ANDOR aka Glum Village : its own thread

i want a thread to talk about it and i'm too lazy to keep putting spoiler tags around everything in the Star Wars thread

Well DAMN Andor delivers so far.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 22 September 2022 06:26 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this is great

the policing aspect feels like oldschool brit procedural and i LUV it

also aesthetically- love the color pallete, all the browns & oranges… also it needs to be said that star wars universe outerwear is chef’s kiss always

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 22 September 2022 06:48 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuck I'm so excited

― i eat ass with a knife and fork (Neanderthal), Thursday, 22 September 2022 06:54 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

So this is where all the budget and creativity for “Obi Wan” and “Boba Fett” went!

― SQUIRREL MEAT!! (Capitaine Jay Vee), Thursday, 22 September 2022 07:53 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Am saving the third episode for the weekend but yeah loving it so far.

The universe feels lived in and the characters for once appear to be driven by human-level motivations - misplaced ambition, jealousy, laziness, spur-of-the-moment thoughtlessness. People actually talking like people, instead of just delivering exposition. No one is just going round going from place to place completing RPG quests (which is what Obi-Wan/Mando sometimes felt like).

also hell yeah, blue ramen

― Roz, Thursday, 22 September 2022 09:41 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lovely and perfect detail, that,

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 22 September 2022 12:09 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Andor truly the Star Wars show for anyone who ever wanted a Star Wars without Jedi, lightsabers, action, cool spaceships, iconic designs, John Williams music, or things happening at all, but get really excited about scene after scene of intensely whispered exposition
— Matthew Perpetua (@perpetua) September 21, 2022
It's amazing how this guy is just wrong about everything. I knew the second I saw this tweet that I would love the show.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, 22 September 2022 16:35 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I enjoyed the first few episodes of Andor, so now I'm going back and checking out Kenobi, and holy shit, I never realized how brutal the recruitment process for RHCP was.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Saturday, 24 September 2022 19:01 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

What I got I got to give it to the Empire

― i eat ass with a knife and fork (Neanderthal), Saturday, 24 September 2022 20:11 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Paul says Let It Be

― Stevolende, Saturday, 24 September 2022 20:13 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

big ACAB energy so far

are my eyes deceiving me or was the police bus thing that brought the cops down to the planetary surface the same sort of vehicle that the jawas bundled our droid friends into on tattooine? as if the jawas had found an old junked spaceship of this model and repurposed it into a sand crawler?

i wasn’t thrilled by the horizon zero dawn shit but at least it’s out of the way. that really could have all been told in a line or two. the way cas was “adopted” was fairly… horrific?! like okay maybe you’re right that he would have been in trouble or even killed later, but who put you in charge

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 25 September 2022 01:11 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh I very much like the idea that the 'adoption' wasn't nice, pleasant or even desired!

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 25 September 2022 01:13 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

the cop transport was similar to a clone wars-era troop transport from the starwars 2 movie

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Sunday, 25 September 2022 01:15 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mull of Kenari

― Stevolende, Sunday, 25 September 2022 08:49 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Am at least semi enjoying this though am aware taht whatever background is being set is pretty temporary no matter how in depth it's being set up as so intrigues between side characters probably not as important as might seem. I take it we do know the ultimate end of the story arc anyway & it ain't no frog chorus. THough possibly set up to show attitudes to loyalty and a few other things. Though he do seem a tad shady and stuff.

Trying to work out why the kids clothing on Kenari looks so manufactured when they seem to have been returned to a primitive level though not sure how long before. THought clothing would be more natural/simple not as textured or complicatedly finished. KIds look more dressed than scrabbling by having to make clothing or whatever from local materials.

Is this like a footnote to a footnote if the main character is someone whose til now main arc was inside a film that sets up some of the action in one of the original films.

― Stevolende, Sunday, 25 September 2022 09:59 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes definitely - backstory to the backstory.

Interesting point about the clothes. Maybe they’re still getting by on the remains of what the mining colony left (maybe 100 years earlier? Hard to tell)

I wonder if Dudley Do-Right policeman is going to “break good” at some point

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 25 September 2022 10:05 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

The situation on Kenari was relatively recent. There’s that line in the third episode about how Cassian saw his father hanged by the imperials in the town square as a kid! The implication is that the adults were killed or were absent for other reasons.

I think the bouncing between his past and the present day sets up the parallel of circumstances molding his path. He didn’t choose to leave his planet but that became his life, much as he isn’t actively trying to become a rebel agent but he’s stuck with another foster parent figure again. Orphans make the best agents, you know.

I kind of hope they follow through on that, and his diminished sense of agency, as he gets groomed as a spy and assassin

― mh, Sunday, 25 September 2022 14:58 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

(I mean, it seems incredibly likely they will with Gilroy reusing some of the backstory markers from his Bourne series screenplays)

― mh, Sunday, 25 September 2022 15:00 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

And that's in place in Rogue One as well, so.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 25 September 2022 16:49 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can tell star wars is for babies because of the crawls and the wipes
— Al Shipley (@alshipley) September 25, 2022

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Sunday, 25 September 2022 17:27 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

this episode was sensational. too short!

- baby banthas!
- “clem”!!!!! i love it
- incompetent sadman fascist on the skids
- light speed!
- THE TIE FIGHTERS fuuuuck
- the creeping centralisation and surveillance
- woke mothma
- the hard-science diversion for the heist a kind of switcheroo of king solomon’s mines, where it’s the locals who use the astronomical calendar to their advantage

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 28 September 2022 23:38 (four weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

How do i do spoiler text?

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Thursday, 29 September 2022 01:16 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

[ h ] like this [ / h ]

― peace, man, Thursday, 29 September 2022 01:27 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i dont think those were bantha babies they just looked like goats to us and i assume they have weird alien penises. My wiiiiife also said she was amused by the star wars world retail experience

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Thursday, 29 September 2022 01:32 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah this was really sharp. Just the way this show easily introduces characters, switches scenes and modes while maintaining mood.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 30 September 2022 07:26 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, it's that dude from The Bear!

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Friday, 30 September 2022 23:23 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I keep thinking this show is called Endor and is about Ewoks.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 30 September 2022 23:42 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

POSEUR!!!!!

― stank viola (Neanderthal), Saturday, 1 October 2022 00:26 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I keep thinking it’s called And/or and it’s a philosophy text

― “uhh”—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie “uhh” (President Keyes), Saturday, 1 October 2022 03:51 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Further adventures of Paul Ramone

― Stevolende, Saturday, 1 October 2022 05:23 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

The Rebellion the Next Generation
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYHSzMMX0AIqLlT?format=jpg&name=large

― Stevolende, Monday, 3 October 2022 21:12 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

getting to the end of Obi-Wan Kenobi, there's certainly some good stuff here, I like the new bad guys and Darth Vader of course, but the retcon level is so high as to make it rather aggravating

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Tuesday, 4 October 2022 16:07 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

(i've never been to england) i like how the first three eps of andor are set in some sort of blighted northern england post-industrial mining village! perhaps the next star wars series will be how the same planet gave birth to the post-modal nodes band the max rebo twelve and their label sandcrawler records?

― 龜, Wednesday, 5 October 2022 04:32 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

great show if your favorite part of star wars were the scenes of imperial officers sitting around a table bitching at each other or if you were curious about the lives of all the construction workers and contractors who died on the 2nd death star

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Wednesday, 5 October 2022 04:49 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well, yes.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 5 October 2022 04:56 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

xp I actually am glad after the last set of Star Wars shows that we're getting a bunch of new/different planets and ecosystems, especially after Boba Fett. (We got like, two or three newish locales on Obi-wan, but eh.) Even "new" Coruscant was fun to see.

― Nhex, Wednesday, 5 October 2022 23:15 (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Perfect ratcheting-up-tension episode this week, I'd say. When it ended I felt totally wound up.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 6 October 2022 01:59 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ooh forgot there's a new episode today

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Thursday, 6 October 2022 02:09 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

The pre-Imperial tech thing Karis was showing off was actually a barely-concealed older Polaroid!

― Priory, Thursday, 6 October 2022 02:46 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ha I DID think "Wait is that a camera?"

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 6 October 2022 04:58 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Which, BTW, was prompted by seeing this earlier in the week -- turns out Diego's a major camera nut (the explanation is kinda sweet, really)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59rKS8qaKuA

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 6 October 2022 04:59 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

is the name of the droid in this noir feelings star wars show actually B2EMO? because that's awesome.

― “Cheeky cheeky!” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 6 October 2022 16:00 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

enjoyed the new episode - it definitely heightened my anticipation for “the job”

love the classic heist/bank job story beats ie new-guy suspicion, last-minute revelations that undermine cohesion, newly-sown suspicion towards leader, etc etc etc

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 6 October 2022 18:12 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

blue food watch: space cereal with blue milk

― Roz, Friday, 7 October 2022 01:25 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

the uptight police guy’s mom is a whole mood, i kind of love her and their vibe

also uptight police guy reminds me of the Jude Law android from AI, it might just be his hair

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, 7 October 2022 01:32 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i thought the same thing

yes his mom is great. strangely for such a diverse and motley set of beings she’s one of the few real “characters” in this show

i was psyched for the heist but now i’m very much enjoying the slow burn. “clem” a bit jumpy, not just a strong dude for us to identify with but a dude with problems. “we all have our own rebellion” - loved that.

will our double agent’s moment of sentimentality - allowing the men to watch the cosmic happening - come back to bite them? i don’t know but i loved that we got to see that little grin

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 7 October 2022 09:23 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

maybe didn't follow the plot but felt like that smile was showing that he played them, got them to think he was giving them what they wanted when really he cleared them out to not be paying attention during the heist or something?

I'm enjoying Ebon Moss Bachrach. I HATED him on Girls, where he played a truly odious character. Then when he showed up in the Bear I was like ugh this guy again, but then I was like well he's playing an asshole, do I hate the actor or just his characters? Then by the end of the Bear I was like, aw I like this guy, and now here he is again! And he's enjoyable. ANd I can erase his Girls character from my memory.

― dan selzer, Friday, 7 October 2022 18:05 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've had almost the same opinions as you regarding that actor; they did too good a job making him an asshole on Girls and it's taken a few years to rectify. He was also in one season of Damages

― Vinnie, Saturday, 8 October 2022 01:58 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

same, his character was so convincingly awful in Girls i thought maybe i hated his face lol but i dig him so mich in Bear & Andor

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 8 October 2022 04:16 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

So difficult to tell whether Dunham liked or loathed her characters, and I guess that had consequences for the performers too - were we watching a charming actor uncharmingly playing an asshole, or an uncharming performance of a character we were supposed to like? Hard to tell from week to week

― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 8 October 2022 11:54 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

dan otm

― assert (matttkkkk), Saturday, 8 October 2022 12:14 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ok. Wow. That was some Star War telly.
Tense.

― SQUIRREL MEAT!! (Capitaine Jay Vee), Wednesday, 12 October 2022 21:43 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol they kinda delivered on the hype for The Eye thing damn

― nashwan, Wednesday, 12 October 2022 22:18 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

wow. episode delivered. only marred by young trotsky nerd’s hopelessly tendentious acting.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 13 October 2022 00:21 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol they kinda delivered on the hype for The Eye thing damn

ha yeah i was disappointed we hadn't gotten to the heist at the end of the last episode, but the wait was worth it!

Between this and The Bear, Ebon Moss-Bachrach has been in the two most stressful episodes of TV I've watched all year

― Roz, Thursday, 13 October 2022 04:38 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok if we get a three episode cadence, every third is action-heavy, and each builds on the last, that twelfth one better deliver

― mh, Thursday, 13 October 2022 13:29 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

THE GREENIE GREEN ONES

THE GREENIE REVNOG

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 22:55 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

this show keeps impressing me tbh

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 22:59 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

so "shave and a haircut" exists in the star wars universe?

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Thursday, 20 October 2022 19:25 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

It does now!

Fantastic last couple of episodes here. And yes it's pretty clear we're on a three episode arc each time, which I have no problem with. (Appreciate the ISB office politics mania of course. Also didn't realize the dude there with the one speech about imposing measures etc is the latest iteration of this character, who might be the classic retcon.)

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wullf_Yularen

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 20 October 2022 19:29 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

looking forward to episode 9 being the star wars version of the great escape

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Thursday, 20 October 2022 19:45 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

nerdy sidebar - i love the room interiors for a lot of their homes & meeting rooms, like the architectural details in mon mothma’s mansion or the interesting brick interiors of andor’s home or that 70’s looking pad of his girlfriend/not-girlfriend, and uptight-guy’s mom’s modular pod-apartment

i can’t say why exactly but it gives me a bit of a “bladerunner” echo.

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 20 October 2022 19:48 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'd reallt still like a series dedicated to Jawas especially a Jedi Jawa

― | (Latham Green), Thursday, 20 October 2022 19:52 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

veg, you're the third person to make the bladerunner connect here. I should be watching Andor I think.

― “Cheeky cheeky!” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 20 October 2022 21:17 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

for me it’s specifically the interiors somehow

anyway it’s great!

mandalorian still my fave but andor def a close second

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 20 October 2022 21:38 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

and some of the music this latest episode - by the fantastic Nicholas Britell - used a lot of very Bladerunner-y synth textures. Such a wonderful series. The ground level Empire stuff (probe droids, TIES, stormtroopers) has rarely felt more ominous.

― SQUIRREL MEAT!! (Capitaine Jay Vee), Thursday, 20 October 2022 22:26 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

If you thought that the Mandalorian was essentially bad, is this good on a Mandalorian scale or on an objective scale?

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 20 October 2022 22:27 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

the vacation planet theme song was pretty amusing

I like this much more than the Mandalorian, it is a very different show

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Thursday, 20 October 2022 22:28 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

it is much more focused on giving a glimpse into how normal people live in various parts of the galaxy, very subdued, much less action and heroics, although that stuff is in there for sure.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Thursday, 20 October 2022 22:33 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

andor is way more grounded in a lot of ways than mandalorian, it feels more like a gritty, modern type of spy movie that happens to be set in star wars world rather than the kind of epic space western like mando was

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 20 October 2022 22:40 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

but if you thought mando was essentially bad i can’t fully speak to whether you’d even enjoy andor

different vibe but like, it’s not NOT star wars

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 20 October 2022 22:41 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

veg otm re the interiors. I also liked that wide shot of the Imperial cubicles, love this (and Rogue One’s) depiction of the Empire as essentially being run by a bunch of corporate stooges and horrible middle managers.

that ISB meeting scene was as gripping as any lightsaber duel lol

― Roz, Friday, 21 October 2022 01:58 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think this may also be the first star wars show to follow multiple agents of the empire maybe not quite as sympathetic characters, but definitely as humans possessing inner lives.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Friday, 21 October 2022 04:29 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

It is Ronin but Stellan Skarsgård has more years and hair this go round

― Cinta Kaz is comin' to town (Sufjan Grafton), Friday, 21 October 2022 05:08 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Absolutely delighted to discover that Chamberlin, Powell and Bon did some work on Coruscant before coming to London to design The Barbican.

Not so thrilled that everyone is carrying around tablet computers, I thought it was canon that SW never had that kind of tech.

― ledge, Friday, 21 October 2022 08:52 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i thought of the Barbican as well!

i must have missed the tablets. it’s a funny mix of tech, it mostly feels like Vietnam-war era is about where they’re at.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 21 October 2022 08:56 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

watched the new one last night and was thinking the same stuff about the production design and music. A lot of these star wars shows have felt kinda cheap...like expensive compared to a lot of tv shows, but budget compared to an actual movie, but the physical world building, the exteriors and interiors, vehicle design etc, on Andor has been really fantastic. I prefer this to the Mandalorian for sure. I skipped Boba and only watched one episode of Obi Wan.

― dan selzer, Friday, 21 October 2022 13:52 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think a big reason it looks so much realer is that they used the green screen superdome a lot less for this show. Or at least, that gave them an excuse to have less scenes of people standing around in the desert.

― Nhex, Friday, 21 October 2022 14:09 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Britell such a great choice for this series

― realistic pillow (Jon not Jon), Monday, 24 October 2022 14:06 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I keep hearing good things about "Andor," but I haven't watched anything post-Mando S2. Just kind of Star War'd out, I guess. (Also totally off the LotR and GoT trains, too, though more power to you folks invested.) But maybe I'll give it a shot, since we're between Marvel things. The praise seems similar to S1 of "Mando" - just a good show set in the Star Wars universe rather than some portentous fan service playing up/with mythology.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 24 October 2022 14:24 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Pretty much - it's a good show, a little elevated by the extra Star Wars mythology that it does touch and the action setpieces that finally happen

― Nhex, Monday, 24 October 2022 14:33 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

it ties in closer to the main Star Wars story than Mandolorian does because it's about the birth of the rebellion, but mostly avoids obvious fan service, most of the characters and settings are new, and there hasn't been any mention of jedi/sith stuff so far. It sidesteps the superhero aspects of Star Wars and focuses more on the human side of things.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Monday, 24 October 2022 14:40 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I like the idea of the "rebel alliance" explicitly being a coalition of partisans and pro-republic politicians and aristocrats, as messy as that may be, playing out. The formal title of "Alliance to Restore the Republic" might be an interesting point in a future episode because it's been pretty strongly implied that some of the people involved hate the Empire but didn't necessarily have great faith in the Republic

― mh, Monday, 24 October 2022 15:26 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I love Andor, and thought the Mandalorian post season 2, the Boba Fett thing, was dumb, as was Obi Wan. Dug the first two of Madalorian, but this is even better.

― a (waterface), Monday, 24 October 2022 15:28 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have skipped LoTR and found HotDragon lame, so I have sorta desperate geek hopes here.

― “Cheeky cheeky!” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post (forksclovetofu), Monday, 24 October 2022 17:21 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have skipped LoTR and found HotDragon lame, so I have sorta desperate geek hopes here.

― “Cheeky cheeky!” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post (forksclovetofu), Monday, 24 October 2022 17:21 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://twitter.com/i/events/1584693275755044865

― groovypanda, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 09:58 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Try again:

A Secret Writers Room, a Rising Scribe and a Post-‘Skywalker’ Timeline: A Look Inside Damon Lindelof‘s ’Star Wars’ Movie (Exclusive) https://t.co/Qr3PvFqx3F
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 24, 2022
― groovypanda, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 09:59 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

no mas

― death generator (lukas), Tuesday, 25 October 2022 16:23 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I’ve read articles by like “industry watchers” who are LIVID that Disney has not been exploiting the star wars IP more in the cinema and I’m like….. thank fuck for that

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 25 October 2022 16:35 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The Force Reawakens
The Penultimate Jedi
Re-Rise of Nu-Skywalker

― stank viola (Neanderthal), Tuesday, 25 October 2022 16:41 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

kinda crazy that Andy Greenwald (formerly of the Ringer) is on the writing team of Star Wars movie

― “uhh”—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie “uhh” (President Keyes), Wednesday, 26 October 2022 15:27 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ha, I knew Andy from Spin.

We saw the first "Andor." I liked it, at times it sort of had "Blade Runner" vibes, but my daughter was very resistant and found the characters "boring" (which come to think of it is also very "Blade Runner"). That means I'm on my own for finishing it, which means it'll be another ... six months before I'm done.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 26 October 2022 15:35 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's a pretty glum set of characters in a pretty glum setting it's true. i didn't exactly find them boring but i can see how someone would think that

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 26 October 2022 15:37 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I watched the first three episodes and liked aspects of it, but the characters are definitely still pretty opaque (and kind of charmless, to be harsh) and I'm not sure I'm going to continue

― rob, Wednesday, 26 October 2022 15:43 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

'this is Murg. she's from the Cassavetes system'

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 26 October 2022 16:18 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

damn i love this show. THIS IS THE REAL PREQUELS, PEOPLE.

instead of princesses and princes it's the story of labor camps, of construction workers, of kidnapped natives, of middle managers and despised sergeants. of plots in the workplace. of the obdurate details of enforcement and empire management. not just as backdrop or character detail but as the main subject. it's bloody-minded in its materialism. and unstintingly gloomy!

so this episode.. our rebellion poster couple has split up. but that's what happens in good dramas, the characters get faced with tremendously difficult decisions and we get to find out what's important to them and you're DAMN RIGHT that the rebellion is more important to... Cinta, okay i did have to go look that up.. than whatever is going on between her and.. Vel, yes i looked that one up too. now i have images in my head of what the actresses look like in normal clothes. but anyway. good.

the prison is WILD. how the fuck is he going to get out?

i enjoyed the hell out of how tense and awkward andor's introduction to the factory floor was. remember that hold-up with the irritated imperial support staff in the corridor? someone wasn't at their post? all that kerfuffle? i'm interested in why that scene was there. why do you need that scene? you could have tightened everything up by just getting andor into the fabrication room straight away. hands on his head, jabber poised to zap him, it's already tense. so why? i guess my answer would be that it does heighten the tension some, makes you say "get on with it", which gets you closer to what andor himself is feeling then. but it also shows how everybody kind of hates their job there, apart from a handful of sadists. they're all just annoyed and snappish and despite the gleaming ultra-sanitary meticulously conformist operation they're running, the human stuff doesn't really work right. the whole thing's idiotic of course. you'd get better work out of your laborers if you actually trained them properly at the beginning! your efficiency would improve if so many of them didn't kill themselves! etc etc but that's how repressive regimes have always done it. they don't know any other way.

still holding out for... Syril?? is that really his name? to break good. it looks like he's reached his limit with the Imperial paper-pushing department. he's going to do something loco next episode it's clear.

- storm troopers, the old school kind! they still strike instant terror in me

- even though it focuses on very different sorts of characters there is a star-warsness to certain themes: hope vs fear, techno-minimalism vs organic sloppiness, belief in a cause vs being a gun for hire

- fuckin GHOST DOG

i want to watch rogue one again now but i think it’s actually a pretty different beast? a “movie” with all the compressed energy and relentless pace that implies these days, as opposed to this which is paced more like a 70s tv miniseries

so uh, the gas shower - was that a holocaust reference?

I think it’s definitely intended.

Such an amazing show. The factory floor introduction was intense.

I said out loud “I wonder what they’re making” and my kid said “parts for the Death Star”…

Out of the mouths of babes.

My takeaway from the holding-up bit where the guy wasn’t at his post was that Andor — as indicated brilliantly acted by Luna — is an extremely good observer. Not some super spy nonsense as such, just somebody who is good at thinking on his feet and knowing when to shut up (like does he even have ten lines this episode? astounding). My sense is that he was taking in a lot of quick details almost chaotically but is filing them away, as was more obviously hinted at with the sign-language sequence.

Yes. And his bewilderment at the assembly process was brilliant as well, it made me extremely anxious. But as you say possibly not as helpless as he seems - he’s filing things away for the future.

thx for starting a thread tracer!

reposting my thoughts:

new Andor episode great

the prison stuff gave me a “Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead” vibe but honestly it’s prob just bc its an all white future hell-prison

diego luna is so good, the transportation + arrival scenes he looked legitimately physically scared like he was going to puke at any moment, like when you are so afraid you’re involuntarily twitching

xpost I think it's good to remember that at the start of the series he's already been established at someone who stole a high-level Imperial macguffin to begin with as well as searching around for his sister in skeevier/less 'safe' situations. It's not that he's James Bond as such, but someone who has some earned skills to start with; absolutely he's frustrated, overwhelmed and bewildered at being stuck where he is now on top of being scared he but clearly realizes this isn't the place for a vent or a whine. (It helps too that I think the character gets clearly established at only being easily conversational and earnest as such with people he's already known for years, thus the small circle of his Ferrix crew. Everyone else, he talks only when he has to, and usually only when he absolutely has to.)

it was extraordinarily tense

you’re like “why is everyone taking off their shoes??” just pit-of-the-stomach horror vibes

and “why do those guards have such massive boots”?

the insta-pain device

the realisation of just how many poor fucks there are in this place

the gamification of work

this is marxist materialist star wars and i’m here for it

yeah Ned i rewatched the first few scenes of Rogue One last night and i forgot just how much of a “shoot first, talk later” guy he is. he’s from the Han Solo wing of life, in it for himself, ready to blast anything or anybody he needs to, but where Han could talk the ears off a rock, Andor just does his thing with minimal extras.

I think the whole "where is this person they're not at their post" is planting seeds/foreshadowing. . . just think at some point in this show he's gotta BREAK OUT OF THERE

CRAZY

HOW WILL HE DO IT

Through wisecracks and tomfoolery

the food hose was so ._.

We get a heist and a prison break in the same show.

Also thought the guards thing was to show how intense the security around the work is, and how the whole chain runs on fear and bullying. (at a time in the episode where it creates maximum anxiety for us!) Worked for me, as does pretty much everything in this outstanding show. It’s almost too good for Star Wars.

Loved this too the show has fine momentum now after a little too slow of a start imo. Nice to see Saw (arf).

good role for Andy Serkis

the penal factory was all very THX 1138

It sure was!

Watching this i was very * in a crow t robot voice* “dialogue by david mamet”

the characters for once appear to be driven by human-level motivations - misplaced ambition, jealousy, laziness, spur-of-the-moment thoughtlessness. People actually talking like people, instead of just delivering exposition.

I never found storm troopers scary in the originals, they looked slow and awkward in those white plastic suits. What was terrifying was the droid that almost chokes Cas out--how did they make the wrongness and un-human-ness of that badly proportioned robot SO CHILLING?!

The Ferrix wardribes--mwah. Skarsgard's outerwear in his off-planet buyer disguise, basically an American military parka as adopted by rebels everywhere--mwah! Everything being slate blue and orange--double mwah.

Skarsgard's failed negotiation with Forest Whitaker told us a lot about the precarity of the elements he's trying to bring together!! All crazy in their own way and each other's worst enemies...except for the Empire.

I really like it. Everything looks so good and not cheap or shoddy.

I said out loud “I wonder what they’re making” and my kid said “parts for the Death Star”…

― Spencer Chow, Thursday, October 27, 2022 3:57 AM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

YOOOOOO I was like THIS IS ALL PART OF THEIR WAR MACHINE.

I was thinking TIE fighter parts, but Death Star makes more sense. I'm still holding to my assessment that this is 100% based on the discussion from Clerks about all the dead Death Star contractors in ROTJ.

What was terrifying was the droid that almost chokes Cas out--how did they make the wrongness and un-human-ness of that badly proportioned robot SO CHILLING?!

I thought this bit was hilarious, because it deliberately makes you think of the same model Imperial droid that Cas owns (and reprogrammed) in Rogue One, except most definitely not as lovable or funny. kind of the opposite of the fan-servicey moments we usually get when we see a familiar character in these shows.  

show needs more aliens though. what, no twi'leks or rodians in imperial prison?

I hate Cyril's manipulative, grasping mom so much. I think that means she's a great character lol. You can really feel how growing up in her shadow, under her power, would mal-form you into something that would look unremarkable (family, loyalty, paying debts owed) but be so wrong inside.

Happy Andor day everyone!

This was the least remarkable and possibly talkiest episode so far (!) and still quite tense in places.

kind of breaks the whole 3 episode arc model, I was ready for some wild escape action

Still a great episode though. Andy Serkis was excellent and guessing the escape action will all kick off next week

It's worth taking a few episodes to build up the escape. Loved the horrifying sound being described to Bix as something we ourselves are spared - and Cyril's Mom's expression when he told her he'd been promoted to name but two of many things.

Denise geogh smash me in the head w a hammer pls

this was really her episode. i thought she was extraordinary. performance of the series imo.

She's so devious, but Mon Mothma has my heart, and it makes total sense that glammed up Vel is part of the family.

Good stuff once more.

i love the way gough does that snarly-sneer at cyril while putting him in his place, she’s so awesome

and the sound editing when they from bix screaming into the drill in the prison workroom was ~chef’s kiss~ so good

cannot say how much i love the actress playing cyril’s mum, more insidious and unsettling than the manipulative-mum-stock-standard - even her tone is somewhat surprising.

great episode

*when they CUT from bix

How long is the series. I assumed it would be either 8 or 10 episodes judging from other things. So is the next one season finale and filled with cliffhangers or are things working up to a temporary at least denouement.
We do know the eventual end anyway already unless that had a miraculous intercession or something.

12 eps for this season

and according to imdb, 12 episodes for the next :)

you're telling me I might have to work with CRIMINALS?!

the entire scene of Mon Mothma giving an impassioned speech only for someone to cut the mic of anyone agreeing with her followed by her continued reticence was some good character development (or lack thereof)

can't believe the Empire plays people the Tim Treadwell tapes from Grizzly Man--didn't Werner Herzog remind us to never listen to the tapes

http://richardhoefer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/honestwithme-1024x573.png

Meero is just the best. So believably compromised and desperate. Her expressions are a tour de force at times, just a flicker here and there which hint at what’s hidden.

She's great. Took a while to realize where I'd seen her, she had a small but good role in Under the Banner of Heaven. Very different show than Andor.

how is meero “compromised”? am i forgetting something? in many ways she seems like a successful version of syril - a true believer

Idk how she literally makes one muscle in her cheek twitch when she’s pissed at Syril but it was masterful.

Yeah that was an astounding moment.

i guess the show is called Andor so this can’t happen but it would be so sick if the show just continued right up to the events at the climax of Star Wars ep IV but from the non-Skywalker point of view

xxp Tracer I meant compromised as a human being

I have wondered if Jyn Erso will show up at some point. Maybe we can learn why she was arrested.

I recently rewatched ROGUE ONE from my enthusiasm for this show, and man she is bad for 70-80% of her screen time. The “Stardust” thing made me groan out loud a few times.

matkkkk gotcha

cosine rogue one cringe factor

ha rogue one is probably my fav star wars

i've love to see her again! i thought she was perfect "Star Wars"-typing

I’d be interested to see her in the lowkey gritty vibe of this show. There were flashes of excellence in RO but a much higher cheese quotient than here. (I will admit I loved the robot snark tho.)

RO is such a comfort movie for me at this point. Possibly the Star War I rewatch the most.

There is a lot to enjoy, the settings and the world building are gorgeous and it’s mercifully low on fan service.

the last hour is amazing

feel like I’m saying this every week but… it’s another incredible episode

Stellan Skarsgard and Andy Serkis. That is all.

This. Fucking. Show.

AAAHHHHHH!!

holy hell. television, eh?

that was just incredible. that was the most thrilling hour of SF i can remember having watched in a good long time. as good as the best expanse episodes. better? mon mothma looks fly as hell in her meeting with Dirk Skelton or whatever the “gentleman thug” financier guy’s name is. he lives up to his billing by the way. they really teased him last episode. would it suit me if he chewed the scenery a bit more? it would. it’s just a whiff of menace and violence to him rather than the whole bottle but it’s delicious nonetheless

the class and labor politics of this show are right out in plain sight and it’s fuckin rad!! the whole prison break was just.. i mean the heist was alright but this was next level in terms of ratcheting up the intensity. so many things came together. watching serkis come around is so gratifying. and hey even dave matthews lookin motherfucker gets to shoot a few guards. andor and serkis’ invasion of the central sanctum of the empire prison control room tense as fuuuuck. (absolutely incredible art direction for the on that btw). and you know what? a lot of dudes died. like a lot of dudes. it’s a massacre.

finally clocked that this is where the rebels get their colors?!?? this is why they wear orange and white in a new hope!! this prison break has to be one of the foundational events of the rebellion. they’re like “we are all those prisoners.” “if we can fight half as hard as we’ve been working we’ll be out in no time”

“axis” lookin like darth vader, talking about using the tools of the empire to defeat them, the ends justifying the means - the “dark side” one might say

fuckin a!

the choice that the banker offers mon mothma echoes the kind of choices skarsgard is talking about in his speech to the spy - and i think mothma’s so shaken up by it because she realises that there’s a version of her who makes that deal

The moment from Rogue One, which didn’t do a great job of selling the schism between those who already accepted that open, bloody rebellion was necessary and those that were still vacillating, had to be the departure of Admiral Raddus

An entire earlier scene where they were diplomatically debating whether they’d do this Scarif mission or if it was too much of a risk. Then, the rogues send a signal that they’ve got the goods and they’re stuck. I think it was Mon Mothma who was like “oh, we have to get word to Admiral Raddus!” and some is like, ma’am, Raddus left five minutes ago after we got the call

I was half expecting Skarsgard to reveal he's a sith lord, it's possible this may yet happen.

he does not speak in absolutes

Great but I don’t think it matches the expanse at its best if I have to compare. Luckily I can have them both!

i think mothma’s so shaken up by it because she realises that there’s a version of her who makes that deal

I think she still might? perhaps it’s why we don’t see her family again in other stories

I was wondering earlier if her daughter might be an Imperial spy, given the way she seemed to randomly show up in the middle of Mothma’s conversations with Tay, but maybe it was just setting up this subplot

i also rewatched Rogue One because of this show and am enjoying the callbacks and parallels

#Andor spoilers

“CLIMB” pic.twitter.com/sRHcRsCmWE

— Phillip✨// ANDOR ERA🤞🏾(RIP Westworld😩) (@thegreattwig25) November 9, 2022

#andor spoilers
cassian's words hold so much weight pic.twitter.com/QGqKzeM2Mf

— kaytuesso (@jeronandor) November 9, 2022

omg great ep!!
also ahhh that final speech was so dope!
that was some tears in the rain shit. skarsgard killed that delivery ugh i love it.

Yeah the whole episode but Jesus H that scene. I was literally leaning forward for it. I even said out loud that might be the best scene as such in the past thirty years of everything/anything Star Wars and I might well stand by that.

my favorite thing about this show is that it doesn't just depict a violent rebellion. it advocates for violent rebellion.

and the "espionage will corrode your soul" b story was pretty good this week. not le carre good, but pretty good!

just an insane episode of tv. it takes in everything from that instantly legendary speech of luthen’s (in the most star wars-y, windswept, gantry shaft setting imaginable??) to the hoity toity doings of coruscant to the question of how long it will take to saw through a pipe

"Power doesn't panic"

that beautiful shot from above of the prisoners swimming away from the jailhouse that just happens to be shaped like the empire insignia

the three moons rising right after luthen's "I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see"

the unimaginableness of freedom - when the other prisoners are told they’re free, that they should come and join and use what they can they don’t immediately do it, they’re wary, confused, can’t process it

And let's not forget "Can't swim" 💔

oh i mean.. just fucking perfect. his journey. the tragedy of it. but the success of it too. "the way i look at it, i'm already dead". andor has the fire. he finally fires up kino, but it's a process. it's more than just one moment of decision. that's the way with this show. things take a long time. the rebellion is a long fucking march. so many sacrifices. so many stories swallowed up in the larger violence. you have to stick with it. the water pipe. turning kino. andor's with him every step of the way. until that point.

i mean i know fanboys are gushing about this show all over twitter etc but fuck it, it's deserved this time

I just watched Rogue One for the second time--I never re-watched it after the first time because I don't like things that make me feel bad/sad but I had completely forgotten how good it is. Damn. It interlocks so well with Andor and makes me understand way more than I did before.

he finally fires up kino, but it's a process. it's more than just one moment of decision

Yessss, the long strategic process is telegraphed so well. Like one step is convincing Kino that no one is listening, that they're safe to communicate, breaking the hold of terror of the overseers. And the jailers unknowingly provide another step by fucking with peoples' "days remaining" because once that faint hope is gone, the prisoners have nothing to lose.

Tbh I thought the prison was in space, I've been reading a couple of books lately about prison worlds and I forgot they could get out of the jail onto a planet lol.

It wasn't entirely clear where it was or what they'd be able to do once they got to the top!

it seems silly unrealistic that nobody's listening but whatever. because that's a huge part of the terror of totalitarianism in my brain. i mean if robots are ai in that space, they don't have robots listening? starting to think this star wars thing is not very realistic etc.

oh yeah, i thought it was in space, too! enjoying the show a lot.

Wait until you find out about the space wizards xp

Well there aren't any droids there in the prison. Not a one! Which is different for Star Wars, definitely.

and once again, everyone is humanoid

surely there should be some Bothans and Mon Calamari in lockdown too

They really haven't featured any AI-type stuff, have they? I feel like the whole SW universe is unrelentingly human, the good and the bad. Even the droids are basically "people" with peculiarities. It's not really about the robots, is it, it's about humanity. What strikes me about the prison is, it's so industrialized that they've almost erased the need for human control, it's almost fully automated, but that also ends up being it's weakness.

they probably just killed the non-humans or sent them to an even heavier labor camp

we know Bothans are always the first to be sacrificed for the cause

iirc lucasfilm has an internal reference doc that states all star wars tech should tie to the 1950s. in other words, it's retrofuturism. one quibble about andor is the presence of ipads and bluetooth earpieces (comlinks are the preferred way to communicate, and should be assembled out of a gilette venus razor.)

...still thinking...the Empire is so fucking tightfisted and capitalist that they reduced their extremely important (in production capacity terms) labor prison to an absolute skeleton staff (good job whoever was wondering why that first scene was in there about the guard being late--was it tracer? you have such a good ear for these things) presumably to put their human capital elsewhere while employing as few people as possible. Whoops! Turns out that was a bad idea, who could possibly have seen it coming etc

Also thinking about how Riker's Island has 9000+ prison guards and only 5500 people imprisoned there...mostly due to the guards having a union, which they mutate into a weapon to hurt & kill inmates (often enough just from neglect despite their overwhelming numbers). The specific evil of the Empire is that it's anti-human, clinical, ruthlessly "efficient," but there are plenty of other kinds of evil.

The stretcher for the dead guy was a droid, btw

Was the stretcher per se a droid or just a floating tray? (I'm sure there's something out there somewhere definitive about this and I refuse to acknowledge it.)

this is entirely self-invented, but i wondered why serkis/kino agreed to go along with the plan if he knew he couldn't swim? but then you start to think how kino's probably been in there for years and years, and has probably forgotten what the planet looks like outside the prison. he probably only got the one glimpse when he was first brought there, and that memory may have been shocked out of him (literally).

Also I think a lesser theme of the show is how *inefficient* repression is, you need so much resourcing and labour in the form of police. Far better to get the people themselves to do it for you a la late capitalism.

xxp it had a wee head with an eye looking around at the front, it was a surprise in the droid free environment.

I really admire whosever call it was during the production to say OK, we’re not gonna have aliens all over. I’ve heard a fair few complaints but it would constantly distract from the intensity of the drama (hey it’s that species from the diner in episode III) and means their budget went on settings and practical effects, which has been thrillingly convincing and immersive. And so imaginative - the terror of the prison is achieved with a few dozen red LEDs, some elaborate sneakers and hands-on-heads.

absolutely best set design

So good. I love the simplicity/neutrality of the cells without bars or furniture, with nothing that can be used for anything, not even blankets! Just all function.

The workroom bits are not really...believable. They don't throw those parts around or wrench on things with any of the smoothness or physical confidence that comes from repetition. And nothing visibly changes any time they say "We have to speed up! Work faster!" and then go just as slowly & clumsily as before. But you can't have everything.

Yes, everyone is surprisingly fully limbed and digited for a place where speed is so highly prized. I'd have pictured a lot of minor crush injuries and amputations. But it's not a big deal.

and once again, everyone is humanoid

I assumed that was to do with the machinery, the feeding, the overall makeup of the prison. Easier to just have a single species in it, I'd imagine?

good use of aliens as lonni makes his way further and further underground into the coruscant underbelly

These are the prequels I wanted, not six hours of “well the Jedi had a COUNCIL and a TEMPLE” and other tedium we already knew.

has it ever been mentioned explicitly that the Empire are human supremacists? Makes sense they would have segregated prisons too, I suppose

that's been a part of star wars lore for as long as I remember

the first couple films imply that other species are relegated to the outskirts of the galaxy

later films not so much

Oh shit I just realized Felicity Jones (in Rogue One) ISN'T the same person as Amiee Lou Wood (from Sex Education, among other things).

did the anti droid sentiment expressed in the original film ever get explored further?

in orbit otm about the unconvincingness of the work on the factory floor. we’ve all seen enough oil rigger tiktoks by now to know what it looks like when somebody can do a highly demanding physically repetitive job in their sleep. trishyb also otm - the whole thing about “hands away!” clearly instituted after one too many dismemberments but i was sure we’d see at least one

has it ever been mentioned explicitly that the Empire are human supremacists? Makes sense they would have segregated prisons too, I suppose

― Roz, Thursday, November 10, 2022 12:10 PM (eighteen minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

that's been a part of star wars lore for as long as I remember

― 龜, Thursday, November 10, 2022 12:11 PM (eighteen minutes ago)

oh right, duh, thrawn - critical to his backstory that he is the lone non-human grand admiral in the imperial fleet.

although i dunno if thrawn is now just a 'legend' or if he's been incorporated into the canon.

ah thanks. i figured there was prob something like that but Ive never read any of the novels

Diego Luna doesn’t get the big monologues but I’ve really appreciated his performance throughout - especially in the prev couple of episodes, where he’s not doing much other than observing, listening, planning, nudging.

It’s kind of fascinating to have as a lead character someone who isn’t shown to be a leader as such, and who wants to avoid doing anything really, but he can’t seem to help himself from inspiring others to lead and to act. Shit gets done when Andor’s around.

These are the prequels I wanted, not six hours of “well the Jedi had a COUNCIL and a TEMPLE” and other tedium we already knew.

Definitely. I can't believe I've been suckered back into this stupid universe and all it took was a commitment to compelling storytelling in place of tediously backfilling every second of every original character's life.

who wants to avoid doing anything really, but he can’t seem to help himself from inspiring others to lead and to act. Shit gets done when Andor’s around.

I love how annoyed he always is about it. "Oh ffs give me that revolution if you can't start it yourself. Why do I always...stop doing that, it won't work. Give it here."

although i dunno if thrawn is now just a 'legend' or if he's been incorporated into the canon.

Oh he's been in for years; Rebels was always explicitly canon and he was a running character over a good chunk of that, and Ahsoka specifically namedrops him at the end of her debut appearance in The Mandalorian. Timothy Zahn was the surprising factor: having introduced Thrawn in novels that were then made 'legends' he went right ahead and wrote a whole new trilogy of them now in canon.

Side note but I love Timothy Zahn and I find his brief series about elite "Blackcollar" warriors waging a violent rebellion on Earth against an occupying alien force to be very instructive in thinking about how Jedis are hunted/in hiding.

i'm well past my star wars expanded universe reading years but maybe i'll pick up some of these new thrawn novels! xp

Worth a read

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/andor-explained-season-1-finale-season-2-preview-1234626573/

Which, among other things, has this immediately relevant passage for this thread:

One of the directors said that you had a mandate, which isn’t surprising to anyone who’s been watching this show to keep the droids and aliens at the margins, in the background. Tell me about that.

I’ve heard that. I think We’ll be addressing some of that as we go along a little bit more. Sometimes it’s problematic in storytelling, where you can’t just introduce a character. You have to introduce, all their plumbing and all their health issues. People said, Why didn’t you have aliens in Narcina Five [where Andor is imprisoned]? You see the the five facilities that are in that lake there, so it’s easy for me to imagine that there’s another one that’s all aliens. But what are the mechanics of what you can do and build and hat would the bathroom be like on the factory floor? I don’t even really know. You get into a bunch of other issues that become just a little bit too complicated sometimes to go into. But we will be doing more of that as we go along.

And I understand that there’s some people that feel that’s been shaded slightly, but that’s probably the primary reason. It adds a level of complexity and it adds a level of political complexity, but we will be going there. Look, we’re going all the way to Rogue One. There’s a lot of that coming up.

I'm so excited for next week now, I'm practically HUMMING.

Ned--you of all people I wouldn't be surprised to learn had read Zahn's Blackcollar books--have you? I was obsessed w them as a younger person. It was such an interesting world that it felt like he never got to build out with the alien invasion. Maybe he did it with the SW books instead?

Sadly I did not read them; I knew the name when he first fired up for SW writing but that was about it. But I'm intrigued a bit now.

I assumed the lack of aliens could be explained as differences in circadian rhythms or some species being immune to electricity and the empire not having to build toilets that accomodate both wookies and ewoks. But it's also probably a lot cheaper to hire 50 humans than to CGI 50 different species in the backgrounds.

Also everyone in the galaxy to live in rustic outpost villages or brutalist apartments or hovels in the desert or clean industrial places or oppulent mansions; I really want to some characters who live in a suburban split level on coruscant

Hilarious that Gilroy mentions that Clerks scene

did the anti droid sentiment expressed in the original film ever get explored further?

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Thursday, November 10, 2022 12:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I always just assumed (after the fact of the prequels) that it was because of the droid armies used in the Clone Wars, but contemporaneously with the original films they didn't really get into it.

Diego Luna doesn’t get the big monologues but I’ve really appreciated his performance throughout - especially in the prev couple of episodes, where he’s not doing much other than observing, listening, planning, nudging.

It’s kind of fascinating to have as a lead character someone who isn’t shown to be a leader as such, and who wants to avoid doing anything really, but he can’t seem to help himself from inspiring others to lead and to act. Shit gets done when Andor’s around.

much thx for that Rolling Stone interview link, Ned

yeah that RS gilroy interview was great

Strongly suggest reading this one from him as well

https://scriptmag.com/interviews-features/tony-gilroy-checks-in-after-10-episodes-of-andor

Plus this from the producer and one of the key writers:

https://gizmodo.com/star-wars-andor-interviews-writer-producer-disney-1849763876

I love that he gives Babylon Berlin a shout, not enough people have watched that show

babylon berlin fucking rules fyi

It's amazing, although I found it amusing he pointed to how they managed the budget. I'm pretty sure BB was the most expensive European TV series ever made at the time.

I'd only vaguely heard of it... I should give it a shot

man Luthen's ship & getaway, Cassian at the end, new aliens that remind me of Stoors. . .

don't care/get the Mon Mothma stuff, the Cassian's mom stuff, but it def. deepens the story. . . am eager for more of this. Was kind of thinking how the Mandalorian was ok at first, but was more a "trial" for SW, can we do a SW live action TV show and have it be good. . . anyway this is fantastic and I will def rewatch

i’m PISSED that this was originally envisioned as five seasons, each covering a year’s worth of diegetic time, and the next four seasons are being squashed into one.. but with actors of this caliber (and demand) i guess it’s hard to get people to block out 5 years of their working life to something

I'm afraid to watch because then it will be over for a whole nother week and I will just want to be watching it for the first time AGAIN.

I can play anything on Disney+ right now exCEPT the new Andor episode which just stalls three seconds in. Make it make sense.

did you get it sorted nashwan?

am i understanding right that andor’s partner in crime, currently being tortured by the empire, is being asked if krieger is “axis”?

yup. they’re asking her if Krieger was her contact and, depending on what she says and how the ISB trap plays out, things could go several ways

Just ask the axis

god the fucking STAKES now are knife-edge in almost every scene, it’s so exciting & scary

also Andor losing his mum makes an interesting point in his journey to the diehard rebel we see in Rogue One … i love the slow progression, like stones slowly added to the jar of who he is becoming … more subtle than expected but v powerful

It’a a hell of a thing. Next week will be even more so. Phew.

grieving droid was rather heartbreaking

i thought it was absurd, in that i guess droids would be doing lots of things other than droiding if this was a known ai property of droids. and just now i sadly am distracted at the thought of the emotional life of sw universe droids as a thing, and i am V SURE it's a thing as all things in sw are things. good show

R2-D2 and C3PO definitely showed a variety of emotions and seemed attached to their owners as well, and there was the whole thing about droids agitating for liberty in SOLO.

are there any properties that really focus on the droid community. they could call it i robot. or we robots

Droids!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Droids

presumably droids have different types of emotional AI depending on what they’re for. B2EMO (…) seems kind of like a companionship droid? so it makes sense that he’d grieve

did you get it sorted nashwan?

no and it was awful I had to watch thru macbook to tv - another one for the backward steps tech thread

episode p much made up for it tho - skarsgard stratospheric skirmish <3

it was v good

the stormtroopers standing at attention the entire time was hilarious for some reason. nameless empire twits astride massive battleships getting outwitted by rebel skunk tech will never not be immensely gratifying and this was an excellent addition to the canon

i love that the basic concept of Empire middle-managers has remain unchanged since the first star wars movie: always pass-agg perma-irritated pasty British dudes, i love it so much

that was a cool scene, although it made me wonder how he's the only person who has giant spaceship lightsaber attachments

He literally owns a shop that specialises in rare weapons and collectibles, and is in regular contact with sources of stolen Empire tech!

Yeah trying to guess the scope of Luthan’s omniscience and access and arms is really fun. Skarsgård’s good at shlub/badass transformation

I liked the plot device of having the weapon charging What kind of countermeasure is charging? Is it going to be ready in time? Calibrating tractor force!

Another fine example of this show only telling you what you need to know when you need to know it (and if they can get away with showing it in context, even better -- my moment from last night might have been how Genevieve O'Reilly said everything in the conversation with Vel with just a very subtle look on her face at one point).

i didnt recognize Vel at first with her glam studio-54 makeover

Another great episode.
But about Luthen’s tricked out ship… I feel like the lightsaber on wings thing is rather impractical. You’d need those two ships flying right at you in a very specific way… why wouldn’t they just shoot him instead of flying past him on either side?!

It's a v minor detail but what's the deal with Andor's place on Niamos, where there's a different random alien each time he visits and he keeps his important secret things in a visible and easy but awkward to access box?

yeah that was very dream logic-ish

i assumed that snoozing tentacle thing was like a lodger?

i loooved the alien-shaped beach umbrellas

apparently those beach scenes were filmed near blackpool lol

The round building you see at the resort is reminiscent of a real one somewhere like Odessa I think.

I was wondering why there were no feds there this time? Maybe it was like 5am?

i assumed that snoozing tentacle thing was like a lodger?

I thought it was one of the fishers who brought them there, maybe sleeping off gratitude pints before heading off again. Husband assures me this wasn't the case. I still like it as an idea, though, and will never rewatch too closely so I can't be proved wrong.

Yeah it's just an AirB&B they both rented at different times and Andor broke in to get the thing.

ok that does make sense. i feel like there's quite a lot deliberately elided in this show, the viewer has to put in a bit of effort to join the dots. which is fine!

I feel like the lightsaber on wings thing is rather impractical. You’d need those two ships flying right at you in a very specific way

didn't he do a kind of barrel roll? that could be pretty effective but yeah they have to be right next to your ship for it to do anything, kind of weird

i still said "whoa" when it happened though

xp

I thought it was some tentacle alien sleeping with the girlfriend from before and they were knocked out after some hard partying. The big box of cash just sitting there untouched was rather strange though.

I think the same snoozing-tentacles thing was in an early scene in Rogue One too - maybe when Jyn was in the prison transport truck.
Incidentally I assume Jyn isn't with Saw Gerrera because it's post whatever situation he abandoned her in. (I recently rewatched RO rather than having a deep knowledge of the lore.)

Rewatching Rogue One for the first time in a while this exchange really jumps out even more now

Chirrut: "We've been in worse cages than this one."
Andor: "This is a first for me."

The Auralnauts strike again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9Pccq0DZVc

v good

nice. very nice.

Wow the cuts and sdtrk and voiceover and sequencing are perfect. the typeface on the text is _not quite right_ imo.

i think it's underbolded or whatever the correct word for that is

nice

seems more 80’s than 70’s to me but still really well done!

Just a heads up that there's a short post credits scene in the finale that confirms what some people thought upthread

motherfucker headbutted a stormtrooper

Was just about to point out the post credits thing. Saw how much left on the file I was watching so thought it probably indicated a further scene. & seemed to be a lot of credits so probably not something everybody was going to sit through to check.
See somebody else has mentioned it though.

"remember this. try." >>>>> "do or do not. there is no try."

so many good bits. space flutes! giant Maarva hologram inspiring an entire town. B2EMO making everybody be too emo. stormtrooper getting kicked out of the bell tower. mon mothma's palpable self-loathing as she sacrifices both her husband and her daughter for the rebellion (while still looking fantastic as fuck).

also huge lols @ the entire sequence of dedra getting hit by a rock, dragged by the crowd, rescued by Syril, and then sharing an awkward but undeniable -moment- with him - just excellent TV

Yeah, hell of a way to wrap it up. For now, obv.

My secret wish is that with Iger back he calls up Ms. Kennedy and goes "Yeah, ask Tony to make it a full five seasons."

Interviews with Gilroy and Luna

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-season-2-post-credits-scene-tony-gilroy-1235268962/

https://www.vulture.com/article/diego-luna-on-andor-interview-finale-narkina-prison-break.html

Plus another Gilroy interview

https://www.vulture.com/article/andor-tony-gilroy-finale-interview.html

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

caught up in the show and read the whole thread. good posts folks.

gonna think some more but i do want to point out that i was sure that meero and syril were gonna make out

I really wanted it to happen

those two crazy brownshirts just belong together

cyril was sure too lmao

he was so eerily calm!

Man this was great. I liked Rogue One but felt it would have been better as a miniseries to develop the characters more, and Andor was pretty much that

love that retro intro.

also, had no clue there was a post credit scene; but i assumed thats what the components were for.

WAIT A MINUTE have there been post-credit scenes all along?!??

Just went back and watched it: awwww yeeeeeeah.

i think just that one.

"Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death!"

just burned through this whole series in about 3 days and what a great Star War - absolutely fuckin ruled

there were moments when that woozy synth soundtrack felt like it was consciously informed by Boards of Canada? esp on the holidy planet... but anyway that memorydelica vibe was perfect for a show that took my fondest sense memories of 70s/80s science fiction and reworked them in a way that managed to feel totally contemporary

definitely this franchise is best when it gets away from the old characters - although why does this feel so much more urgent than Kenobi did? we know the outcome here too, but for some reason it's a much more compelling ride

Honestly I think part of it lies with the fact that for all that certain key characters obv make it at least to Rogue One there was a real feeling that anyone could die at any point. (Obviously accentuated by the heist sequence in particular.) I admit to mild surprise that there weren't more characters similarly gone in the final episode, but I'll be interested to see where they all go in the second season.

As for your burn through in three days approach, that's what my mom wants to do around Christmas (in that I have a Roku stick I'll bring -- she had a full setup before but got frustrated with it so this is the standin). I'll be happy to fully rewatch that way and as she prefers having subtitles on that'll help me catch bits of dialogue I missed myself.

xp Yeah Britell's score was excellent. I like his work on Succession but this was a tier up

Oh I didn’t know it was the same guy as Succession! Nice.

At times this show reminded me slightly of The Sandbaggers (peerless UK 1980s spy series which has its own thread here somewhere I think) - partly Luthen’s “what it takes” morality I guess, but also the ISB roundtable scenes - something about the brutal decision-making of behind-the-scenes manipulators - and the way we saw this play out in the field. Excellent stuff.

Also a high quotient of English character actors, lol.

Spencer Chow has me wanting to see Star Wars does Slacker now.

Good interview with Denis Gough

https://www.empireonline.com/tv/features/andor-denise-gough-interview-building-star-wars-villain-dedra-meero/

(Fiona Shaw's original line was "Fuck the Empire.")

DENISE Gough I should say. Anyway.

In Gough’s own words? “I am going to Dedra the fuck out of the second season,”

I watched Rogue One again. It’s a pretty good, straightforward action movie. The feature film mechanics demand that certain beats be hit, and they are dutifully hit, but there’s not a lot going on thematically, or with the characters either. Jyn’s not necessary for the story once she gets her dad’s holo-message from Ghost Dog. The “don’t choke on your aspirations” scene isn’t needed but we do get those great shots of Vader’s lair. And, it’s been said before but the CGI Cushing and the CGI Fisher are ABYSMAL, and will of course only stick out more as the passing years bring advances to artificial facial movement etc. I’ve been banging this drum since the prequels but animated CGI human faces just don’t look right, they never have - I mean, they’re not even in the ballpark. If you isolated a still, maybe it could pass, but once they start trying to move it around it’s sub-Red Dead Redemption territory. And this is Star Wars! In 4K! How people think this is acceptable is just wild to me. Anyway I sincerely hope that some day somebody does a “special edition” of this shit to fix it. It’s embarrassing.

Anyway I guess you can see the seeds of some of Andor’s themes here: sacrifice, the ends justifying the means, the petty power squabbles among the Empire’s sub-Vader captaincy.

I just keep telling myself that Mon Mothma has to survive Andor bc she's in Rogue One.

some good content

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-made-andor-so-good
https://newrepublic.com/article/169206/grown-up-art-andor

xp among other things!

CGI Cushing and the CGI Fisher are ABYSMAL, and will of course only stick out more as the passing years bring advances to artificial facial movement etc.

I totally agree with you, and it annoys me even further that versions of these films/shows are so fluid and impermanent now that they will just change it and tweak it in the future as the tech improves. But that whole last section really let down the film for me.

The whole battle scene?

Well, any bit that they were in. And then as soon as I realized how precisely they were going to join everything up, I got annoyed, because it all felt very DO YOU SEE, and because it irritates me that there isn't a frame or a word of dialogue in original Star Wars that hasn't been picked over and spun off and explained and retconned and fundamentally had all the enjoyment sucked out of it. For me, anyway.

I felt a tiny twinge of that in the post-credits scene in Andor. Like, we all got it. You don't need to specifically show it to us.

Yeah, agreed.

For some reason this time around it came home to me just how neatly the end of Rogue One lines up with the beginning of Star Wars. Leia has the plans, Vader is already chasing down hapless rebels and wrecking shop.

Yes, the fact that Star Wars presumably starts minutes after the end of Rogue One, that Princess Leia was very obviously fleeing the scene of the first massive space battle between the empire and rebels, and that the death star was already used to blow up Jedha and Scarif, all this causes a lot of plot points in Star Wars to retroactively make far less sense.

I'm just bummed with the knowledge that there's also a second, already functioning, death star on the way, so like, who cares what any of these people did? Everyone from Mads down to to blind force guy. Pointless.

Moodles what makes less sense?

dan - that Fascism must be defeated over and over again seems like a pretty valid message

xposts -- Huh. Honestly I've been thinking the opposite! Not in a oh-how-neat-all-the-points-line-up way, but (quite literally and before I checked this latest group of posts just now), earlier this morning on my walk I was turning over a bit how a universe works -- and actually does work -- where there's a hell of a lot of intensity and layers going on for years per the overall Andor plans and meantime at the same time there's a pilot and his shaggy copilot out there just smuggling and trying to get on with it and there's a teenage farmboy feeling like he's stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do except get out somehow, and the only way that even seems possible to him is the military. And that sounds like...life? It's no longer a singular vision and will never be again but as a syncretic series of intersections and creative decisions to look at the universe in different ways and from different points of view (as it were), I'm liking more and more how this is all being built out.

As for caring for what anyone did, per Dan's point...well this is going to sound unnecessarily heavy and weird to bring up and quite obviously I'm not trying to equate anything here but fuck it: the whole reason why I got my library job after realizing I was done with grad school was because someone at said school library had to take a leave of absence due to health issues; from there I've had my over quarter century career as such in the field. Said person was able to briefly come back in another role but just a year or two later she passed. So her personal tragedy -- she wasn't much older than me and left a husband behind -- was also my benefit. You don't know the future, you just go forward and what actions and legacies you leave behind, however accidentally or cut short, have an impact. Their stories aren't any less of value.

xp

The whole "we're on a diplomatic mission from Alderaan" BS, like no we literally just saw you fleeing the scene of a massive space battle.

Then testing out the death star on Alderaan, and the shock that it can blow up a planet when everyone had already just witnessed it doing exactly this with Scarif.

I dunno re the shock point. Luke Han et al are but I'm guessing they didn't know anything about (say) an isolated and literally shielded off from everything else military intelligence base getting partially torched. And if anything Leia doesn't seem shocked at the idea of Alderaan getting destroyed; when Tarkin tells her it's the target she knows damn well what's about to happen.

scarif wasn't blown up as a planet, just the imperial base was annihilated (same as the temple on jeddah)

They somehow revisit Jedha in the comics and it’s basically an asteroid with an atmosphere that’s dissipating. One of those planets like Cassian’s home world that was strip mined and mostly depopulated so the story about it being a mining disaster might stick

Scarif’s just a garrison and data vault far away from any population and, again, they just use a single reactor blast to take out the base. Alderaan was a sovereign, fully-populated planet not under direct Imperial control and they did the first full-scale Death Star blast on it.

As Luthen and others mentioned on Andor, by doing small scale atrocities all over the place, the Empire had deniability for any one incident by making these things the norm. Destroying an entire populated planet? It’s on.

I watched Rogue One again. It’s a pretty good, straightforward action movie. The feature film mechanics demand that certain beats be hit, and they are dutifully hit, but there’s not a lot going on thematically, or with the characters either. Jyn’s not necessary for the story once she gets her dad’s holo-message from Ghost Dog. The “don’t choke on your aspirations” scene isn’t needed but we do get those great shots of Vader’s lair. And, it’s been said before but the CGI Cushing and the CGI Fisher are ABYSMAL, and will of course only stick out more as the passing years bring advances to artificial facial movement etc. I’ve been banging this drum since the prequels but animated CGI human faces just don’t look right, they never have - I mean, they’re not even in the ballpark. If you isolated a still, maybe it could pass, but once they start trying to move it around it’s sub-Red Dead Redemption territory. And this is Star Wars! In 4K! How people think this is acceptable is just wild to me. Anyway I sincerely hope that some day somebody does a “special edition” of this shit to fix it. It’s embarrassing.

Anyway I guess you can see the seeds of some of Andor’s themes here: sacrifice, the ends justifying the means, the petty power squabbles among the Empire’s sub-Vader captaincy.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, December 2, 2022 1:32 PM (yesterday)

andor made me rewatch rogue one recently too - i liked it a lot the first time around but couldn't have told you anything at all about andor or jyn, it's been nice watching with the backfill on andor. i started reading about how gilroy saved the production - apparently, this being disney they were going to have andor and jyn and maybe a few others find a way to get off the planet before the death star blows up the base, but that seemed too ridiculous even for disney, so they parachuted gilroy in who said everybody must die, which in retrospect is obviously the right choice, you're allowed to have sad endings even in star wars thanks to empire, it sets up an appropriate low point for hope similar to empire/jedi. (you can see the evolution of the movie in the various trailers - the initial teaser has jyn saying "this is a rebellion isn't it? well i rebel", a shot of a tie fighter pulling level with the satellite control tower, some other stuff, there are plenty of nerd breakdowns online that take you through all the shots that eventually were cut). i would have loved to know if our intro to andor in rogue one, where he shoots his own informant, was a gilroy reshoot - feels like it must be given the twinning in the opening scene of andor, doesn't it?

cgi tarkin/leia are obviously bad, but i don't mind because this is star wars after all, lucasfilm's mandate is to be on the cutting edge of sfx even if it's bad. watching light and magic, the disney doc on ILM really brought home for me that star wars above all else is basically a george lucas sfx skunkworks, he never really cared about the story (hence offloading that to campbell) he just needed a frame to hang his sfx shots on. you take the good with the bad here, like his endless revisionism and his decision to move to a full digital workstream for the prequels when everybody else was still on 35mm.

Yes, the fact that Star Wars presumably starts minutes after the end of Rogue One, that Princess Leia was very obviously fleeing the scene of the first massive space battle between the empire and rebels, and that the death star was already used to blow up Jedha and Scarif, all this causes a lot of plot points in Star Wars to retroactively make far less sense.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Saturday, December 3, 2022 10:45 AM (two hours ago)

i hate this too and feel like i have a pretty strong instinct for retcons but i think rogue one charmed me enough to allow me to overlook anything here. obi-wan is much worse in that regard imo, young luke gets chased by a sith lord (who he miraculously never sees so he never knows she's actually a sith lord?) as a kid, but somehow forgets all that to become a very bored teenager looking to get off tattooine by episode 4? it's bad

the parts of rogue one that makes me itchy is really just the sense of scale / sfx, like there was just this giant epic space battle above scarif but then a few days later you're down to just a few squadrons of snub fighters against the same number of TIEs (the death star couldn't hold any more than that?) and they move slow as molasses on screen. but honestly i had that same feeling as a kid between hope and jedi, the space battle above endor was just so much more epic.

i'd love to see the trench run redone with modern sfx, i'm sure george would too.

They made it clear in the 77 movie that the snub fighters were considered no threat at all until they decided to eliminate the small chance of danger by dogfighting them. Vader had an inkling there was something up but without knowing the built in flaw, the risk wasn’t apparent.
They already CGIed it more than necessary in the special ed, there would be nothing gained and much lost by going fully synthetic imo.

xp

it's true, Obi-Wan did this to a huge degree

not reading the thread yet as i'm only halfway in but there's some brit actors i adore in the semi-down-tier cast (anton lesser, kathryn turner): i was looking at my phone when lesser's voice first dryly cut thru the static and it was a real oh shit waddup / here come dat boi moment lol

oh wait i remember who it is that got me paying attention to this in the first place: a blink-and-miss-it david hayman in a little woolly hat

watching light and magic, the disney doc on ILM really brought home for me that star wars above all else is basically a george lucas sfx skunkworks, he never really cared about the story (hence offloading that to campbell) he just needed a frame to hang his sfx shots on. you take the good with the bad here, like his endless revisionism and his decision to move to a full digital workstream for the prequels when everybody else was still on 35mm.

― 龜, Saturday, December 3, 2022 10:16 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I, too, gained this sort of peace from the ILM doc

the telling part about that was when they were talking about how lucas cast american graffiti. the actors were complaining about how long it was taking to choose a cast, and i think george said that they were going to take as long or longer to choose the right cars for the movie too. shows you where his head was at - boys and their toys!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FiTAudNXwAEUekm?format=jpg&name=medium

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/police-and-thieves-on-tony-gilroys-andor/

U love 2 read it:

A New Hope is about controlling your phallus (“Luke, at that speed will you be able to pull out in time?”) and — after you orgasmically blow up the Death Star — getting a medal pinned on your chest by your sister-mother-wife.

that was an excellent read, thanks for that!

great

good read. starts off a little TOO snarky (like in that honestly really funny line quoted above) but eventually gets to a solid summmation

probably without a doubt the best SW story in a lot of ways. It helps that the acting is exceptionally good, helps that the plotting is tight and merciless without being a feel-bad show, and it’s nice to be very distant from the stories of Mandalorian/boba fett/obi-wan/anything Jedi-related. This type of show would be a great path forward for more series and more films to take, something completely divorced from the usual shit, which is partially what sank the sequel trilogy (the rest was just sheer incompetent storytelling and a rudderless ship guided by a hack.) a lot of what makes this show great is what’s left out, which is a lot of what’s included in the other three shows, and which is what keeps me from thinking the best of them (mando) is anything more than good fun.

This one works as a show for those who don’t know much about Star Wars. The most annoying thing about it is the reminder in the post-credits that, oh yes, it leads to A New Hope. I’m onboard with the Rogue One multiverse being the most compelling aspect of SW. and I mean how good is the buildup of tension in some of these episodes? Mentioned this in another thread but the manner in which the show builds little strands of a tense story and leads to a episode where it all explodes is pretty masterful, and it does this what four times in twelve episodes? The first riot on ferrix, the heist, the prison break, the bloody rebellion climax…it’s all really so well done.

Very pleased that there were zero desert planets in sight. Even more pleased that multiple interesting characters are still out there, to be deployed and presumably dispatched in ways either tragic or extremely satisfying. Also said elsewhere: making an empire that is hateful in not a cartoonish cackling cape villain way but a ground-level boots on the ground way is really necessary for this show, and it makes the rebellion not a plot device but an understandable necessity. So much so that we certainly get where cinta is coming from when she decides to take a side trip to murder an imperial agent.

Very pleased that there were zero desert planets in sight

Huh, never actively noticed that, but it was very refreshing

Doubtlessly the lesson that will be taken from this excellent program’s lower ratings is that people want more muppet/helmet Star Wars and less of this, which would be a shame. I just think the difference in quality between this and the other Disney+ series is vast; this is in service of the story, not the fans.

I expect this will have a much longer “tail” than e.g. Obi Wan. Which execs never seem to consider.

Already forgotten most of obi-wan tbh. I have a certain affection for it overall but it was a major missed opportunity.

wow yeah ratings for andor were basically bad https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-andor-lower-viewership/

i think part of that though is bc it’s not really kid/tween/young teen-inclusive the way Mando or Obiwan was, and while there are a lot of adult children who watch (hi) i think theres prob a large portion of parents who only turn it on for kids & if they arent into the parents watch something else

I'm not surprised the viewing numbers for this would be bad. Yeah, not really a show for kids, plus it doesn't have any well-known characters. But a word-of-mouth show can have a longer tail and might reach new customers so I hope they see the value. This show is supposed to be 2 seasons and done, so at least we don't have to worry about its cancellation

Not sure it’s really doing as badly as all that e.g.

https://tv.parrotanalytics.com/US/andor-disney-plus

What Disney will want to see is if:

- Andor drives new sign-ups
- Those new sign-ups tend to stay with Disney after signing up
- Helps them crack a demographic they don’t yet have a lot of

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.

I believe you mean:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Cool News: Tony Gilroy, creator/writer of @starwars #Andor, just announced that they are launching a website soon with all 12 scripts & tons of concept art - all free to read!

He worked really hard on his scripts & is proud of the way they turned out- they are production drafts. pic.twitter.com/LbXEOdumaZ

— Jeff Goldsmith (@yogoldsmith) May 1, 2023

LFG

whoa, had no idea. First heard of Gilroy a few days ago while watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpAE7wgP8oA

Andor is Also Resuming Production During the Writers Strike https://t.co/HmhaXkL3d9 pic.twitter.com/H4dLXPVz6V

— io9 (@io9) May 6, 2023

boooo

Yeah that seems tricky at best, even beyond the 'this is a bad look' factor.

It does, tho it sounds like Gilroy and other showrunners are in sort of a tight spot there.

We actually just finished the series last night — been watching it with one of my kids, so it took a while to have time when we could all watch together. We all liked it a lot and agreed it's definitely the best Star Wars of the modern era. We're going to rewatch Rogue One tonight.

Good read:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-broke-star-wars-rules-reinvent-sci-fi-tv-1235507880/

Finally started a rewatch this very night.

Things I missed the first time: As Luthen and Cassian first talk in hyperspace having fled Ferri, for his wounds Luthen offers Cassian a sip of "Med Nog".

Maybe only abundant in the run up to Life Day, then the Empire takes it away.

One notable thing about Andor vs most other Star Wars related things, is the complete absence of "The Force". Andor is materialist Star Wars, I guess.

Debuted a year ago today.

"Remember this. Try."

<3

Too bad the next season will be written by AI

pockets

are fermenting

Luna now in his last week of shooting for S2 apparently

i'm watching this again. welcome to my blog.

after cassian kills the two security goons, he confers with his friend at work to concoct a lie about it. in the very next scene we see the security team contracted by the empire also concocting a lie about it. this is a world where truth is often v inconvenient

i was struck by how vader-like luthen looks right from the beginning.. he sweeps out of his ship in silhouette, his long cape flapping behind him..

maybe just me, but i liked how we watch the kids of ferrix putting on their warpaint, and then cut to syril - also someone who cares very much about his costume

this show is such a miracle, i need to rescreen too

gets to you, doesn’t it?

that’s what a reckoning sound like.

you want it to stop, but it just keeps coming

don’t you want to fight these bastards for real?

yes, yes i fuckin do

I rewatched it last year and think often about this exchange between Cassian and Maarva:

“I'll be worried about you all the time.”
“That's just love. Nothing you can do about that.”

nothing like being unexpectedly punched in the heart by a star war

still can't quite believe that maarva's funeral speech and stellan skarsgard's sacrifice monologue both happened in a star war, just incredible pieces of writing absolutely knocked out of the park by the actors

comments here making me want to watch it again. i’m almost seeing it as a negative image or anti star war at this point. sure, it exists because of the star war but its purpose is to destroy premise of same.

well it really stands out to me how the OG star wars are all about emperors and princesses and priests and this one is all about thieves and miners and cops and prisoners. yet at the same time it takes the premise of the OG seriously: what if there was an armed rebellion against a corrupt and sadistic galactic order? how would it work? at times is it even distinguishable from robbery, murder?

at the end of ep 3, as the story of andor's escape from ferrix wraps up, his face in luthen's ship as they blast off towards parts unknown - it's not an excited face. it's angry & skeptical. keeping its powder dry. the editing sets up a parallel with maarva taking him from kenari. first a new mother figure, now a new father figure. he loves maarva. does he love this guy? we'll see.

it makes star wars seem incredibly silly

i rewatched a couple of weeks back. i recommend it.

As I mentioned above it’s materialist Star Wars. The Force is a complete non-factor.

yes, saw that comment and was turning it over in my head. thought about the often observed line that the original star wars is itself quite materialist - a second hand junk recycling universe. many people planet-bound, aspirations of flying to the stars extremely unlikely and only adventurers, the extremely wealthy and the politically dominant ever do it.

but yes the presence of the Force as an active quasi mystical quantity in that universe does change things, and that’s emphasised and really becomes the central theme over the trilogy.

royal blood, magic blood is still lucas' central storytelling obsession

“I’d rather die fighting than die giving them what they want” still gives me fucking goosebumps

I had forgotten that Luthen's dramatic speech about sacrifice is in the SAME EPISODE as the climax of the prison break. Just insane

I guess this was obvious the first time around to most people but it really is quite clear how this is the anti-OG trilogy. Not just proletariat vs the OG nobility, not just tone, but the central mystery of the OG movies is how you can 1) fight the dark side without 2) giving in to your anger. fighting, killing, destroying... these things are necessary if you want to participate in a Star War against the Empire. Vader confronts Luke with this contradiction and it feels insurmountable. but in this... the mentor figure is no longer Obi-Wan but explicitly Vader like. a man who's comfortable with moral triage. and Cassian himself is the embodiment of Han's frontier "shoot first" mentality. It's like they took all the interesting rough bits from the mythos, the bits that get sanded away, and put them at the center.

"And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude." = i.e. no medal ceremony for me. No princess giving me approving looks. It's not the world I inhabit

the cynical part of me thinks this show is just the product of some disney MBA saying "market segmentation" - let's make star wars big enough to accommodate magic and wizards, cute pokemon, and grimdark sci-fi. but it's a good show, a really good show. one thing i'm tempted to say about it is it doesn't need the star wars universe at all, it could stand on its own - but nah, being set in the star wars universe lets you skip a lot of the broad brush worldbuilding and to focus on the local.

Very true that you don't actually need the Star Wars connection but if it's a dialectic with the OG trilogy then I guess you do

It would be interesting to see what someone who has little to no knowledge of Star Wars thinks of this show. I don't think you really need to have seen the movies, but you do need to have at least some minimal knowledge of the star wars universe and how stuff works in star wars.

It's nice to see an angle on SW that returns some bleakness to that universe. The other shows and the Abrams trilogy are just so unserious in comparison, the films in particular being saddled with that awkward Hollywood tone of self aware humor winking to the audience and ott space opera darkness which feels as earned as a very special episode of transformers idk. Andor feels exceptionally well-realized and vv surprisingly powerful.

Very true that you don't actually need the Star Wars connection but if it's a dialectic with the OG trilogy then I guess you do

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Monday, February 5, 2024 5:16 PM bookmarkflaglink

yeah, i think the fact i feel intrinsically it needs the OG trilogy in order to visibly and noticeably negate it means it's the latter. it's noticeable, and part of the viewing pleasure, right?

Something that really struck me in the prison sequence is how good this show is at showing you how much WORK goes into it all. Man when he's sawing away at that pipe... it is fuckin HARD.

sort of, i find it distracting for example to think about how this show's mon mothma squares with the trilogy's cool, stately mon mothma and making it work in my head

this show’s mon mothma is pretty stately and cool! no?

Still find the season 1 structure to be really fascinating, it's basically these four extremely tense climaxes to four separate story parts, vs a single stretched-thin storyline leading to one climax, which is a problem with a lot of shows. Here there's just so much going on, such a wealth of character and plot. And it's never overly busy.

her scenes give me a lot of anxiety! xp

Love the way the season is structured. The first couple episodes aren't that exciting and lull you into thinking it's going to be one of those streaming shows where nothing happens, forever.

Then it suddenly puts its foot on the pedal and doesn't let go for eight episodes, so when things slow down after the prison break, the respite is kind of a relief.

abandoning the double life and embracing her role as a leader of the rebellion movement would probably feel like a weight off her shoulders

xp

Also, I like that it's proof that you can make something fun and exciting without veering into sassy self-knowing Marvel territory, or doing something horribly hetero and grimdark

All true, the total lack of sassiness was pretty damn refreshing, as was the lack of shocking deaths for the sake of having shocking deaths.

i don't think andor needs star wars, but andor being set in the star was universe makes the OG trilogy better, and in that sense it makes watching andor more rewarding.

To me at least it's an ideal version of where Star wars as a franchise should have gone

I think creating this story that parallels many events in the real world in a familiar fictional environment gives it some legs. The cost of entry is lower when people notice historical and aesthetic reference points that they've absorbed over years.

Andor's well-written enough that it conveys why you should care about these characters, their particular hardships, the oppression fairly quickly. But it's an easy sell when it's presented as fiction and it's a well-known fictional landscape.

Trying to get the random guy on the street in the US to watch The Battle of Algiers (language presentation aside) is probably trickier than getting them to watch Saving Private Ryan despite the former carrying a lot of historical weight.

Stellan's buzzed for it. (No details, obv., but it's a nice little moment.)

https://gizmodo.com/andor-season-2-luthen-rael-stellan-skarsgard-disney-1851222290

Wait, hold up, what is this "Abrams trilogy" when its at home?

I like to think Rian in his heart of hearts went 'oh this is what you've given me, too bad'

'Too bad' might need unpacking there, if it's "too bad, I'm going to tip half of it out the window", that's fair enough.

(There is a separate matter of "unserious" being used as an insult on the website ilxor.com - particularly in defence of a (great) series that's regularly pretty funny)

Abrams habitually cannot finish a story, his ability lies in hooking you with an opening. so he was a bad choice to take it to the finish line. just an absolutely mediocre talent. as flawed as TLJ was, it was at least interesting and RJ is a director capable of memorable imagery. though i don't really think in retrospect he should have been picked, either. it's kinda weird they're returning to the well with a Rey film, not because Daisy Ridley wasn't good (she was one of the few good things i took away from the trilogy) but you'd think they'd want to completely move past it.

It’s funny how the first time you watch Andor it takes awhile to realise how central Dedro Meero is, or at least it did for me. Plenty of characters in the ISB. Her ambitious and petulant rival; her tough but fair boss; the dude who wants a fancy office on Ferrix; etc etc. So I wasn’t watching her that closely at the beginning. This time I was. And she is just fucking phenomenal all the way through. The tiniest twitch of an eyebrow, the slightest widening of the eyes. This is not stuff that plays in a 1000-seat theatre. This is very close-up stuff and the level of control is just off the scale

i had read that Denise Gough was a bit inspired by Gus Fring in her interpreation of the character.

turns out i was rewatching this in parallel w/u tracer, bursting into tears at the exact same moments lol

'Too bad' might need unpacking there, if it's "too bad, I'm going to tip half of it out the window", that's fair enough.

Very much my meaning!

xxp denise gough would be perfect as a young margaret thatcher

I definitely agree with the point about this being very loosely linked to Star Wars - TLJ strikes me as what happens if you treat it more like the Aliens movies, Rian Johnson clearly came in and said "okay, this is an interesting framework, here's a story I want to tell in it"

(I know it's an over-wondered thought in geek circles, but I do always wonder how big the ripples would be if David Lynch had directed RotJ)

Gough was my favourite thing in the show (among many, many favourite things - set design, no magic, Andy Serkis, prison stun floor ...)

Yes inclined to agree, she's somewhat first among equals.

Although I guess it's evident Gilroy is not reeeally burdened by telling this story in not only the same galaxy as Gungans and Babu Frik but in the increasingly carved up yet still alluring nexus between Eps III and IV where there are always the events and aspects of those plus R1 to bear in mind I'd be interested to see what he could do truly free of all that while still offering a modern branded Star War, maybe concurrent and complimentary to the Rey trilogy.

Rian Johnson clearly came in and said "okay, this is an interesting framework, here's a story I want to tell in it"

Tangentially, did anyone else read that scene with Kylo killing Snoke and then inviting Rey to join him (as sparks fall dramatically from the ceiling) as Rian Johnson inviting JJ Abrams to actually do something new and interesting with the franchise? I can't tell if this is insane or obvious.

bringing this stuff into the andor thread is actually kind of upsetting

Haha 100%

When Johnson was working on TLJ wasn't Trevorrow still expected to helm the final part? From what I've seen of what he had in mind for it it actually lined up well with TLJ (still jarringly suucinct for a supposed middle act imo) and the subsequent nature of Andor via a proposed mass uprising against the First Order that we would see more of as opposed to this just being an aside uttered by Dominic Monaghan (iirc) at the end of IX.

Cheer up Tracer I am rewatching Andor for the second time in six months thanks largely to you (and to large new TV).

xxp You can always take up with the guy who mentioned the films in this thread!

I’m rewatching and I have decided this show is also a romance. Not about romantic love, but about a spymaster willing to believe he’s right about the impulse he sees in a possible agent and the tumultuous route they take to come back together. Just a guy hoping another guy can believe what he believes

Occurred to me after seeing the episode 8 scene where Luthen doesn’t want to sever ties with Bix back on Ferrix and has the delusional belief that anyone on Ferrix has a better idea of where Cassian might be

I never quite understood why Luthen comes back to Ferrix for the funeral. He already has agents to deal with Cassian. What’s he doing there? If it’s a bit of a romance that makes it start to make sense.. he’s drawn to Cassian irrationally.. but I feel like there was something I missed

maybe he intuited the presence of the force (hints for s2 reveal)

my kids keep saying he’s a Jedi and I like NO YOU DON’T GET IT

RETVRN

luthen was darth plagueis all along

what i think is important when watching star wars with children is to make sure they understand when they’re wrong

I think Luthen remains undecided on killing or recruiting Cassian right to the end as one of those two options MUST happen. In the end only going to Ferrix himself to see if he can encounter Cassian again and force a decision on it can enable that, but he has to keep Vel ready to kill him if it all goes south?

yeah that sounds about right. He’s a bit of a gambler isn’t he, despite his attention to detail. He doesn’t mind leaving things open, seeing where they go.

Luthen's also subtly attempting to affirm his own beliefs and you see him waver a little in several episodes. Those grandiose speeches are as much for him as they are for his audience (and the viewing audience). He wants to be right about Cassian so bad

As for something more ephemeral: apparently there is exactly one party song that's popular during the run of the series thus far, and it's titled after the hottest beach planet-turned-imperial: Niamos!

So far we have:
Niamos! (Morlana Club Mix) -- First episode, Cassian is at the club trying to find out if his sister was there
Niamos! (Coruscant Lounge Mix) -- Played at the party Mon Mothma is hosting in ep 7 where she's entertaining guests and talking about moving money
Niamos! (Galaxy Mix) -- Played over the ending credits of ep 7 after the camera zooms out from Syril in his new insanely boring office cubicle, a distinctly un-party atmosphere

Niamos!

here's a 10 minute loop version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r9qnkCE0Hw

keep music live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA8-6X8aR3o

Some are rockists, some are poptimists, some are wailing jizzists.

iirc jizz has now been retconned to "jatz"... thanks disney :(

Some are into skatplay, others are into jatzplay

xxxxp I think that's just the section that was played in the episode looped. The official soundtrack available on streaming has a second section

I was gonna say only on third watch of this did I notice Mothma's muzak was a tease of the same tune as the Niamos Grindcore banger.

Whenever you hear that party music, you know something terrible is going to happen!

oh, I forgot to mention that the Galaxy Mix over the credits was an encore. The first time it appears in that episode is when Cassian is on the beach about to run some errands

the next two tracks are, depressingly:
"Tourists Don't Run"
and
"Six Year Sentence"

space-age music in dune:
• bagpipes
• throat-singing
• chapman stick

Fairly certain Chapman Stick's a character

Blu-ray set out next month with some extras:

https://gizmodo.com/andor-season-1-blu-ray-release-date-details-steelbook-1851308715/slides/5

Sweet!

Wow yes. I just rewatched it with my sci-fi indifferent older daughter who was absolutely gripped from ep 1. Is it even better than the 1977 movie? Certainly for an adult audience.

On a separate note I actually just saw Michael Clayton for the first time thanks to a one-off Alamo screening. And yeah, a lot more of the vibe tracks, if you will.

I recently showed my niece and nephew A New Hope and they kept laughing at how bad the VFX were, they couldn't take it seriously. I kept having to be like, "when I was a kid, this was mind-blowing". My nephew is even pretty into sci-fi but I guess it was too hard a sell for them - no interest in seeing Empire Strikes Back

I suspect they'd be way more into Mandalorian or Andor simply because they look better

Must be hard when you grow up watching movies with great special effects like, er, Ant-Man 3

Vinnie was it the "special edition" with the coating of "new" (now old) CGI applied?

the space battles get a lot better in rotj. i agree, i remember being very nonplussed as a 10 year old by how slowly the x-wings moved in ANH vs the x-wings that i flew in the pc game x-wing.

"new" (now old) CGI

shit, you're right. new special edition mk 2 needed stat!

well i've always said this, that since CGI gets better all the time once you go down this road of specializing old movies with new effects you kind of can't stop since those new effects will quickly start looking very bad, in fact far worse than if they'd been practical to begin with. the only winning move is to despecialize obv but in lieu of that yes, new special editions are needed!

Tracer, it was the special edition on Disney Plus. I don't think I was particularly bothered by the "new" CGI - it doesn't look great but many of the old VFX shots look pretty dated nowadays as well. I still enjoy all the other aspects of the movie, but I can see how it's a hard sell for younger people. My nephew and niece pointed out how bad any blaster scene was, with the shots going wildly off-target every time. And fair point to them

that lobster man in full

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmFiZjBjZmUtOTdkYS00YmU0LTlkMjItMjZiZTk1YWJlMjRkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDYyODAzNQ@@._V1_.jpg

FUCK

lol when we watched Andor my kids were stunned that stormtroopers actually got a few hits in

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cuc3t5utwj2pdijmtakoawim/bafkreiame3gbiasobwwrhlso2l3xngq7kx37pp2x7wrt653qedklqtmhf4@jpeg

lol

Okay, we got a first little bit of footage in the second half of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnwpxgR3STE

The comments on a bunch of youtube videos of monologues from Andor got a lot of traffic last week. Generally I think fandom mapping on to real life can be goofy, etc. Nonetheless...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-asb8zTiuZ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaKrm5txGCQ

the line i keep coming back to is “don’t you want to fight these bastards for real?”

power doesn't panic

April 22, btw

yesss

Hauntingly good/bad time for a rewatch!

Indeed

has there been a trailer or anything yet?

now there has!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE4wxt70aUM

weird tone, imo. i welcome a more action-heavy approach, as long as it doesn't lose some of the spirit that made the first season special.

hope steve earle got a nice payday, at least

really weird tone indeed, towards the end at times feels like it's a cop buddy comedy or something.

feels like it is marketing towards people who didn't like the show, which makes financial sense. can't imagine they could do anything to keep me from watching, and i bet a lot of people who loved season one feel the same

yeah i assume it's just like an ad or whatever and the show will feel more like s1. also i did wonder if they thought that track ties into the times in a safe kind of way.

A concentrated release pattern, it turns out, per io9:

today the studio confirmed that the 12-episode sophomore season will release as a series of three-episode chapters each week, rather than a by-episode basis

you probably could have made a trailer like this from the first season as well

Diego Luna is Midge Ure in...VIENNA: The Ultravox Story

Kidding. This looks amazing (again)!

They should have gone for Won't Get Fooled Again

well scroll upthread for a 70s action TV show take on what a trailer for S1 would look like - it’s brilliant

Who knows what it will be like but I know how much the people making it care about it - and in light of the muted viewing figures for S1 i don’t think there was ever a chance they were going to lead with a cerebral trailer

andor cleans up pretty good huh??

Looks a bit too … Star Wars for me, I hope that’s not representative. But delighted to see Mendelsohn back.

How strange that a Star Wars thing would look like Star Wars.

Didn't spot Anton Lesser in the trailer melee but guess they can't keep everyone. V stoked tho.

honestly Andor s1 was enough of a little miracle, I am kinda going into s2 with zero expectations

Yah, I'm steering clear of the hype cycle and just going in cold

muted viewing figures for S1

did not know about this. bummer!

xps that was my tepid joke, Ned

I’m into this

This show, despite acclaim and putting it on ABC to gin up numbers, was the lowest rated Star Wars show and it came it at a cost of about $640 million. The ad is not very good but I wouldn't be worried, they're just trying to get the most audience possible.

Andor S1 was incredible and i'm thinking this will be too but why the actual fuck was that song used

Agreed.

yeah the song made it feel more like a corporate “sizzle reel” from the industry upfronts. corny choice.

It is kind of hilarious how all the text is like "100 INTELLIGENT CRITICS AGREE - THIS SERIES IS SMARTER THAN YOU" and all the visuals are like people smirking while things explode behind them

Not very quippy, lots of explosions!

I did appreciate "Do you want to fight, or do you want to win?"

the trailer is clearly trying to draw in the part of the audience who enjoyed boba fett, obi wan et al. they know they've already got the star-wars-fans-who-also-loved-battle-of-algiers crowd hooked, they'll watch regardless

The extra viewers they might get from that trailer might be canceled out by the “I really hate that song” demographic. It’s just kind of shockingly bad I think. I watched it with my kid and I felt the cringe.

I actually don’t think it would lose any viewers, but I just don’t think anyone would see that trailer and get hyped so they should probably get a different one out there as fast as possible.

I know at least one person not on ILX who refused to watch the trailer because of the music

Aw yeah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feJSTZRRaFQ

(Anton Lesser presence confirmed, BTW.)

Fffffffuck

much better!

omg yes

much more like it. cool it's the final season also, no need to drag it out like most shows do.

They originally wrote it for five, and then Disney said "guess what guys, two."

There seems to have been back and forth on that idea -- I've also heard Gilroy and crew considered five, then in combination with acting commitments etc two felt like the better deal.

Season 1,2 and Rogue One makes a nice trilogy on its own

I am so glad for the return of Our Ben as Krennic. And Alan Tudyk who stole that movie.

i like how after the huge delay they started meaningful promo with a month or so to go, not sitting here waiting on it for ages

New interview feature with Gilroy. (And thankfully Lussier didn't write it.)

https://gizmodo.com/star-wars-tony-gilroy-andor-interview-season-2-2000573377

And as for the whole 'two seasons v. five' thing:

“We were filming, we were about halfway, three quarters of the way through filming season one, while I was really trying to come up with what was going to be the second season when we realized that we couldn’t do five years,” Gilroy recently reflected over Zoom. “So that became a very rapid exploration—you have basically a year to work on the show. It was more about being able to make the show, and pay for the show, and get the budget for the show, because between the time that season one started, and season two happened, the metrics and mandates of streaming had completely reversed.”

The whole feature is a really good read, probably the most detailed I've read with Gilroy on it all in a bit at least.

Separately, another fine thing:

https://collider.com/andor-season-1-scripts-not-released-explained-tony-gilroy-ai/

"I wanted to do it," Gilroy said. "We put it together. It's really cool. I've seen it, I loved it. AI is the reason we're not." He went on to elaborate about how he wanted to show off the show's writing, but found that keeping them from becoming AI fodder was more important:

"In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it's just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the f***ing robots any more than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses."

Vader's in this season, I'm probably overthinking this but I'm curious how they'll fit an evil sorcerer into the themes of the show

kinda spoilery no?

it's not a secret, I found out by opening YouTube and seeing the thumbnail for trailer #2

There's a new trailer?

(Because he's not in either of the trailers so far.)

I was going to say yes to this, but it turns out it's a fan-made trailer that people were circulating a few days ago, so Vader is not actually confirmed

ah oops

lol

I appear to be rewatching s1 for the third time.

Same, trying for the third time to make it through season 1

Wait, you've never done a full watch? What falls off for you?

Don’t recall. First time I reached the glum village, second time not even. We’ll see this time

Watched it three times, and on both rewatches I inhaled it like oxygen.

I'm torn between a rewatch and the worry I'll be all Andor'ed out by the S2 premiere...

god, I hate the stupid fan-made fake trailer crap on youtube so much

I get it's a fun little fandom wishcasting thing but the structure of youtube means fan content gets munged in with everything else

I’m rewatching with my kids ahead of the new season. Just finished ep3 and finding even richer than I remember it being. Conversely, my 11yo is mulling over whether or not he actually likes this show the second time around.

I remember feeling that way around ep 3 but iirc all that buildup starts really paying off in ep 4

I found it all a bit of a slog first time until THE EYE

Rewatching recently I found it useful to keep its intention as a Bildungsroman of radicalisation in mind. It’s often pretty subtle. For example it dawned on me that the Kennari angle, in addition to providing a motivation, also explains why Andor has a heavy accent compared to the rest of the cast.

I feel like ep3 is where it really becomes obviously great, the very end of that episode

i had to look at Wikipedia to remember what happened in what episode, but i agree with that. it was a real ramping up of the stakes and the storytelling, i don't think the previous episodes were anything but very good but at the point of E3 it could have easily gone the route of the other SW series, which have ranged from pretty good to mystifyingly conceived to bad. Sometimes within the same series.

it took time to get used to the three-episode arc structure. makes sense that they are releasing season 2 three eps at a time

One last trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duN-KQgOjYs

I’m rewatching with my kids ahead of the new season. Just finished ep3 and finding even richer than I remember it being. Conversely, my 11yo is mulling over whether or not he actually likes this show the second time around.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp)

We've just finished the family rewatch, gulped it down and I've really enjoyed seeing the journey once you know the destination.

the bits that hit in the first viewing still hit hard but you appreciate them having the guts to do the slower episodes as its the range of the season that marks it out.

The Eye and One Way Out would have undoubtedly felt like Mandalorian 'escapades of the week' without the build up.

Yes for sure. My 11yo son almost tapped out after the third episode because there was just too much talking. But from the Aldani heist to the prison arc, he was fully sucked in and didn’t mind all the talking in various episodes because even a young kid like him could feel that it was building tension.

I also appreciated the rewatch personally because I had an easier understanding of all Mon Mothma’s worries and maneuverings, and the Kreegyr storyline - both of which are more or less told through explication over many episodes without any real action payoff.

We just did a rewatch and man this show is great. Having 12 episodes rather than the usual 8 or 9 really gave it time to develop.

apparently they’re dropping s2 in three episode batches, with each batch covering a year of time! four years of insurgency to rebellion over a month. I’m psyched!

One last little promo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKNi5-zrH_8

Loved it again on my refresher. One thing I saw more clearly - I feel like I've watched a lot of drama where there's a baseline liberal 'but aren't these violence/property-damage radicals awfully compromised when you think about it - how sad - ah well - it is wrong to kill' where this is yes, but we've thought through that and here's an amazing soliloquy about the compromises and you know this shit still has to be done and you're going to be cheering when Cassian coldly offs prison guards. One way out.

Yes, that’s exactly one of the many things I appreciated about it, the notion that you want to make the sadists and fascists who have been grinding you down feel the same same fear and terror, and the same threat of violence hanging over their heads.

let’s fuckin goooooo

[stares blankly at TIE fighter console]

So psyched but still haven't figured out if I'm burning thru all three later or piecing them out over a few days.

I've been loving the s1 rewatch but for some reason I had it on my head there were only 9 episodes and then there was a 10th and then I realised there were 12 so bingeing hasn't quite dovetailed perfectly with the s2 premiere. Still, more Andor! Can't even remember what else happened apart from Cassisn going home to find he's too late to see his mum.

Oh, and Luthen's ship getting picked up by a patrol

s2 eps 1-3 was slightly daunting at first bc i felt like i had lost some of the story subtleties (bc i didnt do an s1 rewatch) but at the same time, it’s so thrilling to have a show this rich with detail that it deserves and rewards close-watching, not in a puzzlebox theorizing way but just to catch every detail.

man that TIE fighter opening: the joy of seeing a craft being flown badly was something i didnt know i wanted & it was so funny!
Like a Buster Keaton space movie. And Luna has such a great (beautiful) face for the reaction shots.

Anyway, i wont lay out all my likes and observations yet bc i think we all need time to digest.

But; Gilroy set the table, laid out the dishes & began serving the food in this 3 story arc and we are eating WELL

Aaargh hide spoilers plz

I love how in this show, any time you hear some party music, someone's about to have the worst time of their life

lol, I just finished ep3 and I was wondering how that wedding party went from Gulliver's Elf Tea Party to Weird Star Trek Planet to Deodorant Ad Rave so quickly.

Also weird how hobbity the long table dinner with the farmers/rebels was.

Same music as when Cassian got arrested on the beach and thrown into the terrible prison in the first season, I think!

I wonder how many show years it's going to be until we get Mon Mothma with her less-styled, "I'm no longer in the senate, it's rebellion time" hair

s2 eps 1-3 was slightly daunting at first bc i felt like i had lost some of the story subtleties (bc i didnt do an s1 rewatch) but at the same time, it’s so thrilling to have a show this rich with detail that it deserves and rewards close-watching, not in a puzzlebox theorizing way but just to catch every detail.

same, didn't rewatch and felt similarly at times. tho i am not sure i found the machinations of the posher characters too interesting in s1 either, kinda hit and miss maybe. some bits of it work, others a bit less so.

overall really enjoyed the return.

Enjoyed the third ep much more than the first two (can't be a coincidence that it featured more Syril & Mom) which I now immediately wish could've been merged into one single (maybe slightly longer) episode so we could've had a bit more of the fallout from this last one.

Too much space fighter and wayyy too much Mothma shit, I think she and Skarsgard are the weaker of the principal cast. Didn’t pull off the get-drunk-and-dance at all for me.

Great interview w Tony Gilroy on The Watch podcast about the first 3 episodes - starts at 20 min mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRpusXtuLvU

Have not been feeling the first couple episodes. Going to assume they pay off later.

I became more compelled by Mon Mothma’s story when I did my s1 rewatch, and therefore felt as sucked into her story as anyone else’s. Although I did feel the constant intercutting to her rave was a weird and distracting choice.

Given the four-year arc of this season I’m curious if the daughter will become more significant as she ages.

terrible dialogue and casting in the jungle in the first episode.

You people with criticisms are all high. There, my honest and objective truth.

Loved all of it, especially the useless squabbling fucks on Yavin, which was somehow even more of a perfect payoff to the initial TIE fighter goofs, and how Tay Kolma just doesn't know how fucked he is.

whenever b2emo isn’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “where’s b2emo??”

Ned is otm

Luthen glares at Tay from a sci fi sewer drain

Mothma is one of the stars of the show and these episodes were very juicy for her. Wild to say she is a weaker part of the show, on a S1 rewatch I was lapping up the pregnant dialogues with the political elite.

You people with criticisms are all high. There, my honest and objective truth.

You Love Everything.

xp same. I find Skarsgard pretty electric in this too ("how nice for you!").

the jungle dumbass rebels were amazing, especially with the Yavin 4 reveal at the end

one of those guys was the stoner idiot from never have i ever, which was fun

is it clear cut that Brasso made up the bit about the farmer boss snitching on them so that guy would be spared? I took it as literal tbh but the former is smarter storytelling and vmic for Brasso the a1 mensch

i like that reading - that possibility didnt occur to me

I definitely got that feeling. He even gives him a Significant Look, which confirmed it for me.

I also really liked the how strongly they depict how insurgent cells work in this programme. If you don't already know this information, I'm not telling it to you, and that's for your safety but mostly for mine. I suppose it helps that the audience always knows what's going on, so the cast don't have to constantly be blabbing stupid details to each other for our benefit.

Yeah I saw it that way too. Apologies for the carping above, I still think these eps were a worthy continuation, just not hitting the heights of S1 (which to be fair came later in the season). I have to admit I winced when we saw Meero at home, but they pulled it off well.
Seems like the opening sequence of ep 1 was a conscious effort to counter the "slow start" criticisms of S1!

I kinda read it as their own version of a pre-credits James Bond sequence, and I wouldn't be surprised if we get something like that kicking off each of the remaining sequences.

it felt very like that to me also. i think i was expecting that sort of bombast which made the shambolic piloting funnier.

“i have been upside down for two days!”

were we supposed to believe he just worked out how to fly it after that, or they told him or something? idk if this is a dumb question or i missed something.

VG otm re the opening TIE fighter sequence, so great. I love that this show knows how to do a big comedic action set piece alongside the serious boardroom drama

the chandrilan outfits were incredible

love watching Andor instinctively knowing how to push everyone’s buttons again: telling the girl helping him at the imperial base exactly what she needed to hear, prodding the silly insurgent cell members just enough to buy time and make his escape

the cackle I let out after seeing that dedra and syril were now living together, I mean of course they are after their little ~moment- on Ferrix but I didn’t think the show would actually go there

dedra tearing his mom up while he’s lying on the bed, so perfect

I’d forgotten that Belinda Chandra on Doctor Who played Cinta and got all excited seeing her in the third episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6wLcx7AkRM

I love this show bc it makes the “boring” parts (board meetings; senators accounting issues) the most gripping, and the action-packed parts the most comically undermining of its characters’ seeming super powers. (Ie cassian only succeeds in spite of his own weaknesses / because of others’ greater weaknesses)

Fits well w the theme

Also just love how willing to go for the unexpected gesture inside the familiar form gilroy is in general

Ie everyone talks about how this is about heroic revolutionaries leading up to this season and the first episode is mainly about a totally dysfunctional revolutionary cell

Or ppl complain it’s too dry and from a textural pov maybe the most riveting scene is the creepy Nazi board room meeting

otm

the action-packed parts the most comically undermining of its characters’ seeming super powers

both comically and tragically… the action-packed third acts almost always has an important character die - Nemik, Kino Loy, and now Brasso

Yes … i shouldn’t even say super powers the only power is survival and we all know the titular character himself doesn’t make it, no one does. It’s a show about martyrs, the unheralded heroes, and how what motivates them is ultimately what matters because it’s pure endurance that allows them to win when they do, just caring a little bit more at the right time, and then losing despite that all the time

I really enjoyed the cuts in the first ep between the “who’s in charge” idiot rebels covered in mud and the extremely orderly imperial meeting with Krennic’s cast of hand-picked officers.

Similar but not quite as enjoyable was the contrast in ep 3 between the chaos of the rebel cell trying to escape the auditors and Mothma’s idgaf drunken raving.

I would like a floating DJ droid in the form of a disco ball. I would fly it around the neighborhood playing classic bobbins

were we supposed to believe he just worked out how to fly it after that, or they told him or something? idk if this is a dumb question or i missed something.

lol yeah that was bugging me too

Maybe this was a special non-brittle model for Vader's use.

One thing I did like is how Ben Mendelsohn plays Krennic slightly differently here than in Rogue One, a bit more flamboyantly confident in his approach, with the bit about how nobody is to tell Tarkin rubbing up against how clearly he's knocked off his game when Tarkin *does* show up early on in said film.

Separately, good interview here:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/andor-tony-gilroy-season-2-interview-darth-vader-1235324435/

Thanks for posting that, love the bit at the end where he talks about SW exploring different genres and shouts out Skeleton Crew (not enough love for that show out there imo)

Also enjoyed him talking about the wedding rave scene (and other things) here: https://www.slashfilm.com/1842151/andor-showrunner-big-galactic-hit-wedding-scene-disco-droid-interview/

Tony Gilroy: [Visibly animated] The song is "Niamos." So "Niamos" came up the first time in season 1 when we went to [the planet] Niamos. We really liked that song a lot. And then, it's very difficult to do source music in the show. So [season 1 composer Nicholas Brittell] took that Niamos theme and, if you listen very carefully, it's back in the brothel in the very beginning [of the season 1 premiere], played weirdly. It's also in [Mon Mothma's Chandrilan Embassy on Coruscant] played sort of backwards. So we sort of said, "What if it's a galactic hit? What if that's a really big galactic hit?" So we're like, "We're going to do the wedding."

One thing that just occurred to me is absent in Andor (and maybe throughout Star Wars films and TV, I'm no expert) is mass media. I suppose I notice it more here cause it's such usually such an instrument of fascist propaganda.

Or am I talking shit? Suddenly occurs to me that the news of Aldhani heist spread around, though I can't now remember exactly how.

The propaganda video displayed in the first episode has to have been displayed somewhere for the masses to see. And in oddities like the Star Wars Holiday Special we see TVs and TV shows.

Oh yes, the propaganda video. My memory is so bad

Also per the sports bar sequence in _Attack of the Clones_ there appears to be Space ESPN

*watches next batch*

Plus we now have the equivalent of morning TV with double Ruby Wax!

Anyway, Diego Luna IS…Bono?

stray thoughts as i calm down from all that stressfulness
-Star Wars store dot com better have Ghorman spider merch or I am going to be PISSED
-Diego all spruced up giving the fans what we er they want. Swoon etc :D
-The way i GASPED at Dedra’s doublecross
- loved the scene w Cassian and the bellboy at the Ghorman hotel. Beautifully written & acted.

Incredible television

what do you mean by double cross?

Heartbreaking ending. Banging Bruce cockburn “lovers in a dangerous time” and crying into my beer”

good to see the guy who beheaded Anne Boleyn at the end of season 1 of wolf hall and the nazi who who got the swastika tattoo at the end of inglorious basterds pop up in the Ghorman debating society.

I was trying to remember where I'd seen the guy leading the Ghorman resistance... he was the king vampire's #2 in The Strain.

One thing that just occurred to me is absent in Andor (and maybe throughout Star Wars films and TV, I'm no expert) is mass media. I suppose I notice it more here cause it's such usually such an instrument of fascist propaganda.

― Alba, Tuesday, 29 April 2025 10:09 (yesterday)

Rebels made use of the Imperial HoloNews Net for similar effect, but yeah for the most part not a lot of galactic information sources shown

Allllmost a bit on the nose here per Gilroy's comment in this short making-of bit re why they cast French actors for Ghorman folks, the patisserie on the plaza etc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ihBfycg8Wg

So you give them berets too? Almost makes me wonder if they were talked down from having everyone carry around space baguettes.

This aside: another great sequence, final overall part had me ramped up once again, and can't wait to see how that same feeling happens next week.

Really enjoyed ep 4, so much so that I'm gonna save 5 til tomorrow and try not to click itt again.

mr veg was so dismayed that i wanted to watch all 3 eps last night lol

I would have loved it if it was the same once-a-week model as last time but if all three are there each time, fuck it.

Gilroy said he was conceiving of them as chapter groupings kind of, i quite like the rollout

watching Whittaker i am still like man that affected accent is a helluva choice, like welp ok yr still really doing this i guess? alrighty

Hey, good new interview with Ben M here:

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/andor-ben-mendelsohn-rogue-one-orson-krennic-1236382983/

nice :D

Liked these last three much more than the previous week's. Re: Whittaker's voice: I'm guessing it's due to what he was raving about in Ep 5. Really dug the scenes with Saw and crew - had a nice Rogue One vibe to them.
Mendelsohn is great and intense in this tho I keep thinking he sounds as if his teeth are gonna fall out!

yeah re Mendo i was casually wondering if he’s gotten veneers maybe

Imperial dental insurance plans = secretly shitty.

Really dug the scenes with Saw and crew - had a nice Rogue One vibe to them.

Definitely there though I admit I wasn't expecting the sequel trilogy location Easter egg. (Then again, might explain how that later crew knew about it to start with -- and I'm still half wondering if we're going to get a scene or two set on Dantooine in live action at last [it's turned up in the Rebels and Resistance series].)

Anyway, I'd listen:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kqdyhnklmmv34nmml6btyqv6/bafkreia3ik3lqr6cv22rlhflkfgwge7rwrvpqcrywqxrzefuf6nyresioq@jpeg

I think they’d sound like Adult :)

yeah re Mendo i was casually wondering if he’s gotten veneers maybe

Maybe it's just the roles I've seen him in before, but this is the first time I've ever been able to understand him when he talks. I usually think of him as a mumbling stooge.

oi mate, you haven’t been talking to the cops, have ya mate?

he seemed to really play it up in the movie Killing Them Softly, to the point where his words sounded like they were dripping wet

combined with the fact his character looked like he’d smell wretched, it was overall a disgusting performance

“mumbling stooge”
how very dare u

Caught up. Expected more from the convoy heist.

Glad that Bix got hers, tho.

Syril: “it’s safe. I was careful.”

Dedra: “I know, I had you followed.”

Lolololololol their whole relationship in a nutshell

I love them together. It’s such genius. Like, next to Dedra, Cyril is revealed as such a smoothbrain. Like he seems fairly competent & together until you put him in a room with her, & then you realize he’s a total house of cards lol

Syril: “it’s safe. I was careful.”

Dedra: “I know, I had you followed.”

Lolololololol their whole relationship in a nutshell

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Friday, 2 May 2025 04:29 (fourteen hours ago)

I was a little surprised that Syril was upset to find out she had him followed, I expected him to be flattered

and/or turned on

they did turn the lights out after

yeah he idk abt upset

a thing i love about this series is how it takes imperial functionaries like krennic (so impotent in the main films as to be a running joke) and turns them into figures of fear and dread. yeah this is the dude responsible for the death star, he should be scary!

great eps once again. just now realizing that the drunk guy involved in the tragic conflict in ep 6 was the same guy complaining about the imperial convoys being too loud at the resistance meeting

i forget the exact context (was it syril trying to convince the ghormans or vice versa?) but my fav moment was when they posit a deep state conspiracy. “the isb has secretly taken control. the emperor might not even know what’s going on!”

Yeah I loved that. Another great detail to show their naïveté

It was fun after my question about mass media to have Bix watching TV in the very next batch of episodes.

How weird to see Ruby Wax presenting Good Morning Coruscant.

Just saw ep 6 and good tension tho I thought they would have Krenmic or Sculdun notice a drop of (Kleya's) blood on the floor by the piece at the end.

I was anticipating some silly moment between Syril and Cassian on Ghorman, like maybe just Syril noticing him from a distance and doing a double take. Probably best they resisted that.

Just posting some first three episode thoughts here, while avoiding looking up thread for spoilers. I was *really* disappointed with the first two episodes, Cassian struggling to fly the ship in the hanger aside. The juxtaposition of needing to hold Cassian up for a bit with some goofballs and the ponderous wedding build-up was really tedious and tonally jarring, even if said goofballs come back to fulfil Mon Mothma's 'encouraging stupid rebels to do the wrong thing' plot.

That said, the end of episode 3/Arc 1 pay-off, with Mon Mothma losing herself in the dance to annihilate thoughts of Tay's abduction/murder, juxtaposed with the death Brasso and Cassian and co's last minute escape was certainly something. Also actual lols at Cyril collapsed on his bed while Dedra Meero takes on his mother, and that whole scene, taken with the wedding made it feel like a space version of A Bit of a Do* or something.

not really sure about the bucolic idyll tropes on Mina Rau is it? plus side - speeders thru corn. administrative emptiness and evil continues to get its dues - the 'propaganda' presentation at Orson Krennic's team away day, red tape manipulation as precursor to attempted rape of Bix. And just in general, the moments of disorder and confusion that take place when attacks or something surprising happens.

*UPDATE on watching some of A Bit of a Do: *not* really that much like A Bit of a Do, other than 'big party plus comedy of manners' - I'd forgotten the north/south family dynamic at the heart of it.

i was also disappointed. the story bogs down immediately. in contrast to S01 none of the squabbling rebels are distinguishable. things do pick up w e03 but tbh last night i started e04 and realised that e04’s “last time on…” is really all you need. nothing seemed to actually happen. the bix confrontation was probably the most intense and moving thing in those first three eps, but did it add anything to her story or character that wasn’t already there? in general it was really surprising to me how little story seemed to actually take place. ditto the syril/dedra stuff. we’ve already seen the mom dynamic. what does this add? there was this funny moment where we see tut both of them trying on clothes. an important moment! but actually - it’s obvious neither of them care about the mother. so why did we get these little character moments? it feels indulgent - somebody in the cast or writing staff thought it would be fun to see them doing this.

e04 is a different kettle of fish. there’s a real story starting and i’m looking forward to it.

whitaker's delivery is a p straight tom-baker-as-who rip, prove me wrong

on-line someone said no it's anthony hopkins as hannibal, but here's the thing: no it isn't its tom baker

the problem with kathryn hunter's character is that it totally messes with the show;s ambient message: that life is boring as shit at every level of the empire and increasingly shit as you plane down the levels

but kathryn hunter as yr mom is the opposite of this -- i mean its simple sitcom stuff but she is such a great actress (i love that she's getting more big film work) that everyone wants more of her and this unbalances the project

yes im saying they shd make the whole plane out of kathryn hunter: then rename it and deliver it as a difft SW project (it shd be the actually grebt sitcom everyone in the empire loves and watches)

this also solves the problem of where's the media^^^

_One Eedy At A Time_

the model is bewitched! there's a whole andora/endora/endor* deal ready for use!

*(the whole empire loves comedy ewok, a lovely ewok that delivers comedy *five minutes later* etc)

(guess how much work i am supposed to be doing today)

This works. They should just keep it as a sitcom though – I drifted away from Wandavision towards the end when all the big MCU battle stuff took over

yes that sucked obviously (i didn't watch it)

I think the funniest part of the Syril/Mom bit was when he was lying about already being at work and it did double duty -- he's this put-upon son who is trying to make it sound like he's a responsible adult, but it was also this ploy where she's his unwitting accomplice in setting up a back story for his spy work.

Her perpetual insistence that his current job is below his station plays right into his cover of being a disaffected imperial

and his pathetic eagerness to Be Important

“excellent work, cyril”. sly writer’s joke or no? with anton lesser delivering they can’t not have been aware…

well the plan was to foment a resistance that they could count on to screw up...