It was 2016 and I remember watching the trailer for Rogue One and getting so excited hearing Forest Whitaker speaking ominously and enigmatically. There was something gritty and dirty and threatening after the shining polish of Force Awakens. I was looking forward to seeing that movie and then in theaters I saw… a movie certainly but not quite the movie I was hoping for.
Fast forward a few years later when Andor was announced and here was a show that seemed designed in a lab for me. It was all about exploring the grey areas of Star Wars, the moral ambiguities and imperial bureaucracy. Given my love of John LeCarre and the West End Games Imperial Sourcebook I was absolutely primed to love this show and… I didn’t. Not at first anyway.
My review of season 1 of Andor talked about how Rachel and I didn’t connect with it. It felt cold and joyless. We thought it was missing something of that sense of friendship and camaraderie that so defined what we wanted out of Star Wars. We could recognize the quality of the acting and the writing but it just didn’t quite hit us in the same way we saw it hit others. A little while back I went and rewatched season 1 and I liked it more a second time around. I think some of my concerns still held up but I was in more of the right headspace to appreciate it on its own terms.
After revisiting it, I felt ready to sit down and watch season 2 and discovered that this is what I wanted all along. Season 2 of Andor is all over the place. Literally. It’s jumping through time and following so many different story lines on so many different planets. It’s a lot to keep in your head and yet they managed to pull off the trick of making you care about these people largely by showing what they have to live for – showing their connections, their families, their friends, their missions and it works. It works phenomenally.
I’m trying to parse just what it was about this season that clicked in a way that season 1 didn’t originally. I’ll confess that the secret buffet meeting based almost certainly on the Wannsee Conference and my favorite movie didn’t hurt. Was it the exploration of how fractious resistance movements are? Maybe it was the many episodes we spent among the space French which itself was based on West End Games roleplaying supplements:
Whatever the reason, this season picked up the baton from the previous season and ran like hell. Knowing the larger scale of the story also added an amazing frisson. I’ve seen the Death Star blow up countless times and yet I could feel my heart race as these particular characters raced and fought to make that possible. It’s telling that as I finished the series I was getting into unwise Internet fights about George RR Martin and arguing that it does ultimately matter if Game of Thrones is finished because the story along the way is so compelling and Andor proves me right.
As I was watching this show an episode would end and I’d think to myself, “Wow! If that was the end of the of the season they did a great job” and there would be another episode to go and that just kept happening. The stakes were so intense and the pace was unrelenting. It was fantastic and when we got to the actual end and I saw how they tied everything up literally taking us to moments before Rogue One starts, I was floored.
I’m probably going to go and rewatch Rogue One and I’m kind of worried about it because I think Andor has built it up so much in my head and I’m going to see CG face Tarkin and all the the weirdness of that movie and its somewhat disjointed nature. But I am curious to see if Andor did the really hard job of taking a previous work of art and making it better retroactively. Regardless, I imagine I will have Forest Whitaker in my head whispering “What will you become?”