ANDOR aka Glum Village : its own thread

What I appreciate about this show also is that everyone is pretty sharp, very wary, not falling into easy traps, correct in their thinking, undone by hubris or arrogance perhaps; there were miscalculations made by some characters but nothing egregious. They’re all so cautious (on the rebel side) and detail oriented (on the imperial side) and mostly the former managed to evade the latter while it not seeming like it was due to pursuer stupidity or quarry luck.

And really fascinated by the complicated web of loyalty and betrayal Andor found himself in after entering the orbit of Luthen and the heist crew, and how none of them were bad guys but extremely gray area types, and not committed to the single shade of gray they’re in at any given moment.

The most annoying thing about it is the reminder in the post-credits that, oh yes, it leads to A New Hope.

yup, totally. i posted this tweet upthread but maybe it was too oblique, i'll post it again:

Imagine if Andor's season finale is great, just really thoughtful and compelling stuff throughout, but then there's a post credits sequence with an evil Yoda who's like red

— The Man of Astoria (@depechejoe) November 14, 2022

basically how i felt / my biggest fear watching the conclusion of this season, that you'd get some sort of reveal that takes you out of this world of spycraft and small resistance against the boot on your face.

i think my biggest problem with, er, the star wars universe, not this show, is that yes this is a great show that shades in its story with great care, shows how the rebellion was built out of a thousand small injustices, against an empire that wasn't initially evil but produced evil as a necessity of the grinding machine of the bureaucracy. but it sucks to know that at the end of this storyline lies the Death Star. like, it becomes hard to care about how a small scale rebellion organically came about on ferrix if later on the empire will have this thing that will just zip in and destroy the whole planet should the locals get too much out of line. you see the beginning of that in rogue one actually, how the death star is used to literally extinguish jedha because saw's rebellion started winning. the empire becoming just so comically evil that you need a comically good hero to overcome it. but i mean, that's the original star wars, lucas was always thinking this way hence the name starkiller, and the one we all fell in love with. i'm not saying it's a bad universe. just hard to imagine that story and this one existing in the same universe. i know this point has been made a million times before in the discourse around the show, but just had to get it off my chest, this red yoda moment.

On one hand, I absolutely didn’t need the “see, they were making death star panels!” moment and it’s nice they hid it in the credits. I didn’t even see it originally.

On the other hand, as someone who has suffered through one zillion Star Wars moments for the occasional gems: what if red yoda?!!

give me Zombie Sith Yaddle

basically how i felt / my biggest fear watching the conclusion of this season, that you'd get some sort of reveal that takes you out of this world of spycraft and small resistance against the boot on your face.

I really hope they steer clear of too much Death Star claptrap in S2 and just leave it as foreshadowing for Rogue One. I’m sure it’ll get more play than that but after Andor I have trust in Tony Gilroy, and for all the chatter about how JJ Abrams was such a fan of Star Wars and how that informed his desire to take the reins for the sequels, it shows that being a fan isn’t enough if you’re a terrible storyteller.

one of the many things I liked about R1 and now the show was that it craftily shifted Star Wars away from being the story of one very fucked up family and how this child of destiny saved the galaxy, and to this story of how the resistance worked together from the ground up to defeat the empire. I understand it goes against the whole SW universe as a storyline, but boy I really think Gilroy “gets it”, and gets back to some essential core of A New Hope, which is a ragtag rebellion against an arrogant militaristic empire, and ultimately the pursuit of the skywalker stuff just sidelined and benched much of what is revived here in interesting ways. Not entirely abandoned in the last two of the OG trilogy of course, the empire military made for some fun stuff in ESB and the best part of ROTJ was the rebellion coming together to engage in one epic space battle.

I think where the other revival series fail a lot is that for all the charm and humor and fun stuff in Mando, for the nostalgia of Obi-Wan, for the…whatever Boba Fett has going for it, they’re mostly just not very gripping storylines, there’s fun to be had but they seem designed to reassure and remind vs compel and create genuine tension or try something really interesting.

There is a basic level of fun to be had in The Mandalorian but I find the whole series very hollow. Nearly every episode of the second season felt like a backdoor pilot for some other character. I find the whole series to be a very cynical cash grab - made slightly palatable only because the other shows (Obi-wan, Boba) were even more cynical.

Yeah I mean I get a decent amount of mileage from Mandalorian but it’s almost exclusively due to it being an enjoyable experience for my kid. It’s really more akin to a Saturday morning cartoon show than a great narrative experience.

i don't recall ever seeing more than a handful of characters on screen at once doing anything meaningful - probably a result of those shows all being shot on the volume. i think i posted how weirdly empty the dingy planet in obi wan felt compared to a similar scene from blade runner shot with good old fashioned sets.

in other words, mandalorian is still a hero / western, blah blah blah, small scale stories. andor feels more like, i dunno, i keep on thinking of psychohistory a la asimov/foundation. trying to tell the story of largescale / grand movements across the galaxy, as far as a medium like straightforward linear tv character narrative can, anyway, without feeling like the history channel.

this discussion reminds me of this great tweet

It's really funny whenever they mention the emperor on Andor and you remember what his deal is. It's like if The Wire was set in a city where the unseen mayor is a cackling goblin who shoots lightning at people

— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) November 23, 2022

Also, the actors in Andor are good, whereas what I saw of The Mandalorian was full of terrible acting.

must agree the acting on andor has been v good.

a primary character in mando was a charismatic muppet with an appetite for intelligent-frog eggs.

peak Star Wars has to be somewhere between, where we get a peek behind Tarkin types that is a little deeper and also more egg boy

hah, agreed!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pJVHwmLibsAgrohTyZlab?si=53c6feffc68f42ac

I tried watching this, and it just didn't grab me in any way… but nonetheless I can see that it is a high quality production, and so my disinclination to stick with it is my problem, not the show's… many many people have told me they think this is the best SW exponent ever… fair enuff! I more or less have a bad taste in my mouth from SW shit, think Lucas is a bullshit artist and not particularly smart, sophisticated or insightful, and have no warm and fuzzies for SW the way I do for DC, Marvel or Star Trek shit…

However! My wife watches a lot of BBC and adjacent european crime shows (and had only seen SW77 12 years ago, the force awakens with me in 2015 and exactly no other SW shit ever) and so she was right there with Andor, unlike me. Which makes me think that this show, which has as few references to existing lore as any brand extension show I've ever seen, doesn't need to be a star wars show… sorry, star wars STORY at all and would have been better off as its own thing entirely…

But! Maybe no one cares about anything unless its wedded no pre-existing IP! I might convey the sentiment in the above graf to one of my pals, and they'd say "but would anybody see this show if it wasn't attached to SW?" Maybe not! And that's a problem, that new productions must function as brand extension or no one will make the effort to see it. Same thing with the Watchmen show: it seems to me that show should have been its own thing, the points it was making were in no way indebted to Moore's work, and just as Rorschach = the Question is known to some nerds but in no way required knowledge to fathom what is going on, Lindelof could have made it plain that this new character = Laurie, this new character = Veidt and in that he could avoid going against Moore's wishes…

Brand extenstion is a scourge! Make new shit!

The streamers would like nothing more than to create lots of “original IP” that they could milk exclusively for years to come but audiences gravitate towards stuff they know

I'm extremely anti-IP-recycling, hate SW now too, and was reluctant to watch this. But I ended up really liking it and must admit that in this case, the IP serves a useful function: avoiding exposition and tedious "world-building." Since everyone goes in knowing what the empire & the rebellion are, the show is able to communicate a lot through costumes, accents, and decor. Now I do think it's entirely possible to do all that in an original series too, but still it was useful in this case.

On the audiences question, while I thought both movies were merely okay, the popularity of Glass Onion and Everything Everywhere All At Once suggest that people are actually dying to watch silly genre stuff that isn't so familiar and leaden with continuity.

It was helpful to me to watch Andor out of the hype cycle when it was first airing. I binged the whole thing last week - I'm barely invested in extended Wars, but I've always thought that SW was at its best when it got closer to its 70s science fiction roots. Thought it was great, no need to fret about season two.

I was surprised a friend didn’t quite get the gravitas of that ending and the callback, but screaming children might do that. Just a good end to the arc of wondering if Cassian is on the cause. Can a man just live under the empire and maybe take a job subverting it to continue living, or is it worth putting your life on the scale of rebellion or death, when rebellion may mean certain death?

I feel like im approaching it in a tony gilroy-sympathetic way where its like ... he already made the archetypal self-contained against the grain cinematic thriller in michael clayton, why not allow him a little expensive IP as a treat

Q&A with Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, Genevieve O'Reilly and Fiona Shaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7EBMge-ARo

Just finished this, and I loved it. But one thing that distracted me throughout the entire series was the fact that Diego Luna is apparently playing Paul McCartney in the biopic:

https://i0.wp.com/thebeatlezone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/download.jpg

!!

huge if true <3

very belatedly getting into this, watched the first half of it last night. I particularly like the Imperial Stand Ups where the project manager gets a dressing down.

i’m PISSED that this was originally envisioned as five seasons, each covering a year’s worth of diegetic time,

Sometimes you just need cereal

“That’s my cereal!” #Andor’s Kyle Soller loves Syril’s cereal as much as the rest of us. #StarWarsCelebration pic.twitter.com/X4JQlQoBvp

— Star Wars (@starwars) April 8, 2023

They really should firewall Andor from the shitshow that is the Lucasfilm marketing-and-fanboy-service department

But cereal

But Syril

Finally started watching this (on ep4) and it's wild how much better this is than any SW thing after the original trilogy, aside from Rogue One.

Yeah kinda crazy and just such a well-structured, tense season. The best parts are yet to come!

Finished this last week, the prison eps are really burned into my brain. Still can't believe that this was legit good, not just good enough for some Disney SW content.

just got irrationally angry thinking about how those imp bastards kicked b2emo!

After recent rewatch imho those Clone Wars final four episodes might be on a par with Andor in a number of ways.

just got irrationally angry thinking about how those imp bastards kicked b2emo!

Nothing irrational about it. I nearly cried when they threatened to turn off his power

when he's too scared to come out in the last episode :(

Not gonna lie it's been kinda disappointing to watch Mandalorian in its wake, it's fine and all but it's never excellent.

I always felt Mandalorian was coasting on a couple vv good aspects. Crucial ones, of course: the two main characters. It just still has that Saturday morning cartoon feel to me (despite the Pershing episode almost feeling like an Andor knockoff.)

mandalorian really went downhill after they focused on the other mandalorians. this new season was almost unwatchable for me. too goofy

i gave up 10 minutes into the second episode of this mandalorian season. maybe it was always a kids show but it felt like that more than prior seasons. maybe it just suffered in comparison to andor.

Nothing irrational about it. I nearly cried when they threatened to turn off his power

― jbn, Thursday, April 27, 2023 2:40 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not irrational while watching the show but irrational thinking about it months later!

The existence of the Mandalorian also necessitated a Boba Fett show in which the dude had to keep his helmet off most of the time and become sort of a perpetually bemused benevolent town mayor.

After recent rewatch imho those Clone Wars final four episodes might be on a par with Andor in a number of ways.

I also think those episodes were excellent, some of the best work SW has done, but you have to watch a LOT to get to that point, and much of it is not great. Think I mentioned somewhere that Clone Wars starts out bleh and gets steadily better and more consistent each season - increasing returns. One of those shows where I'd definitely recommend someone follow a guide and only watch the best/most important episodes

My kids have watched all of Clone Wars but now we’re watching them together. We are midway through season 2. It’s not bad but I’m glad to hear it gets better.

Mandalorian honestly lost me in s2 with every episode feeling like a pilot for another show. And then Boba Fett was infuriating that even existed at all, and then on top of that ruined the character. But my kids (and my inner kid) keep me watching. Agreed that Mando s3 was mostly a misfire. The Andor-like episode was a pale imitation and then it really didn’t lead anywhere either.

the intro of the other mandalorians way back was v cool suggesting some kind of interesting intra-cultural split and complexity, then they made it mostly awful and often nauseating.

Mando S3 had IG-12 which probably leaves it in net positive territory overall IMO.

I also think those episodes were excellent, some of the best work SW has done, but you have to watch a LOT to get to that point, and much of it is not great. Think I mentioned somewhere that Clone Wars starts out bleh and gets steadily better and more consistent each season - increasing returns. One of those shows where I'd definitely recommend someone follow a guide and only watch the best/most important episodes

― Vinnie, Thursday, April 27, 2023 7:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, after watching Andor, I was listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age, which primarily focuses on the Clone Wars, but took a 12-episode detour into Andor. They kept dropping Clone Wars character references and plot points in the Andor episodes so I decided to revisit it. I had watched a season or so when my son was a kid. I even found a list of the "essential" story arcs somewhere, trying to avoid getting bogged down. Still couldn't hang with it.

The sticking points for me were: 1.) the animation style, which has never sat right with me; 2.) the numerous gruff New Zealand accents all sounding very samey; and 3.) the presence of battle droids - "roger, roger" and all that insipid humor.

Mando S3 had IG-12 which probably leaves it in net positive territory overall IMO.