Andor Season 2
The making of the original Star Wars is replete with stories of the obstacles George Lucas and his team of intrepid craftsmen had to overcome in its realization, and the inspired solutions and compromises they were forced into which became the texture of the film its admirers adored and memorized. (And woe be to anyone who challenges those compromises later). Armed with a nearly $300 million budget, Tony Gilroy did not have anywhere near the same limitations forced on him when he began Andor, the inspired prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Lucas’ own film detailing the earliest days of the Rebel Alliance and its own compromises (moral and otherwise) inherent in standing up to authoritarian tyranny. Ostensibly focusing on the journey of smuggler-turned-rebel Cassian Andor (Luna), Gilroy transmogrified Andor into a multi-faceted view of life under fascism and the cost, and value, of standing up to it, the beginning of a five-season plan to march through individual years of Andor’s, and the galaxy’s, life in the mixture of glacial and surprisingly immense change existence is made of.
Looking back on both the success of the first season and the multiple years of writing, production and post-production it took to get there Gilroy realized even the immense of resources Disney and Lucasfilm had given him weren’t going to be able to overcome the immutable march of time and twenty years of production was going to be bit much even for his grand design. So, like his Star Wars-ian forebears, Gilroy compromised, reducing his five-year plan to one as he dips, an episode at a time, into a year of the galaxy’s life to check on events before jumping forward a year to show how they’ve changed and mutated.
It's a noted change from the first seasons’ slow burn which built tension through character, conversation by conversation and moment by moment until there was no option but an explosion. Andor Season 2 offers a similar cadence -- particularly in the growth of its contrasting couples Andor and Bix (Arjona) and Dedra (Gough) and Syril (Soller) -- but by design must also stop from time to time for Andor to find himself in the middle of a riot or attempting to spirit Mon Mothma (O’Reilly) out of the capital as Imperial agents close in. It makes for a stop-and-start dynamic which compliments the growing tension of the first season without repeating it and keeping centered on its core components as much of the flavor is pushed away to make room for necessity. Andor has places to go and things to do.
Which doesn’t mean it can’t faff about when the mood takes, particularly among Gilroy’s particular episodes setting up the season which see the wedding of Mon’s rebellious daughter to a criminal banker while Andor is temporarily marooned on a familiar jungle planet after a TIE-fighter heist goes wrong. These are the episodes which most feel like the previous season, setting aside plot progression in favor of character detail. Andor may want to be part of the Rebellion but he has no idea how to do it and is quickly realizing no one around him does either. His only fortune is that the people aligned against are equally in the dark.
It’s both precious and previous and gives only the slightest hint as to what is to come.
Which is not useless; even as he flits from year-to-year Gilroy table sets to prepare for the inevitable but also uses those moments to relish in the absurd. As thrilling, heartfelt and commentative on the present moment as Andor is, there may nothing in it better than the galaxy’s most uncomfortable dinner with Syril, his mother and Dedra. The nexus of such concentrated misanthropy is clearly a treat for Gilroy who revels most in his vilest creations’ statements of selfishness and cruelty where personal aggrandizement is placed above humanity, from bureaucratic Himmler stand-in Major Partagaz (Lesser) to the returning Director Krennic (Mendelsohn) who is given prose poems of malevolent intent.
And all of it terribly real. Not just because we can easily believe that if there were a Galactic Empire far, far away it would be staffed by exactly such individuals – the same people exist today in the here and now and are trying to do very similar things for very similar reasons – but because Gilroy makes certain even his most diabolical creations have real, and relatable, inner lives. Dedra loves for real and for the same reasons we do, making her cruelties all the worse as she is unwilling or unable to see that truth of what she is doing to others, but her heartbreak as understandable as our nearest and dearest kin. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is not making the world think he didn’t exist, it’s tricking us into feeling the pain of the remorseless.
As the story moves inevitably forward, like life itself it begins to speed up until those movements between the notes which have given it shape must be cast aside to make room for the crescendo. In some ways the decision to focus on three days of Andor’s life and then jump forward a year adds strength to the progression a more leisurely pace could have accidentally sapped. The long-term consequence of choices and decisions are immediately felt. The plot to steal resources from the peaceful planet of Ghorman while cutting it off from the rest of the galaxy is moved from what could have been a multi-year arc to a stark before and after picture as Andor and company visit the world at different stages to aid its nascent guerilla uprising. It’s exactly the sort of dramatic escalation the prolonged version of the story may have neutered or at least lessened. By the same token, Bix’s psychological recovery from torture at Dedra’s hands takes years, but is quickened to the point where its feeling remains without protracted or repetitive elements.
There’s a price to be paid for that momentum shift. As events accelerate and plot takes over character is forced to take a back seat, leaving life changing decisions and occurrences which once would have been fodder for intense dissection to be pushed to the margins and occasionally shrugged at. After years of sitting at the center of Rebel growth, living eternally in the same paranoia he benefits from, spymaster Luthen Rael (Skarsgård) is gradually sidelined in favor of the more orderly military operation will meet in “Star Wars.” An operation Mon Mothma, after years of hiding her activity within the political canyons of the Empire, finds herself leading. What does Luthen think of the outcome he foresaw when it finally reaches him? Or Mon and her family of her true self when it is revealed and leaves them behind? We’ll never know; suddenly, for them and for us, there’s not enough time.
Is it a compromise? Or is it an accidental revelation of the series’ ideal form?
We’ll never know, an argument can be made for both. It’s easy to imagine the longer, more fleshed out version of Andor, particularly once Alan Tudyk’s sassy police droid arrives to remind why he was the best part of Rogue One. Something was definitely lost in the transition, but as Andor reminds us with every unanswered question and desperate fate, that’s life.
9.5 out of 10
Starring Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O’Reilly, Elizabeth Dulau, Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, Anton Lesser and Ben Mendelsohn. Written by Tony Gilroy, Beau Willimon, Dan Gilroy and Tom Bissell.