If I didn’t assist run an internet site that covers Star Wars, I’d have given up on Andor after two episodes. That was probably clear in case you learn what I wrote the week of Andor’s debut, “If You Like Watching Diego Luna Walk Around, You’ll Love Andor.” Reader, I don’t like watching Diego Luna stroll round, no less than not at that size or with that a lot frequency. I assumed huge chunks of the three-episode premiere had been flat-out boring.
Six episodes later, I feel Andor, created by Tony Gilroy, has advanced into among the finest Star Wars exhibits on Disney+. It’s definitely essentially the most fascinating.
Admittedly, it’s nonetheless not essentially the most thrillingly paced. For the second straight week, the present’s title character has spent the whole episode locked up as a jail laborer for the Empire. His essential adversary, an Imperial Security Bureau officer named Dedra Meero (Denish Gough), made little or no progress in her investigation into Rebel exercise — and he or she nonetheless doesn’t know that Andor has already been imprisoned (underneath an alias) for a minor crime. (Andor, in the meantime, doesn’t even know Meero exists.) Several key characters, together with Stellan Skarsgard’s Luthen Rael, don’t play a task on this week’s Andor. This just isn’t a Star Wars TV sequence for individuals who need continuous motion. (Or, for that matter, intermittent motion.)
But there are many Star Wars films and exhibits that present that form of stuff. Andor, like its title character, has taken a unique path. It focuses on the nuts and bolts of life within the Star Wars galaxy, displaying the step-by-step course of by which the Rebel Alliance grew — and the step-by-step course of by which the Empire managed its residents by concern and overwhelming energy. Although the present doesn’t deal with the Rebels and Empire as ethical equivalents — the Rebels are preventing for freedom whereas the Imperials torture their enemies and imprison them in perpetuity after sham trials — it does empathize with the mindset of the people inside the Empire, who should navigate the non-public {and professional} pitfalls of life inside a corrupt and sadistic group. While Andor stays in a literal jail, all of its essential characters are trapped in a technique or one other.
While Andor’s time in jail hasn’t been particularly eventful from a narrative standpoint, it’s been a tonally efficient chapter of the sequence’ general story. His work on an meeting line constructing items of Imperial expertise (probably to be used within the Death Star) serves as a metaphor for the whole present: How repressive governments create a system of management, and the way they make their topics equipment to their very own oppression as cogs in an unlimited machine designed solely to complement the few on the very high of the chain of command.
In hindsight, these jail scenes additionally add fascinating context to these early episodes the place Andor wandered endlessly on the planet Ferrix. Now Andor’s freedom has been stripped away; one unsuitable step in any course can get him fried by the Imperial jail’s lethal, electrified ground. The approach Andor’s existence has been upended serves as a microcosm of the best way the Empire is tightening its grip over the whole galaxy. It’s bleak stuff — like the ultimate act of The Empire Strikes Back stretched throughout a number of hours.
Another nice facet of Andor: It is a prequel that’s virtually inconceivable to anticipate from a narrative perspective. Sure, Cassian Andor himself can’t die; he’s received to flee that area jail ultimately and present up initially of Rogue One to steal the Death Star plans. But from episode to episode, his journey, together with the evolution of lots of the supporting characters, has defied prognostication. (Did you suppose Andor would spend two episodes in jail hanging out with Andy Serkis? I positive didn’t!)
The season’s remaining three episodes (and Andor’s upcoming second season) will wrestle with many attractive questions. Will Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), the obsessive former “corpo” who first acknowledged Cassian Andor’s illicit actions, persuade Meero to assist him? Will Syril rise by the Imperial ranks, or will he develop so annoyed along with his incapacity to navigate its paperwork that he ultimately joins the Rebels? Will Serkis’ character support Andor’s budding escape try or expose it? We simply don’t know — a refreshing change of tempo from nearly all the pieces else in Star Wars in the previous couple of years, which has been sometimes enjoyable and thrilling, however not often this unpredictable.
I’m nonetheless undecided Andor couldn’t have labored simply as effectively at, say, 9 episodes as a substitute of 12. But I’ll admit I’ve gone from dreading having to look at this sequence each Wednesday to actively wanting ahead to it. And abruptly I discover myself pondering the plan for the remainder of the sequence — which can supposedly compress the following 4 years of Andor’s pre-Rogue One life right into a quartet of three-episode arcs — doesn’t seem to be an expansive sufficient palette to conclude this story in satisfying style. Then once more, if Season 2 options this caliber of writing with so much much less aimless strolling, it might be the right Star Wars TV present.
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