I’d always had high hopes for Andor and I had those confirmed when I watched the first three episodes and talked about my hopes for the show. I wanted Andor to be a reckoning with respect to the story but also a reckoning with respect to the Star Wars franchise.
I’m glad this has proven to be true.
Andor is perfection
The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.
– Karis Nemik
Andor is a show that is as close to near perfection as you can get. It’s meticulously constructed from every line, scene, performance, and episode and the series builds and re-integrates like an orchestra delivering a glorious symphony. It fits together like a perfect narrative jigsaw.
I wasn’t just enthralled by the story and the milieu being presented but by the artistry of its construction in every moment.
I was drawn into its rolling three-episode arc structure, the exploration of ideas, the build-to action and the way it would introduce characters and we’d connect to them more in 3-minutes than other shows manage in three episodes. It’s ludicrously lean in its execution as everything matters.
We often say that TV shows these days are like films, but this often isn’t true, but it is true with respect to Andor. It’s written, directed and acted like a film worthy of an Oscar. If Andor doesn’t get numerous awards above the technical line it will be a serious disservice.
Don’t write Star Wars
The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness, it is never more alive than when we sleep. It’s easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it’s true, maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it’s too late. But I’ll tell you this… If I could do it again, I’d wake up early and be fighting these b*stards from the start. Fight the Empire!
– Maarva Andor
Over the last few years or so, with the proliferation of streaming and the need to fill them with content, I’ve come to a few conclusions about the writing of some of these shows. It’s not the usual YouTube grift where people are grinding out negativity for money, but we do have a challenge.
The construction of media franchise TV can fall into two traps: –
- They write the franchise rather than a good story within the franchise
- The writers have no actual sense of how to write what the show is about
Star Wars often suffers from the first, with the generation who grew up on Star Wars trying to write Star Wars, which results in different degrees of mimicry, pastiche, easter eggs or homage and you just hope the rest is good enough to hold it together. You don’t write Star Wars you write a great story and then frame it within Star Wars.
Marvel can sometimes suffer from the second (She-Hulk I am looking at you), but that’s a different topic.
Andor does it right. They decided to tell a story about normal, ordinary folk rising to meet oppression and explore what that fascist regime looked like. Then they framed that in Star Wars. This means you get a shows that is as haunting and tense as one about the French resisting the Nazis and at moments is reminiscent of something like Les Miserable.
That’s how you write Star Wars by writing something else first.
It’s about what is said
What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!
– Luthen Rael
Star Wars has always been about ideas, but the challenge is those ideas have always been hidden several layers deep behind the space opera action and, quite often, weak scripts. Lucas was never good at exposing the ideas behind his stories in a way that was a natural extension of the wider events. He’s not a great writer even by his own admission and we just have to look at the attempt to explore deeper ideas in the prequel trilogy to realise how ham-fisted he can quickly become.
I love my space opera action and it’s true you can only put so much into a genre meant to be fast-paced and big on visuals but sometimes you want better writing or something different.
What I remember about Star Wars has always been things that happened. Andor presents a version of Star Wars where you remember what was said.
Andor changes Star Wars. All my memories of Star Wars are mostly about what happens, not what is said. yeah, there are notable lines, often singular in nature, like the interplay between Han and Leia or some of the lines between Luke and the Emperor. I’m sure we all have our own examples, but they are rarely profound or explorative, they are more neat and timely and snappy.
We actually have monologues in Andor and they are astounding in their observations on events and the nature of fascism and oppression and the consequences of fighting it. Andor, Karis, Kino, Luthen and Maarva all have astounding monologues that fit perfectly into the narrative and the moment and literally make you either sit back in profound shock or cry or both.
Andor is a Star Wars show where what’s important is what’s said and it’s glorious.
Contrasting with Deep Space Nine
The other show that Andor brought to mind was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’m not directly comparing them as they are very different shows in many ways. Andor is a full-on member of the serialised TV, HBO-style membership club, while Deep Space Nine was still fighting the TV formats of the 90’s in order to tell its stories.
They do have many similarities though.
They both deal with fascist regimes but at different entry and exit points. Andor deals with a rising fascist regime and how control and oppression give birth to rebellions from everyday, ordinary people who just want to get on with their lives. Deep Space Nine deals with it at the other end as it focuses on how those once ordinary people struggle to find peace with their once oppressors having become something they almost don’t recognise in themselves.
They use a core location to tell their story in that Andor has Ferixx and, obviously, Deep Space Nine has the station. Deep Space Nine spends much more time fleshing out the station and the politics surrounding it but Andor does do something similar in the first season. We start in Ferixx and we end in Ferixx and its people and culture and how it is suppressed into rebellion are a key part of the story. While Deep Space Nine mirrored the UN peace endeavours we’d hear about in the news, Ferixx presents us with every struggling small town that exists in a myriad of places and nations. It even made me think of the film Brassed Off!
They are about the sacrifice necessary in rebellions and war and the impact they have on people. In both shows, we have characters who have to question who they are or question whether they can maintain their morals under the forces they face. Andor does it better on the inward vector and Deep Space Nine gets to play with both but is particularly effective at the portrayal of those damaged by living under and fighting oppression for years.
They’ll be more popular later than during their original run. We already know this about Deep Space Nine. It was a Star Trek show that always suffered against Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager despite the latter show being substantially weaker. Andor is experiencing something similar and is certainly not getting the attention it deserves put to hopelessly constructed shows like Obi-Wan and The Book of Boba Fett. It’ll almost certainly be true that Andor’s focus on ideas and its meticulous construction will serve it well over time and, like Deep Space Nine, will find an audience for years to come.
And, Finally…
Andor isn’t just a great Star Wars show, it is peak TV at its best. It highlights how even some of the best-written genre shows sacrifice overall quality for their genre elements. It should be winning awards above the technical line. In terms of Disney+ it’s like it belongs on a completely different streaming service like HBO.
I don’t want all my Star Wars to be written and constructed like Andor. I want the glorious space opera, the space battles and the amazing action scenes. What I do want is for all future Star Wars shows to take note of Andor.
Because I can’t be the only one who wished Book of Boba Fett had some of the sensibilities of Andor and used it to construct a story of Boba taking over as a proper gangster drama. You should always choose the story and then make it Star Wars.
As another Star Wars show might say: This is the way.