There had to be a comedown. By the standards of Episode 10’s for-the-ages, nothing-left-to-lose prison break, the penultimate installment of Andor’s first season is a quiet, somber episode. It’s more concerned with moments of individual sadness than collective action, with frustration and powerlessness rather than catharsis. But still there are unexpected reprieves, dry humor — and, in a move that ought to delight longtime fans of the franchise, some of the most Star Wars-y stuff this Star Wars TV show has ever attempted. That these attempts are so successful should come as no surprise: This is Andor, and Andor doesn’t miss.

I reviewed today’s episode of Andor for Decider.

In the latest Patreon-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, Stefan Sasse and I discuss Andor‘s magnificent tenth episode. Subscribe and listen!

Star Wars means a lot to me. The original film is the first movie I can remember watching, a copy taped off of CBS by my father, who carefully paused the recording to cut out the commercial breaks. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater at age 5. I had all the action figures I could get my hands on. My Millennium Falcon hangs from the ceiling in my children’s bedroom; my AT-AT passed into the possession of my niece. During my adolescence and teenage years, when nerd culture was a complete non-starter, I kept that love alive like a secret fire, wolfing down the Expanded Universe novels. When the characters in Clerks had that conversation about contractors on the Death Star I nearly lost my mind. At age 18 I got my first tattoo, the Rebel Alliance insignia. I waited on line overnight for the Special Edition theatrical re-releases, and for the first prequel. (I’m a prequels guy, for the record.) Once I had children of my own I took my daughter to every new Disney Star Wars movie, though admittedly I tapped out on The Rise of Skywalker; better for her not to sully the memories with that thing. So yeah, Star Wars means a lot to me. 

But nothing in any of the Star Wars media I’ve consumed over the years ever brought me to tears, until now.

I reviewed today’s magnificent episode of Andor for Decider.

Another week, another podcast from me and Stefan Sasse on Andor for our Patreon—subscribe and listen!

I focus so much on the writing of this show, the shocking and rewarding ways that it deviates from the Disney Star Wars norm, that I feel I neglect the performances. Frankly, they’re uniformly excellent. Genevieve O’Reilly, conveying Mon Mothma’s imprisonment in a gilded cage. Denise Gough, making Dedra Meero one of the most magnetic and frightening villains in the Star Wars legendarium. (She’s serving Peter Cushing, baby.) Diego Luna, a rat in a trap, always searching for a way out, never letting himself let up. Andy Serkis, showing layers of weariness and fear under Kino Loy’s bluster, emotions that finally give way to anger when he realizes he’s been had. Kyle Soller barely keeping it together as Syril Karn, all desperation to prove himself to someone, anyone, to be respected, perhaps to be loved. Kathryn Hunter as his mother, a passive-aggressive martinet, making his life worse even as she purports to be making it better. It’s such a wide range of performances for such a wide range of characters, all of them handled with care, all of them, even the bad guys, treated as three-dimensional human beings.

Unless things go badly wrong, Andor has already cemented itself as one of the best science-fiction shows of the century, up there with Battlestar Galactica, Dark, and Raised by Wolves. I simply cannot wait to see how far it goes.

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of Andor for Decider.

Stefan Sasse and I tackle the latest episode of the excellent Andor in a Patreon-exclusive podcast—subscribe and listen!

But mostly, trying to encapsulate the brilliance of this show is best done by simply recounting a litany of the many many ways in which it draws the Star Wars struggle down to a human level. This is a show concerned with prison bureaucracy, with the existence of toilets, with the existence of deaths from despair. It’s aware of revolutionary factionalism and bureaucratic infighting. It unflinchingly depicts cops and corrections officers as unrepentant, moronic sadists. It shows how prisoners can be made to turn on one another, crabs-in-a-bucket style. It includes insightfully fascistic phrases like “Can one ever be too aggressive in preserving order?” and “If you’re doing nothing wrong, what is there to fear?” It acknowledges that the quaint customs of the various exotic civilizations in the Star Wars Galaxy include shit like arranged marriages between children. It shows committed romantic partners reading each other to filth, as when Cinta dismisses Vel as “a rich girl running away from her family,” then effectively quoting the Velvet Underground & Nico by telling Vel “I’m a mirror…you love me because I show you what you need to see.” A prison overseer tells Andor “Losing hope? Your mind? Keep it to yourself.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of Andor for Decider.

Here we are, back again for a slightly delayed take on last week’s stellar episode of Andor! Subscribe to our Patreon and listen!

One of the many things that fascinate me about Andor is the way it makes you feel empathy, even admiration, for the employees of the Empire. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon is the simple fact that it’s simply a better written work of filmmaking than the vast majority of Star Wars material; of course the Imperials and their lackeys are going to feel more fully human, because everyone does. But even as the show chronicles the touch-and-go, knife’s-edge early days of the Rebellion, it paints portraits of Imperials you wouldn’t mind having a conversation with — if it weren’t for, y’know, the fascism. But still!

Take Dedra Meero, the Imperial Security Bureau officer trying her damndest to figure out the exact contours and scope of the nascent Rebellion. Thwarted by bureaucracy and backstabbing colleagues, she takes advantage of new laws passed in the wake of the Aldhani raid — the Patriot Act, basically — to work around those obstacles and get the information she needs from a galaxy-wide survey, instead of going sector by sector as mandated. And she gets results: enough information, she says, to prove her theory about a coordinated, galaxy-wide rebellion is correct. 

And instead of chiding her for breaking the rules or being over-ambitious, her supervisor, Major Partagaz, rewards her! He compliments her moxie and initiative, wondering how much better off they’d all be if everyone who worked for him displayed the same qualities. He gives her control of the sector previously under the command of her primary office rival. And he warns her to watch her back, knowing what kind of people they’re all dealing with. 

As played by Anton Lesser, Partagaz a charming guy, intimidating but insightful, the kind of boss you’re both scared of and kind of in awe of too. And Denise Gough plays Dedra as nothing but competent, strikingly so — truly skilled at her job in a way that makes you like and respect a person. These are remarkable, precise performances that endear you to the characters — I mean, again, if it weren’t for, y’know, the fascism. But still!

I reviewed today’s episode of Andor for Decider.

Stefan Sasse and I continue our breakneck pace of reviewing big genre shows with our latest podcasts on Andor, which we love, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which we do not love. The latter is the first time I’ve done a podcast where I got so emotionally exhausted that I literally had to ask Stefan to stop the episode. How’s that for a selling point? These are both Patreon exclusive, so go subscribe and listen!

Human, humane, and absolutely thrilling on a genre level, Andor, like Interview with the Vampire and House of the Dragon, proves that nerd-franchise filmmaking on television can be real television, with real stakes and real characters and real motivations and real complexities that can’t be resolved with a visit to the wiki. I’m so glad it exists.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Andor for Decider.

I spoke with Jeet Heer about Andor for his podcast The Time of Monsters at The Nation! Listen here!

Stefan Sasse and I return with our regularly scheduled weekly series, focusing on this week’s episodes Andor and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, both Patreon exclusives! Subscribe and listen!

I don’t know how else to say it about Andor: It is just flabbergasting to hear genuinely adult ideas and witness genuinely adult character dynamics in a Star Wars project. Rogue One is an antecedent of course, and I think some of the very early scenes in the original Star Wars — Luke arguing with his aunt and uncle, concerns about work and the harvest, politics as a threatening but distant cloud — have a similar vibe. But to see it on this scale, consistently, is just amazing.

Now, I totally get if it’s not for you. It might not be the kind of Star Wars you want. You might simply be sick of Star Wars in general or post-Lucas Disney Star Wars in particular. But man, get a load of this dialogue from this week’s episode:

“It’s so confusing, isn’t it? So much going on, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of oppression 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.”

My dudes, come on. Come on. Does this sound like a reality we’re familiar with or what?

(And yes, I understand the irony of an oppressive corporate entity like Disney presenting us with a ferociously anti-oppression message like that. But Too Old to Die Young and The Underground Railroad, respectively perhaps the most ferociously, brutally anti-cop and anti-racist works of art I’ve ever seen, were both funded by Jeff Bezos. Ooh, baby baby, it’s a wild world.)

I reviewed this week’s quietly remarkable episode of Andor for Decider.

My Illustrious Co-Host Stefan Sasse and I continue our breakneck podcasting pace with new Patreon-exclusive episodes on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 6 (disappointing!) and Andor Episode 4 (invigorating!). Go subscribe and check ’em out!

Four episodes (though just two weeks) into Andor, and I remain shocked by just how good it is. And having made similar statements on Twitter, I feel the need to clarify and caveat a bit. Is it The Sopranos? No. But is it, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi? Also, no, and that’s a good thing. This is a real show, with a real message yes, but more importantly with real moments that are not necessary to move the plot or pop the fans with Easter eggs and references. 

There are going to be viewers and critics who are so disgusted with Disney Star Wars material that this simply will not penetrate to them, and that’s fine, I totally get it, it’s not hard for me to imagine being in that position too. But I’m too shocked by the show’s many subtle, legitimately subtle, touches of personal and interpersonal drama to share that disgust. Again, Andor is a real show. Given the machine that produced it, that’s a minor miracle.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Andor for Decider.

My illustrious cohost Stefan Sasse and I have posted not one but two Patreon-exclusive new podcasts, one on the most recent episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and one focused on the three-part series premiere of Andor! We’ve got a very ambitious schedule going on right now so there’s no guarantee of future Andor episodes, although at the rate TRoP is going we might decide to switch, who knows. Subscribe and listen! And hey, they’re at two different tiers, so you can select one that’s right for your budget!

And we can talk about how the villains of the piece are, unambiguously, cops — not even stormtroopers or Imperial officers, but literal boys in blue. They trash homes, they bully civilians, they beat a female suspect, they shoot an unarmed man to death for failing to comply. Sure, they work for a corporation rather than “protecting and serving” on behalf of the people. What else is new?

The point I’m trying to make is this: When George Lucas envisioned the original Star Wars trilogy as a story of rebellion against an empire, he was thinking of Vietnam and the American war machine. But that hard-to-miss metaphor kind of slipped into subliminal range because the Imperials were hard to see as American analogues; their overall vibe owed too much to Nazi Germany (“stormtroopers,” for god’s sake) and, honestly, their awesome white armor was too cool-looking in a faceless sort of way. 

Not so here. So far, Andor’s rebellion is one of normal people banding together to fight law enforcement. It’s shootouts with corporate security forces. It’s hidden nexuses of resistance to the everyday depredations of forces that seem too big to fight against, until someone does it. Success is not guaranteed, and will not entail a big award ceremony in a temple on Yavin IV. At best it might make some small part of the galaxy a bit more livable for the people in it, for a moment or too. Is that worth fighting for? Is it worth dying for? Is it worth killing for? The show, crafted so skillfully in so many ways by creator/writer/showrunner Tony Gilroy and director Toby Haynes, is on Disney+, so its radicalism only takes you so far, but still, it has its answer. What’s yours?

I reviewed the third episode of Andor for Decider.

The Disney Star Wars Universe is a fictional world in which plot is privileged over all, in which fanservice and Easter eggs are held up as superior artistic achievements to virtually any other aesthetic consideration. With that in mind, it’s worth saluting the fellow who did nothing else but bang a metallic drum that signals the end of the work day for the working stiffs who populate Andor.

Why is he there? Why does the show repeatedly take time out of its already truncated running time to show us his routine? Because it adds something, dammit. Because little details that are unnecessary for plot movement are, outside the auspices of major franchise properties anyway, the stuff that good drama is made from. They’re like the huge, very un-Star Wars drums that hit on the soundtrack just prior to the end of the episode: They stick out, and insist that you experience them. I don’t want to make too much of the guy myself — it’s just a couple of little moments, that’s all — but those little moments linger.

I reviewed the second episode of Andor for Decider.

As a score that’s more John Carpenter than John Williams plays in the background, out-of-focus lights pass by overhead. A man walks in the rain through a red-light district of an alien city, in which various life-forms attempt to entice passers-by through Amsterdam-style show windows. The man enters a brothel — later referred to as such, by name — where an exotic-dancer hologram cavorts and employees attempt to entice him to try various wares from various exotic locales. 

The man refuses; he’s looking for his long-lost sister, not a good time. In the process, he makes enemies of two corporate rent-a-cops, who follow him out of the establishment into a dark alley and stick him up for money. 

The man fights back, accidentally killing one of his muggers before getting the drop on the other. Rather than report the death to the authorities together, as the remaining assailant begs him to do, he simply shoots the other guy to death in cold blood. More moody synths play on the soundtrack. 

So ends the first ten minutes of Andor, Disney+’s new serialized Star Wars drama. It’s true that my knowledge of the material is not exhaustive. But it’s safe to say that based on what I’ve seen, these ten minutes are more interesting than everything I’ve seen from the Disney Star Wars machine since Rogue One — combined. 

I reviewed the excellent first episode of Andor for Decider.