may be either deleted scenes (maybe a directors’ cut?) or a novelization/comic book that uses the five-year story they clearly had mapped out, character building and all. I’d buy it. The action, script, filming, etc. remain top notch.

As many have noted, this series is incredibly important, trenchant, and bloody prophetic as a fictionalization of the fascist upsurge we are currently living through. At times, it was difficult to watch because it hit so close to home. That’s needed and deserves high praise.

Spoilers follow

My favorite episode, oddly, is one that had no Cassian, who is my favorite character: it was the one with Luthen and Kleya’s backstory. This isn’t really odd, though, because it’s the episode with the most character building. The attention given to the evolution of their relationship gives Kleya’s action sequence weight. Much of the rest of the series feels like the action sequences without that work to fully earn them.

I get why they decided to skip to Cassian/Bix and Dedra/Syril already being couples; how they got together was easy to elide. But in both cases, the story was harmed—well, lessened—by not showing these beats.

For Cassian/Bix, two things are lost. One is pretty minor, but it’s any overt acknowledgement that their being together is not his “reward” for rescuing her in S1. I think this is implicitly clear, but it could have been nice to get just a scene showing that they had to get back together; they aren’t automatically a couple now because he rescued her. More important, they missed an opportunity for really powerful storytelling: it could have packed a punch to see them meet up again after S1 and decide to get back together.

With Dedra and Syril, I’m left rather unsure about what happened. More than with Bix, skipping directly from “he rescues her” to “they’re a couple now” falls into that “reward” trope. I’m guessing that’s not how they’re relationship went down, but I don’t know what went down because we don’t see it. It’s a bit puzzling that Dedra seems to have genuinely fallen for Syril, though not incomprehensible: her revelation about being raised in an imperial orphanage with no family indicates she really has no life outside work, and she doesn’t know how to do relationships, which might make her susceptible to Syril. But as with Padme’s attraction to Anakin, I may be able to piece a narrative together, but it sure ain’t there on the screen.

Mon Mothma’s family’s fate also felt weirdly left out. Her daughter is just dropped in way that feels unfair to all three in the family, and I don’t believe her husband is not immediately killed or imprisoned or—at the very least—under house arrest.

I agree with many that Cinta should not have been the “buried gay,” especially not when so many lived (including one happy het couple)! I really thought Rogue One set us up for everyone dying. Now, Cassian’s line about how the Empire took everything from him reads hollow: no it didn’t! (I get he was speaking in the heat of the moment, but I’m talking about narrative resonance, not psychological plausibility.)

Dedra niggle: I did not love the scene where Syril assaults her and she’s just helpless. I’m glad Dedra is not a “girl boss”; she doesn’t need to be super warrior. But she is a completely career-devoted, competent ISB agent coming out of Enforcement, in the middle of what she knows is designed to be a war zone, and I don’t buy that she hasn’t studied self-defense and kept in practice enough to have some muscle memory for what to do when someone attacks her. It felt like a very old “helpless damsel” trope, and I expect better from Andor.

Bix niggle: She doesn’t remember a time before she knew Cassian. Are you sure, writers? You sure you want to go there? Because he was absolutely not younger than eleven when he came to Ferrix, and I think most people remember when we met (or loosely started know) important people in our lives by the age of five or six. So when her dad was telling Cassian that their house was the last place he should be, they were how old??

Leia niggle: I find it positively odd by the end that, with all the Bail-rebellion-planning stuff, on what is effectively the eve of ANH, we got zero mention of Leia. By this time, she would have been one of the major pieces being put in place.

Okay, some stuff I liked: all the Chandrilan wedding arc, the cultural worldbuilding, the rebellion tensions, etc.: the commentary on undocumented immigrants. I’m in the camp that thinks the attempted rape scene was plausible, tasteful, and important to show. The Ghorman genocide was gripping and probably the best-paced piece of the show. I’m very glad Luthen and Kleya’s relationship got fleshed out. Luthen’s whole evolution as he begins to be obsolete and gets ready to die is excellent. Gripes above aside, I’m glad Wilmon and Kleya, in particular, lived (at least a bit longer). Though it was not as hard-hitting as season 1, I liked almost all of Cassian’s scenes; they tended to be gripping and sympathetic.

And I really like the classic SW music in the end credits. Well earned!

A Slight Concern about Race and Gender

I think Andor, in general, does a good job of being socially progressive without calling attention to that fact in an ostentatious way. I also worry, though, that S2 faltered, not out of ideological conservatism but probably out of carelessness, that lack of vigilance that creeps in as soon as progressivism ceases to be a rigid demand (as it now has in Hollywood). Cinta’s death is the most tone deaf of the tired old tropes. The “girlfriending” of Bix and gendered disempowerment of Dedra were not great testaments to the show’s feminism. (I’ll write a separate post about Bix.)

As to race... this season was really white. We had two 100%(?) white civilizations: Chandrila and Ghorman. Now, I give Chandrila a pass because it’s an aristocratic, inward-turning, possibly somewhat inbred society, and the series (intelligently) codes the Republic/Empire as white privileging/colorist. Ghorman, too, I get it, is a prosperous place, coded “France,” that makes the news because it’s posh, and I don’t have a problem with its being mostly white, but all white? You mean to tell me that in a thriving trade center for textiles, no non-white person ever comes through and decides to stay, marry in, etc.? None? Not 5% of the population? Because I don’t know how to explain that as other than in-universe racist. And if that’s what they were going for a) it’s an interesting choice for your genocide victims and b) it should have been at least once explicitly called out to distinguish it from production-level implicit racism. That said, I do like the fact that attention to diverse casting led to the last three survivors of the Ferrix gang all being coded (in our terms) as people of color. That felt natural and powerful.

In Sum

All this griping is the outpouring of a serious enough fan to genuinely care. My disappointment after the long wait was inevitable, and now that I have it out of my system and know what to expect, I think I will come to accept and love the story for what it is. I mean, I could gripe about how TESB has that timeline that doesn’t make sense, where Luke spends months on Dagoba while Han and Leia spend a couple days on the Falcon, but I don’t because I’m used to it. I’ll get used to Andor S2 as well, and hopefully in the future get a chance to really marathon through Andor S1 through Return of the Jedi, and truly marvel at the accomplishment.