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Tinker, tailor, soldier, antiques dealer? |
So Andor season two has wrapped up, and reviews are everywhere. I’ve never seen anything get so many reviews, commentary, and accolades. I smell marketing money.
Does it merit the accolades?
The simple answer is yes. Andor's a highly relevant and incisive social commentary masquerading as a sci-fi political thriller.
Major caveat: Andor is not a Saturday afternoon serial you’d catch at the matinee. Those serials, particularly Flash Gordon, were a major point of inspiration for Lucas. You can see it in the franchises’ DNA, as well as in Lucas’ other big hit franchise, Indiana Jones.
Lucas has said repeatedly and emphatically that Star Wars, in his vision, is for children. It’s not meant as an all ages franchise. It’s targeted at kids, and it’s meant to sell toys. Personally, I think the first two films of the original trilogy qualify as General Audience. They’re not patronizing or dumbed down like kids films are.
Andor, however, is not meant for kids. At all. In any way, form or manner. Nor is it a swashbuckling show. It’s a political and character drama. The characters are not simplistic, superficial archetypes you find in action films: they’re complex, nuanced and not easily bucketed in categories like ‘sassy princess’, ‘charming rogue’, ‘wise wizard’, or ‘earnest farm boy’.
Archetypes are a form of short hand, and they’re best used in stories where the focus is on action and adventure or comedy. They let you get into the action quickly, without having to spend a lot of time explaining who the heroes are.
Andor takes its time, weaving out a complex narrative with multiple story lines, and builds slowly. It’s more like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy than Moonraker, or Zorro.
Frankly, I’m surprised, even baffed, that it ever got made. Kudos to Kathleen Kennedy and Tony Gilroy for taking this leap into more mature material. I don’t think George Lucas would have allowed it, given the flat out hostility he’s expressed at the idea of Star Wars being aimed at an older audience.
The series wraps up fabulously. It’s incredibly dark, and the characters reap the consequences of their actions. The Rebels that survive trudge onward because they must, and their sacrifices weigh heavily. Dedra, like Syril, soar to the ecstasy of triumph… before suddenly plummeting into hell.
Typical of fantasy stories, Cassian, Dedra, and Kleya are orphans; Syril, for his part, has an absent father and overbearing mother. All of them are the product of their upbringing: Cassian is motivated to save people because he lost his sister, Kleya hates the Empire because it murdered her family, Dedra serves it because she was raised in an Imperial Kinderblock, and Syril yearns for approval from the paternal law & order patriarch embodied by Palpatine.
Syril and Dedra are obsessives, and it proves their undoing. Syril’s pathological hate of Andor leads him to self-destruction; he might have survived his disillusionment otherwise. Dedra disobeys orders and indulges her inner rebel to satisfy her personal grudge with Axis, yet in pursuing Axis outside of official channels, she snoops where she shouldn’t, and her discoveries are then pinched by the Rebel spy Lonni Jung.
Cassian spends more time than I would have liked telling Luthen that he's out (take a shot every time he does, that's the Andor drinking game), he's like a space age Godfather. They cycle through that loop repeatedly. It's not as interesting as the other facets of rebellion that Gilroy touches on.
Tony Gilroy is very knowledgeable about world, particularly revolutionary, history, from Stalin’s train heist to fund the Russian Revolution to the ISB eating its own. During The Terror in the Soviet Union, the Cheka (later the KGB) went through leader after leader, from Yagoda and Dzerzhinsky to (finally) Beria. All of them were executed by the state they once served. Corporations do much the same thing: they get one poor sap to fire a large group of employees, and then they fire the firer, who goes out into the job market despised by many of his former colleagues. The Cheka was a little more final.
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Oh, what a poetic reversal this is. |
I was sorry to see Partagaz go. He was a great villain: competent, calculating, and ruthless, but also professional, paternal and contemplative, like a professor presiding over a graduate class. He maintained his inquisitive bent right up to his suicide, listening to the Rebel Manifesto and asking a subordinate what his thoughts were. The ultimate problem with Partagaz is that he was amoral: he was about doing his job, and doing it well, but he didn’t care at all for the human consequences.
Far better a villain than the laughable Hux, or the temperamental man-child Kylo Ren. That pair was more a meta commentary on Star Wars fanboys than they were serious in-universe villains, much as Barclay was a sneering criticism of Star Trek fans by the show’s smug writers.
Partagaz and Tarkin are believable in their ranks whereas Hux and Kylo are not. I can accept laser swords sooner than that pair managing a McDonald’s, much less an empire. A space opera requires grand and imposing antagonists; you can make competent villains despicable and avoid fascist fetishists in the audiences idolizing them by other means, which Andor demonstrates with aplomb. Underestimating your enemy is the biggest mistake you can make, and I believe that is borne out repeatedly in politics.
Mon Mothma, Luthen, Drellen, Kleya, Bail Organa and Saw exude authority and competence, on the Rebel side. Yes, Saw is wonderfully bonkers, but he has a mesmerizing kind of batty charisma you’d expect of a cult leader, like Che Guevara (on whom it wouldn’t surprise me Saw is partially based. Che was both a monster and nuts). You don’t know if Saw is going to hug you or shoot you. They all make for very capable, believable foils. We need such competent characters for a political drama (as opposed to a comedy) about rebellion to work: a Galactic Empire managed by hyperventilating imbeciles would collapse of its own accord.
The other character death that disappointed me was Luthen’s. I get narratively why he had to die, it fits, but I suspect his earlier life will be explored in other media in future. Ultimately, Luthen’s speech in season one bore out: he never saw the dawn, but in a highly symbolic scene at the very end, Kleya steps out into it.
Lonni’s death was one of the most shocking low points of the series, at least for me, on a personal level. Obviously the massacre on Ghorman looms larger, but here’s a guy who’s thrown his lot in with the Rebellion, lives a double life, constantly on edge, and he brings Luthen intel that’s crucial to understanding the threat of the Death Star, ultimately leading to the Rebels stealing the plans and empowering Luke to blow it up. He’s absolutely key to the Rebellion’s survival… and he’s rewarded with a blaster bolt to the heart for it all.
That’s not how heroes are typically supposed to behave.
But that’s the Andor show for you.
And from a ruthless spy craft POV, I get it: the Imperials were already on to Lonni, and if he fell into their hands, they’d torture and squeeze him for every ounce of information they could get. Luthen couldn’t even save himself. What bothered me is that he didn’t even try.
I don’t think I’d make a very good secret agent.
At least we can see more material with Kleya, Bix, and perhaps even Dedra, if she ever sees the light of day again.
The strongest character arcs in the show, funny enough, belong to the villains: Syril and Dedra.
The greatest arc on the rebel side belongs to Mon Mothma, who had to make peace with the cost of Rebellion, and the violence inherent in it. Yet man-boy Syril’s journey had more dramatic heft. This is at least partly due to the nature of Mothma’s reserved and controlled demeanour.
Her pithy speech in the Senate, however, was absolute killer. ‘The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil’… nothing in the entire franchise history has ever, ever been so topical or powerful.
Why, it could be said today, on the floor of a certain Senate not so far away...
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I'm sure Maarva would approve |