ANDOR. Once this issue of the Journal is put to bed, this column included, I will head home and sink into my couch with a bowl of pita chips that are not nearly hard enough to grind the stress out through my already taxed molars while I watch the closing three episodes of the second and final season of Andor.
It’s necessarily the last season, running up to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), which passes the baton (and secret plans) to Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977). Having spun off backward in time from the intense Rogue One, in which Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) will be sent to assassinate the architect of the planned Death Star, director Tony Gilroy’s Andor is the most grown up among its series brethren and the least comforting. Over two seasons in 24 episodes, we follow Cassian through the trauma, paranoia, loss and violence of living under the boot of despots, and the trauma, paranoia, loss and violence of resisting them. All this with nary a Jim Henson puppet in sight.
The die-hard Star Wars completists are duty bound to watch Andor anyway, so I leave it to them to duke it out over lore, Easter eggs and, to an extent, politics Earthly and intergalactic. But there’s much to admire in this branch of the saga apart from the rest of it, even for those less invested in the franchise/endless narrative sprawl. What Gilroy and this committed, talented cast have done is pull us into the lives of layered, damaged, hopeful and maniacally driven characters to feel the weight of their choices and the angles of the corners they’re backed into.
The first season of Andor, released in 2022, answers the “What radicalized you?” question with Luna’s understated character study and a narrative arc that plays with the structures of fugitive thriller, espionage, prison break, political drama and war movie. We watch his transformation into revolutionary through encounters with idealists, a deadly pragmatic spymaster, struggling workers and prisoners, and the crushing, life-stealing bureaucracy of a fascist regime. Pulling people off the street and dropping them into remote prisons indefinitely and without due process is evidently some people’s Rubicon.
Season 2, released three episodes per week with time jumps between the groupings, begins a year later and tracks the rocky business of forming a united rebellion from disparate factions with infighting and distrust. Cassian and his partner Bix (Adria Arjona), who suffers from torture-related PTSD, take missions from Machiavellian spymaster Luthen (the stony browed Stellan Skarsgård) and hide out from the law and waves of guilt and grief. Elsewhere, we see the government’s covert media campaign to dehumanize and villainize a people whose resources it covets, both from inside its Stasi and the dissidents it pursues. We also watch a rebellion-funding senator (Genevieve O’Reilly) navigating superficial norms of statesmanship amid disinformation and outright atrocities.
Since we know where this will wind up, the devil — and a season’s worth of spoilers — is in the details. Sparing those, the performances in the series as a whole are strong and the actors stretch deeper into their characters as the world unravels around them. Luna is brilliant and his Cassian is that much more of a tragic figure for the glimpses of sweetness and charm he shows us, just as the cracks in O’Reilly’s poise reveal her interior life. (O’Reilly’s wardrobe is also serving sci-fi glamour heretofore unseen.) As the ice-hewn Dedra, Denise Gough gives the marvelously bitchy Ben Mendelsohn a run for his cape in the category of loathsome Imperial careerist, her fear and frustration twitching at the hinge of her clenched jaws as her proximity to power pays diminishing returns. To see her pitted against the diminutive but deadly Kathryn Hunter, who always burns like an unattended menthol, is in itself worth your time.
While there’s pleasure in the performances and fine writing, suspense and thrills in tight action set pieces, there is little escapism in this galaxy, similar as it is to our own, drawing from the history we seem content to repeat, in too many ways. Science fiction’s powers are employed well here, allowing us to see the workings and foundations of our own world more clearly through an alien one. As things fall apart on screen, it’s impossible not to wonder what it would take for the officials we’ve elected and everyday people to move against fascism and how much is already being lost to it. TV14. DISNEY+.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @JFumikoCahill.
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This article appears in ‘Fire Teaches Us Many Lessons’.
