Andor (Disney+ 2022)

 

There is rarely consensus in Star Wars fandom, or indeed in SF fandom more broadly, but something approaching that has been arrived at with regard to Andor (Disney/Lucasfilm 2022). It is, everyone is saying, the best Star Wars for a long time, perhaps the best since the original trilogy.

It’s a prequel: the story of how Cassian Andor (played with ingenuous charisma by Diego Luna) goes from being a ‘rebellion-averse’ cynic to a mainstay of the revolution against the Galactic Empire, which is how he appears in Rogue One (2006), itself an immediate prequel to Star Wars: a New Hope (1977). Now, there is, it seems to me, something very interesting about the logic of ‘the prequel’, and especially its popularity as a mode at the moment, and part of me thinks it has to do with Spoiler Culture. What I mean is: the outraged reflex to deplore ‘spoilers’ has metastasised, become a culture in its own right, looms over SF as if the only thing that matters about a text—about a film, a book, a TV series—is not knowing what’s going to happen next in its plot. How angry people get when reviews, or social media, or casual chat ‘spoil’ a text for them! Furious, furious. It’s getting silly, frankly.

I’m not denying that there can be pleasures in the unexpectedness of plot-motion, but I am suggesting the deeper satisfactions of storytelling lie elsewhere. Rereading is more profoundly pleasurable than reading. Just as Greek audiences for Attic tragedy already knew the stories they went to watch (the point of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays is not ‘ohmygod what’s going to happen next? Will the king live happily ever aaaafter?’—the point is how the dramatist frames and tells the story we already know), so a prequel show like Better Call Saul works as well as it does—better than Breaking Bad, according to many—in large part because we know where the overall story is going, so we can concentrate on how it gets there.

Andor certainly benefits from that. Nor does this pre-knowledge destroy narrative tension. For example: we know that Mon Mothma (an excellent performance by Genevieve O’Reilly, whose mask of poise and self-command never obviously slips and yet who nevertheless communicates to the audience all her inner turmoil) survives the show, because she’s right there, in the original trilogy. But Andor nonetheless generates genuine tension out of the precarity of her position as an Imperial senator struggling to keep her secret life secret.

It’s also true that Andor benefits from good writing, good acting and absolutely superb set- and prop-design, costumery and special effects—it so completely inhabits its illogical ‘it’s the 1970s and all the tech is clunky and old-fashioned and fat-buttoned and yet also somehow super-advanced artificial-gravity laser-pistol and FTL spaceships’ idiom that it feels utterly believable. The script keeps a large number of characters in play and almost all are vivid and engaging (some of the ordinary-proles-on-Ferrix are perhaps a bit interchangeable, and Varada Sethu’s rebel agent Cinta Kaz isn’t given much to do, other than moon about as the romantic foil to Faye Marsay’s more substantially-written rebel agent Vel Sartha). But in the main the whole is superbly accomplished, high-spec, quality TV drama.

After a slightly awkward prelude—our hero, Cassian, is searching for his lost sister on a distant planet and ends up killing an imperial soldier (the ‘lost sister’ plotline is then simply dropped for the rest of the series)—the show settles into four nicely chewy main acts. The first is set on the blue-collar industrial world of Ferrix. We are introduced to Syril Karn, an imperial Deputy Inspector: a wonderfully stiff-necked creepy performance by Kyle Soller, this, playing the character as an emotionally stunted incel who has, in a strangulated sort of way, internalised an eroticised version of imperial tyranny as ‘order and beauty’. Karn tries to track down and arrest Andor, but the operation blows up, people are killed, Andor escapes and Karn is dishonourably discharged (what the show does with the rest of his storyline is masterful).

Act 2 takes us to the rural world of Aldhani: Andor has been recruited by Stellan Skarsgård’s rebel bigwig Luthen Rael and sent to join an operation—a heist, effectively: stealing a fortune in cash from an Imperial base. In Act 3, the Empire reacts to this affront by tightening its authoritarian grip, and Andor (who has walked away with his fee, wanting nothing more to do with the rebellion) gets sent, with bizarre arbitrariness, to an Imperial jail. If Act 2 is a heist movie, Act 3 is a prison break movie, and it leads into Act 4 which takes us back to Ferrix and the denouement.

It's a broad canvas with lots going on, and mostly the show juggles its disparate elements well. There are odd sunspots. The Imperial Prison controls its inmates by forcing them to walk around barefoot on a floor that can be electrified at any time, and Andor defeats this technology by breaking a water pipe, flooding and thereby short-circuiting the system, which seems a little screwy to me (wouldn’t the inmates just take off their uniforms and wrap them around their feet, to avoid being zapped?) I puzzled mildly how it can be that Cassian Andor has a Mexican accent where his mother, Fiona Shaw’s Maarva Andor, has an Irish one—beyond, of course, the fact that the actor Shaw is Irish and the actor Diego Luna is Mexican. [Update: Twitter tells me that Fiona Shaw is actually Andor's adoptive mother which, er, OK?]. That’s pettifogging of me, except that there did seem something underbaked about the representational logic of the show. Here’s a question: why are all the show’s Imperial officers human? Wouldn’t the Empire hire talented (talented-at-fascism, I mean) officers from everywhere? There are all sorts of funky alien species knocking around the Star Wars universe after all. (The obvious answer to my question is that, setting aside the in-text logic of the show’s worldbuilding, the Empire figures tyrannical uniformity, racism, oppression and hostility to ‘the Other’, where the rebel alliance figures diversity and acceptance and love and rainbows and so on. But in Andor there are plenty of female and POC imperial officers, so in terms of contemporary hiring practice the Empire looks weirdly progressive, actually—compared, say, to the original trilogy).

But I thoroughly enjoyed this show, and am happy to join the consensus: it is the best Star Wars since the original series. I have seen it praised as more realistic than, let’s say, the sequel trilogy, because it eschews both Jedi knights and Sith warriors, with their force-magic fairy-tale shenanigans. There are none of either in the show, and excluding them from this story was a top-drawer decision by the show-runners, although its strength is not that it makes the series ‘realistic’—a daft thing to claim about a space-opera really—but that it deprives the writers of the magic plotty ‘get out of jail free card’ that the Jedi and their improbable skills represent. Instead the show portrays the rebellion as effortful, as entailing genuine costs, as a struggle, and does so convincingly. And, with the brief post-credits sequence after the show’s twelfth and last episode giving us a glimpse of the Death Star being assembled, I got a particular frisson. It wasn’t the fan-service (though I’m certainly not immune to that). It was the sense I got, determined by precisely the prequel-nature of the show, that the heroism, labour and struggle of the rebellion, of rebellion as such in the world, was being slyly satirised. ‘You see how hard it is?’ the show seemed to be saying to me, ‘you see what people must sacrifice? How torturous revolution is, sometimes literally? How ruthless? You see how it is a thousand separate small actions and intentions aggregating over time that build a movement? You see what human price must be paid, in broken relationships, in lives lived in terror, in mutilation and death? Well,’ the show was went on, ‘this is how such things end, and it’s not with collective action, collective courage and determination. No: things can only be brought to consummation by a magic teenage space-wizard using his magic abilities magically to blow-up the giant sphere of oppression.’ That’s an acidic commentary on the nature of political struggle, if ever I saw one.