Moderator: Please feel free move to the Star Wars boards at your leisure

I wasn’t going to watch this. The premise and marketing didn't really appeal to me. I liked Rogue One well enough; the characters were fairly one-note but they served their purpose just fine and it was generally a good experience. Despite that, I’ve now seen all twelve episodes of Andor and can honestly say that it is better than the last three SW shows at least IMHO, but that is currently an extremely low bar. The writing was decent, the acting was good, the set pieces and filmography were fantastic, the score was ok... What surprised most of all though was (gasp) the Empire wasn’t depicted as buffoons! They were competent, calculating, and downright terrifying in this show, and that was a refreshing thing to witness.

Having said all that, the show is also very slow, so much so that you can practically skip every other episode and not miss much (specifically 2, 4, 8, & 11). There is some buildup and payoff, it’s just not very well balanced (way too much buildup with little payoff). I’m not somebody who needs constant action to be entertained; I am a Trek fan as well after all, however SW appeals to a different audience, and historically that means memorable characters with frequent action.

One thing we learn about Cassian from Rogue One is that he’s “been fighting the Empire since he was six.” We’re not told how old Andor was meant to be, but Diego Luna was in his mid-thirties during that movie, which takes place right before the events of A New Hope (or 0 BBY). At this point the Empire has only been around for 19 years, so it wouldn’t be possible for him to fight the Empire at that age. We also see a young "Kassa" in the show at around ten when a CIS (Clone Wars era) craft crash on his home planet, further indicating the age contradiction.

The season is essentially broken up into four subplots, and one of them is the tried-and-true bank heist. That’s right, a culture that is so advanced that they can travel to other planets as easily as driving to a nearby town, communicate over galactic distances using holo-technology, heal most wounds with a single treatment (bacta), etc... they still have large cashes of physical currency piled in a modestly secure vault at a small base on an undeveloped planet. It’s not the fact that money exists in the SW universe that’s strange, it’s that this money isn’t being kept in something resembling a bank (the Empire would have no reason to hide money) and that at no point was stealing the money electronically brought up in the show. Even in 1977 when SW came out money could be at least traded electronically, so it seemed out of place here rather than the heist being focused on a computer mainframe or the like.

Another common story trope used in the show is the prison break. Cassian gets arrested and imprisoned under an assumed name, that somehow escapes the Imperial Security Bureau's notice (no facial recognition or biological data?), and is sent to a fairly interestingly-designed prison (gave me vibes of The Island, Tron, and a few other classic films). Here he says a line that stood out to me: “we’re cheaper than machines and easier to replace.” I find the first part very hard to believe since droids don’t need food/water, sleep, a livable environment, guards, or even gravity to do their job. They need to be built, and undergo occasional maintenance, that’s it. We see at the very end of the season that machines are what’s installing the parts they’re constructing anyway! Then there’s the actual prison break, where most inmates were probably recaptured, and Cassian’s barely hidden cache from the bank heist is still where he left it... after almost two months.

Overall, this was a decent show that continued the the styles/themes that were featured in Rogue One, and I respect that. The problem I had with it is it shows how unimportant Cassian Andor really is, making the whole thing ultimately forgettable. What put him on the Empire’s radar in the first place was a botched arrest (by a local security force) for a murder I'm still not sure how they even connected him to. Then the ISB wanted him so they can trace a suspected Rebel collaborator they named Axis, which he doesn’t even know anything about other than what he looks like. He doesn't even really move the plot along, just kind of goes with the flow. He's just a guy with a few skills who goes from a scavenger/thief (which seems to be the standard occupation in SW these days) to a member of the Rebellion. Personally, I was more interested in Mon Mothma’s storyline than Cassian’s, but maybe that’s just me. I think this story would’ve made a great novel, but not so much a "spy thriller" show, particularly since there's no Force use or users.

Why did you post this here, and not in the Star Wars forum?

And only Roving Moderators can move threads from one forum to another. Of course, Yours Truly happens to be one of them. However, unless KAM, the Kitchen Sink Mod, okays a move to the SW forum, this thread stays right where it is.

It's fine if a Roving Mod wants to move it.

I couldn't start a new thread in the SW forum. I just checked again before this post and the main board and TV board didn't give me the option to start a new thread. Perhaps you two are able to do so, but I haven't been deputized into the magical realm of the moderator

Here we go.

Thank you Tim! Sorry for the trouble.

One other thing that occurred to me about this show is that there were few aliens in [b]Andor[/b]; I'd say only about one per 20+ humans. A lot of SW shows/movies have been like that since the sell out, which is too bad since there are quite a few interesting species that could carry a story by their culture alone IMHO.

That's okay, there wasn't any trouble