Andor‘s greatness makes it kinda tough to love other Star Wars shows
Season three of The Mandalorian will surely hit differently now that Andor has raised the bar for these series
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[Editor’s note: The following includes spoilers from the first seasons of Andor and The Book Of Boba Fett, as well as the first two seasons of The Mandalorian.]
There’s an old song lyric that randomly pops into my head whenever I think about the Disney+ show Andor: “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” It’s a wartime song about the fear that soldiers returning home from Europe would no longer be content with a simple country life. Star Wars fans can surely relate. Luke didn’t go back to Tatooine after blowing up the Death Star, did he? And now that Andor has redefined what a Star Wars show can be, it may be jarring transitioning back to something as straightforward as, say, The Mandalorian, which kicks off its third season on March 1.
This isn’t meant as a critique of The Mandalorian. Until recently, it was the gold standard for live-action Star Wars shows. It had widespread appeal (all that Baby Yoda merch) and proved there was a way to successfully mix nostalgia for old-school fans with new adventures their kids could enjoy along with them. I’ve been looking forward to seeing Grogu and his Mando dad get back to exploring the galaxy together since they were reunited in the season-one finale of The Book Of Boba Fett. The continuation of their story was the best thing about that series, and, yes, that is meant as a critique of The Book Of Boba Fett.
With The Mandalorian about to return, we’ll soon be heading back into a world of living action figures in beskar armor and pew-pew shoot ’em ups with laser blasters. It will likely bring back a lot of other Star Wars elements that Andor eschewed, including Jedi, lightsabers, and the Force. I mean, the show’s breakout star is a practical puppet. Grogu is admittedly adorable, but it’s hard to imagine him gliding down the streets of Ferrix in his floating pram. “This is the way” seems so quaint now compared to “one way out.”
How Andor re-energized Star Wars by avoiding Star Wars
The Star Wars fandom is notoriously rancorous (an apt pun) and prone to infighting, so when fans rally around a series the way they have for Andor, it’s a minor miracle. The show’s excellence can be attributed to many things—compelling characters, a solid script, tight suspense, sharp dialogue—but most of it comes down to showrunner Tony Gilroy’s sensibilities and the fresh perspective he brought to this universe.
Best known for the Bourne films and the legal thriller Michael Clayton, Gilroy isn’t really a Star Wars guy, and doesn’t hesitate to say so in interviews. It turns out, that made him the perfect choice to tell the backstory of Cassian Andor, a fan favorite since his first appearance in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which Gilroy rewrote late into the production).
Gilroy set out to tell realistic, street-level stories within the Star Wars universe that didn’t rely on the same old tropes. He also intended to aim for a more mature audience than the previous Disney+ shows. The characters in Andor swear, fuck, kill, lie, steal, and cheat, and that’s just the good guys. One of Andor’s first scenes is set in a brothel, followed by the title character committing double manslaughter in an alleyway. It’s almost as if Gilroy was testing the streamer to see how far he could push the boundaries into mature content. In fact, as he revealed in an interview with Variety, that’s exactly what he was doing. That opened the door to a world of possibilities limited only by the established rules of Star Wars canon (no paper, no wheels, no knives, and all the rest of it.).
The irony is that the originality that made Andor stand out is the same thing that makes it unrepeatable. If other creators start thinking that all Star Wars fans want is grit and grime, that’s the wrong lesson to learn from its success. There’s no formula for novelty. Future shows (including the ones already in development) will have to figure out their own way to be different.
Shifting gears for season 3 of The Mandalorian
Have we, like many of the characters in Andor, been so radicalized by this new way of thinking about the nature of the Star Wars universe that we can’t go back to something as family friendly as The Mandalorian? Of course not. But it’s going to take some adjusting.
Bear in mind that the influence of executive producer Dave Filoni—the driving force behind the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels—can’t be understated. Next to George Lucas himself, there’s probably no one who knows the universe better than Filoni, but he’s understandably very attached to the characters he created for the cartoons. We’ve already seen some of them in live-action in previous seasons, and it looks like this one will connect to that lore even more directly. You don’t have to know the history of Bo-Katan or Mandalore or the Darksaber to understand their importance to the story, but it helps.
If it seems weird to go from suicide-mission heists, jailbreaks, creeping fascism, and funeral dirges to a fight over Space Excalibur, well, that’s because it is.
There’s another big difference too, in the way these shows are filmed. The Mandalorian was the first to make use of ILM’s state-of-the-art VFX stage known as The Volume. Andor was the first not to use it. The Volume is a massive improvement over greenscreen, but the technology is still relatively new and not without its limitations. It allows the actors to feel like they’re immersed in the environment and saves on post-production costs, but virtual scenery is no substitute for the real thing. Andor felt expansive because it was filmed in wide-open spaces and locations that grounded it in reality. Going back to projections now may feel constricting. Or it could just feel like the established aesthetic of the show we’re used to watching.
This galaxy contains multitudes
Is it cynical to look at the success of Andor as a bad thing? Maybe so. It’s going to be hard to top it, but certainly not impossible. Star Wars is a large sandbox with plenty of room to play in, and its fans are not a homogeneous group. There’s room for everyone to hold onto what they love and ignore the rest. At least, there should be.
Following the new season of The Mandalorian, we’re getting a handful of upcoming shows which will really test the idea of how crowded this universe can get without feeling overstuffed. Next up is Ahsoka, another Filoni and Jon Favreau team-up focusing on the live-action version of the character from The Clone Wars. We first saw Rosario Dawson’s version of her in season two of The Mandalorian, and now she’ll get a spinoff of her own. This one seems to fit in with the existing shows in a way that some of the others may not.
Also on the slate is Skeleton Crew from Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts and starring Jude Law. The official logline describes it as a “galactic version of classic Amblin coming-of-age adventure films of the ’80s.” Following that will be The Acolyte, helmed by Russian Doll creator Leslye Headland. It’s going to be a sci-fi-tinged mystery-thriller set in the final days of the High Republic era. The cast includes Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix), Jodie Turner-Smith (White Noise), Lee Jung-Jae (Squid Game), Manny Jacinto (The Good Place), and Charlie Barnett (Russian Doll).
It all sounds like the kind of thing Star Wars should be doing right now—giving creators a voice to tell their own stories with a shared galactic backdrop. Time will tell whether this strategy pays off. Having a show that’s too popular is a problem most franchises would love to have so, all things considered, it’s a pretty good time to be a Star Wars fan.
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Shennanigans. Mando will either be good, or not. It won’t be “less” because Andor was great. Boba Fett wasn’t “less” because Andor was great, it was just shitty. Make good stuff. That’s all that really matters.
I think for me personally that what I want most from Star Wars is good stuff with new characters and storylines.It’s been almost half a century (!) since Star Wars debuted its Universe to the world and we’re still hung up on one storyline and set of characters. Judging solely from the franchise’s output, the “galaxy far, far away” must be the smallest one in all of creation.Andor was hopefully the first baby step toward something new, even though it’s still attached to that narrative throughline. I hope it’s not the last.
“Andor was hopefully the first baby step toward something new, even though it’s still attached to that narrative throughline.”
I’m curious why you consider Andor to be closer to “new characters and storylines” than Mando.
Still waiting for Mando to be “good stuff”
Sounds like a “you” problem then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by the nature of the statement, it is literally the shows problem.
The Mandalorian has a 95% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 92% audience score. It’s IMDB rating is 8.7/10 where it’s ranked as the #86 Top TV Show of All Time, notably above The Boys at #88 and Downton Abbey at #96. It has 14 Prime Time Emmy wins, with another 58 award wins from various outlets.At this point, you’re in the minority, and factually, that makes your negative reception to it your own problem to tend to. You’re welcome to say “It’s not for me…” but the question of it being “good” or “bad” isn’t up for debate when a massive majority of the people that view it and share opinions on it say it’s good.Perceptive reception can be a fault of the viewer having no interest, in which the content made plainly isn’t for them. But that doesn’t mean it’s “bad” by any means. One person’s opinion doesn’t matter that much.So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I’ll be the only one here who agrees with you, I’m sure. But man, I have never bought into this show. Shallow can be fun, no immediate examples come to mind but there are multitudes, but I found this laughably bare of anything resembling story, character arc, or fun. Cartoons have more weight (Filoni’s in particular) than this show. Favreau’s fault? I don’t know, but it never worked on this ol’ timer Star Wars guy. I’m not usually a hater, but I never, ever understood the passion folks have for this one.
Mando is flying by on the Clone Wars effect — a few great episodes sticking in memory and plenty of mediocre to bad ones. Truth is, BoBF’s premiere had more viewers than Mando S2’s finale did. BoBF’s finale had the exact same viewers as its premiere.People stayed for Boba Fett and bailed on Mandalorian S2 and fandom just isn’t aware that people are having wildly different responses to Star Wars things than they want them to. (Case in point, Obi-Wan viewership blows both of these shows out of the water. Andor viewership has been abyssmal.)The viewing numbers, in my opinion, aren’t particularly fair given the quality of the shows and we can argue that all day, but let’s also go back to the fact that only the first Mando solo episode in BoBF was excellent. Hell, the second episode where Luke and Grogu play act like it’s Dagobah and Djarin lies on a bench for an hour doing absolutely nothing is probably the single worst episode of live action Star Wars TV ever conceived.That 50/50 quality of the content was more consistently spread out in BoBF given it had hour-long episodes and Mando had half-hour episodes. While Mando followed this pattern of swinging between gold and garbage every other episode (as we saw in BoBF), Book of Boba Fett usually had its garbage right alongside its gold partitioned off into wonderful flashbacks and aimless present day stuff that kept stumbling into dead ends.
Truth is, BoBF’s premiere had more viewers than Mando S2’s finale did. BoBF’s finale had the exact same viewers as its premiere.People stayed for Boba Fett and bailed on Mandalorian S2 and fandom just isn’t aware that people are having wildly different responses to Star Wars things than they want them to. (Case in point, Obi-Wan viewership blows both of these shows out of the water. Andor viewership has been abyssmal.)Not surprising, since Disney+ had about 30 million more subscribers by the time BOBF was released.
I’m not usually a hater, but I never, ever understood the passion folks have for this one.That sort of happens to a degree on any show. For me, I have never understood the passion people have for Rebels or Clone Wars (and it is not because they are both animated. I enjoy all sorts of animated stuff). But I am a big fan of The Mandalorian (although I was a bigger fan of Andor). And BoBF really fell off for me after around the 1st 2 episodes.
Rebels and Clone Wars were aimed at younger audiences, but they at least had coherent (if simplistic) narratives and character arcs. I watched a whole lot of Clone Wars over my kids’ shoulders when they were younger, and while I wasn’t particularly excited by it, it seemed fine. I assume Rebels is along the same lines.
Mando and BOBF, on the other hand, fail catastrophically in terms of basic narrative storytelling. It was astonishing.
I don’t understand how that’s the case for Mando. If anything, the criticism seems like it would be that the basic narrative is too obvious and trope-worn. Tough guy protecting young innocent gradually softens. They have episode adventures in the meantime.Personally, that’s not a negative for me (in general I’m fine with storytellers using established tropes as the bones of a story), but I certainly don’t see an absence of arcs or a failure to present a narrative.
“Tough guy protecting young innocent gradually softens.”That’s the premise. I have no problem with the premise. The narrative is the sequence of events that occurs, hopefully with a plausible cause-and-effect. That’s where Mando frequently broke down (a lot more in the second season than the first). Every episode, I was constantly slapping my forehead, wondering why the characters were acting like complete morons, wondering why the dialogue was proceeding in a way that made no sense, wondering why it seemed like a sequence of Cool Moments that had no properly-developed narrative tissue connecting them.
Yup. 100%
You’re not the only one.
Agree. I find it mildly entertaining most of the time. Occasionally better, occasionally worse. But it’s stunningly simplistic and unambitious, which is the polar opposite of Andor.
There’s a collection of scenes in the Mando heist episode where they go from room to room wiping out Stormtroopers like they’re made of paper with no sense of danger or urgency. Just pow pow down they go. I felt sorry for those mofos! The good guys we’re so overpowered it made them almost diabolical… until they get to the exterior docking platform and suddenly they get overwhelmed by plot contrived, superior troopers (?) just so they could have that “smash through them with a troop speeder” moment and man… I laughed at how weak ass it was. I mean, do that! It’s fine to have that cool moment, but work just a little harder to give it meaning. And I know, Andor is different because it treats the materials through a new lense, and that lense doesn’t need to be shared from show to show, but like I said… the cartoons would’ve made it tougher on the heroes and earned that moment more than Mando did.Also… The Volume. It ain’t doing it. Mando handles it better than Obi Wan did though. Holy crap.
You’re not. It’s dull. I actually think the Boba Fett episodes of Mandalorian were the best ones.
I never, ever understood the passion folks have for this one.
Star Wars + Sergio Leone influences + cute baby Yoda..
Not hard to understand.
And there are cartoons that “have more weight” than most live-action shows. Grave of the Fireflies, When the Wind Blows, etc.
Still waiting for Andor to not be boring.
100 percent this. Of course The Mandalorian Season 3 won’t be Andor. It’ll be The Mandalorian Season 3. Compartmentalization: try it! (also, my super unpopular opinion is that Andor was great and would have been even better if it wasn’t a Star Wars show).
But Mando has never been “good.” It’s been mostly okay, kinda mediocre. Entertaining, but deeply shallow. Compared to Andor, its weaknesses are even more starkly apparently.
That’s not what “shenanigans” means
I liked the book of boba Fett. Honestly, I would have preferred the boba Fett stories from during the original series. Before return of the Jedi. That’s when all the real material was written, and those were great stories. But we can’t have that because of the age of the actor who plays boba, and they are not going to CGI him younger every episode for it.The only thing I didn’t like was clipping in the mandalorian episode into the book of boba Fett. That seemed really odd. Plus I did not want to see Grogu comeback until he was a little bit older and more trained.I wanted the third season of The mandalorian to be without Grogu because Mando is going back to mandalore
Yep. The quality of Andor being a 1970s dystopian political scifi story doesn’t diminish Mandalorian being a spaghetti western. ( even though, I not quite sure that’s what Mandolaorian is anymore)
Boba Fett was fun and Star Wars-y. Andor was dullsville and from some other property.
Boba Fett was really just The Mandalorian season 2.5
It’s kind of surprising that Mando has maintained the momentum that it has while having to stop periodically to set up several other shows.
I kinda hope if anything, the success of Andor would put more emphasis on the scripts for other series too. I think the problem is that most of these shows assume that fans only want fantastic visuals and the actual stories are like vessel for providing those.I personally (and I think I’m not alone with this) would like to see better scripts with sensical plots in more scifi and fantasy series. Not just half assed fan fiction with pretty visuals. Expanse did well in this area as did GoT and HoD.
Nah, most of us can understand how different shows are different.
Count me as one that can’t. I still can’t get over how Star Wars wants it every way, all ways, all the time, to everyone. The whole franchise is a cum-guzzling whore who will fuck anyone for a red cent and a ride home. Every time someone says “you’ll love this SW show/movie” it’s like them saying “I tried this food, here, you LIKE food”. Star Wars is so generic, SO scattershot, so pitifully shapeless. The fans guzzle up anything they’re fed. Who cares if Audience A doesn’t like it? Audience B will eat it right up! We can’t lose! Maybe y’all don’t remember when Disney was up its own ass like this in the 1990s. Anyone with a milligram of self-respect knew that a Disney movie was media for pussies. The worst thing in the world was attending a sleepover and seeing a Disney movie get put into the VCR. They’ve done the same thing with Star Wars, inventing a whole new universe where anything can happen and you never have to leave. Just like one of their parks. What a colossal waste of time.
“Anyone with a milligram of self-respect knew that a Disney movie was media for pussies.”Jesus dude take a chill pill.
I once raged over this… back when I bought tix for Phantom Menace… and again when the 3rd trilogy was forced down my throat. Now I’m just openly bitter toward Star Wars. I’m just so glad even the stans in my neighborhood are finally getting the message that not everyone has time to see whatever’s been recently shat out in the the name of. (And yeah in 1988 we didn’t watch Disney, the kids with bikes and a dollar watched grindhouse and Predator and sex comedies)
Pretty sure nobody forced you to watch any of that, if they did you probably should have called the cops. I skipped watching both Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith in the theater, I have a feeling you could have too.
“And yeah in 1988 we didn’t watch Disney, the kids with bikes and a dollar watched grindhouse and Predator and sex comedies”I wouldn’t know about the grindhouse, in 1988 I was busy saving up all my dollars so I could buy an NES. Watched the hell out of some taped off of HBO free preview weekend Predator and felt lucky enough for that, only a few years before that we couldn’t even afford to own a VCR and had to rent one once every few months.
Man, my house had so many recorded HBO movies. Watched the hell out of a fuzzy Empire Strikes Back VHS in those days. Gladdens the heart to hear others did this.
Oh hell yeah, we had stacks of tapes with 3 movies each recorded from the free preview week/weekends.
You maybe arguing with someone trying and failing to satire. Either way, pull the ripcord.
You okay? Want an aspirin or something?
I’m good, thanks!
Sorry, that was meant for Sinatra up there. He seems stressed.
Such a strange comment. Like yea – kids in elementary school and middle school were overly concerned with being judged based on what they watched by asshole bullies. So we all avoided watching specific stuff or at minimum, talking about it, even if we enjoyed it. I remember being made fun of for enjoying anime when I was in middle school. But aren’t you an adult now? Kind of sad if you still have a middle school bully’s mentality as an adult.
Ugh. This is the same line of thought that’s led to the Marvel backlash, isn’t it? “I liked this thing, so this other thing is going to suck.” It amuses me that at the time I’m writing this, every single response is some variation of “uh, no, audiences are adults and can recognize that more than one thing can be enjoyable for different reasons”.
It reeks of that smugness of looking for a reason to hate things or call them bad.
The Marvel backlash has been going on for six or seven years. They just finally got a movie that fully aligned with their point.
“Comic book fatigue” has been a lazy entertainment writer’s go-to trope since like 2002.
I’m not so sure that’s true; having trouble finding any mention of the term that predates like 2019 or so, and few articles prior to 2016 that express such exhaustion.
Maybe not that specific term, but people have been calling comic book movies a fad that was about to die since like X-Men 2, if not earlier.
I feel like it’s a bit of the opposite – Star Wars is backing away from its central OT-connected themes in a way that looks promising. This is the same argument fans of The Last Jedi made – it’s a huge universe, there are great stories to be told about the billions/trillions of people who inhabit it, the Jedi don’t know every fucking thing.
Not sure if you read the same article.
eh, my expectations for S3 of Mando are extremely low, so hopefully i’ll be pleasantly surprised. just not really interested in the fight for rulership of Mandalore. ughthat said, Mando and Andor are very different shows with different tones, so no i don’t expect mando to be like Andor or vice versa.
You might be overthinking this. Andor was a great show but it never once changed my expectations for what other shows, especially one with two seasons under its belt, needed to be. There’s plenty of room for both serious fare like Andor and more traditional Star Wars with The Mandalorian. There’s no one formula to making TV shows or movies work and anyone expecting that has a pretty narrow view of what entertainment should be.
Exactly. Just because Andor was a more serious show it doesn’t mean Mando has to suddenly become that kind of show. Sometimes we just like fun shows, too. Mando is doing just fine on its own terms.
Yep, it’s like what the MCU was at the beginning — at no point did I think that a period action film (The First Avenger) would inform how the massive team-up film (The Avengers) would work, let alone prepare me for the 70s spy thriller version of Cap afterwards (The Winter Soldier).It’s fine for there to be good AND different series humming along — it makes it better, in fact.
Andor has changed my expectations for what Star Wars can be. I totally agree that there is plenty of room for all types of Star Wars shows, and the author of the article does as well. For me, though, the bar has been set higher as to the quality of the show. Compare Andor to Boba Fett and you see how much better Star Wars can be. Doesn’t mean you have to match the seriousness of Andor. But man, it made the other shows(and I enjoyed the Mandalorian and Obi Wan) look cheap and poorly written.
Now that Citizen Kane’s been released, how can I enjoy Man Getting Hit By Football in the Groin? With absolute pleasure, and a minor amount of wincing, that’s how.
Is it wierd that I really don’t like the whole “gritty, grey” Star Wars? For me, space wizards and lasers swords is what made Star Wars better than a lot of other boilerplate sci-fi. With Last Jedi, Andor, and Rogue One, it feels like kind of dark fan fiction that reduces Star Wars to just typical political sci-fi to me, which is funny because most of the time recently people rail against the whole “gritty reboot” phenomena with a lot of stuff, but with Star Wars it’s so welcome.
That said, I do enjoy the storylines of the KOTOR series, but they had a certain nuance that these series and Last Jedi just lacked in spades. Also the prequels sucked- there’s a limit to the amount of “magic” I can handle in that regard too, but I dunno, this stuff just doesn’t interest me.
My favorite part was when they won the star war.
I’m not even sure I can accept the premise. Andor and Mando might both be in the Star Wars universe, but they are different in nearly every way, so much so that I can’t even incorporate “lessons learned” from Andor into what to expect from Mando.Yes, Andor is the best SW show by a country mile. Mando is great for its own reasons. I can enjoy pew pew nonsense and merchandise ploys just as well as I can enjoy a three-episode arc shot in the Scottish highlands or Andy Serkis giving one of the better performances of his career.
1) invent problem2) write content3) admit there’s not much of a problem in your own conclusion4) ???5) AV Club
Nearly unlimited free shit to read on the internet is bound to lead to diminishing returns.That is why I seldom read the pablum anymore. I just come down to the comments to make dick jokes.
Please do.
That cheap circumcision turned out to be a real ripoff.
…of cock. Literally.
Don’t spoonfeed my audience.There isn’t enough cock to go around.
Just a shame when there’s so many good shows they could be reviewing instead of writing/trolling like this.
Might even get readers to care about the articles here again, instead of just clicking and going straight to the comments to check that everyone’s not falling for this rubbish.
You want the old AV Club. That requires time travel.Safety not guaranteed.
I think they do it so the people who agree with the headline can bicker in the comments with the people who agree with the conclusion.
Not everyone is an internet nihillist.
Who?
I just had this same experience talking to somebody from The Ringer claiming there could be “audience fatigue” with the Marvel movies. Now they’re saying “some critics could be fatigued,” which is a whole other thing.
I certainly appreciated Andor putting effort into characters, rather than into references to a cartoon I didn’t watch.(I have since started watching The Clone Wars and I quite enjoy it, however)
There’s a fundamental problem with Star Wars – it was intended to be one film, basically an homage/art project, that everyone expected to be an interesting failure, including George Lucas and Alan Ladd, Jr. When it became a phenomenon, the retconning of its origin story started immediately, including the notion that there was this “wider universe” and that all of the characters had back stories and there were sequels being written (ie Episode IV), if only the movie was a success. But that was never the case. George Lucas DID have back stories for the characters in the same way any writer comes up with a basic “what made this character who they are” sort of dossier. Read the original making-of accounts. That’s blatantly obvious to even the non-obsessives in the permutation of all of the relationships in ESB and RotJ, then the sequels. The modern creators are beholden to that foundational story. That small galaxy of only a few characters, because that’s what the fans care about… because that’s what Star Wars is. We care about Luke, Leia, Han, the droids, Vader, Obi Wan, Yoda. We care about the Jedi and the Empire and some ancient good vs evil storytelling based on mythical archetypes and even tropes. That’s Star Wars. And the tone of those original films – the mashup of spaghetti western, samurais, Flash Gordon – is essential to telling that story. Not saying you can’t adult it up like Andor, or animate it like The Clone Wars. But if you decide to modernize it because a movie franchise like Marvel or god help us Transformers has some cultural cachet, than you’ve blown it (and yes, I’m looking right at JJ Abrams here). You could stretch the storytelling galaxy out and drop the audience into a far distant corner of the galaxy where none of the characters has ever heard of any of those OG characters, or maybe even know about the Empire or the Jedi or any of that… but then is it Star Wars? Or is it just another tangentially sci-fi movie, like Avatar? If that were the case, what prevents Avatar from existing in the Star Wars Universe? Or Dune? Or Marvel?For whatever faults the Mandoverse stuff can be assigned, it’s at least tonally consistent, abides the storytelling rules of the Star Wars universe, while adding its own bit of lore to the larger story that is Star Wars. Just my $.02, as a fan since the original was released.
Wow, now imagine you had the faculty to be able to like one thing, like ANOTHER thing, and yet STILL like that first thing!
Wow, what an incredible thing that would be, eh?
[Editor’s note: The following includes spoilers from the first seasons of Andor and The Book Of Boba Fett, as well as the first two seasons of The Mandalorian.]Luke didn’t go back to Tatooine after blowing up the Death Star, did he?Oh, fine, you’ll note spoilers for Andor and Boba Fett, but not A New Hope?
And he did go back to Tatooine!
So did ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ make it tough for you to love the rest of the movies?
Ew, the one where everyone takes a nap during the middle act?
You’re absolutely right. If you loved Andor and the way it presents a Star Wars universe, featuring unremarkable people doing remarkable things under the oppressive boot of the Empire, then you aren’t going to connect with a ‘Mandalorian’ or a ‘Boba Fett’ show where everything seems like an easier win while notable characters bump into each other regularly like the universe is tiny. It is possible to enjoy both but the Andor version is deliriously more fun to watch and get invested in.
I’m not gonna read this cuz I haven’t gotten far in Andor yet but I’d really like to try to finish it. I just wanted to say that it wasn’t Andor’s greatness that made it harder to love for me, it was walls and walls of dialogue.
I realize people like that aspect and in another context I find it dandy as well. But it’s just not what I go to a galaxy far far away for.
Here’s an example: I shouted “Aw yeah” when the lightsabers came on in the Mando 3 trailer (I realize this makes me a broken person but I like pew-pew).
To be honest your complaint is not that uncommon on Andor. The first few episodes ARE very slow and it IS exposition heavy. It does get far more exciting and tense as it goes along, so I would keep going if you are interested enough. But it is totally true that a lot of people either stick with it or drop by episode 3.
One of the smartest things they did with the show was release the first three episodes on day one, so people could see that whole arc and be assured that everything on the show was going somewhere.
I agree with the others here. Get through episode three and that groundwork pays off. If you’re hoping for non-stop pew pew, you might be disappointed, but it is a heist/espionage show.I especially like how they dole out TIE fighters, star destroyers, and other legacy stuff. It is all the more ominous when you hear a TIE coming up a valley, but don’t see it. The ISB is also more menacing when you see that bureaucracy up close.
Andor is super fucking dull and bloated the whole way through.
One (Andor) took inspiration from the original trilogy. Everything else so far has gone for the low brow, easy access fluff, and it pailful shows. In Andor the characters actually feel like they are living in the world. In all the other shows, the characters feel like they are just cosplaying on sets. At this point, there is no way to change that. People are in a way expecting it. Will these issues be highlighted more now? I do believe they will. There will always be a level of entertainment to them, but they will just be cheap rides.
Ewoks.*drops mic*
Just combine them into one super-show called Mandor.
Can Mandor ride a rancor on Endor?
Well done.
No knives? What’s that?
This article absolutely nails the deep deep conflict I feel between wanting to watch Succession knowing full well a shitty rerun of Blue Bloods may be airing at the same time. Eep!
They should add some golden agouti gerbils to all those desert planets in the star wars universe. Their ability to survive the arid Mongolian steppe would add a new level of realism.
Oh shut up. You got space gerbils.
What I imagined:
Yeah I’d probably watch that.
Hard agree. Andor is a compelling drama, Mando is decent fan service.
Andor made me finally recognize I wasn’t enjoying The Mandalorian and I no longer have to keep going back to it because there’s other stuff out there. I don’t think it’s a bad show, it’s just not my thing so I’m glad there’s more space (ha) for all sorts of Star Wars things.
Might be an unpopular opinion in the fandom, but Grogu’s return has me less excited about S3. I was surprised Disney had the guts to kill its darling and ride him off into the sunset. Between S2 being a series of Skywalker-adjacent cameos and backtracking Grogu’s departure in a completely different series altogether, my goodwill for this series is diminishing faster than I would’ve thought.
Nope. Andor makes it kinda tough to love LAZY Star Wars shows, like Boba Fett or Obi-Wan. Mando knows what it is, and the story it wants to tell. Sure, Luke shows up, but it’s heart is still Mando and Grogu. There’s room for serious fare like Andor, and pulpy Western fare. Hopefully there’s no more room for “Hey, remember this guy?” shows, that have no real narrative reason to exist.
But if it’s a backdoor pilot into a Porkins prequel series where he’s a private detective solving supernatural mysteries across the Outer Rim, we’ll allow it.
Andor was received the way it was primarily because of the novelty of getting that far away from the Skywalkers and other familiar elements of the Star Wars universe. But it still exists in dialogue with that universe. Most Star Wars content needs to involve space battles and lightsaber battles in order to create space for content that turns over rocks and asks questions like “what does a prison look like in this universe?” and “what did Imperial senators do all day if they’re functionally powerless?”It’s great, it’s refreshing, but ultimately it has to be limited. It’s interesting primarily because it’s covering nuts-and-bolts territory that is otherwise suffocated out of sight. The Mandalorian is creating “real” new Star Wars content that follows all the rules, and it’s not fair to compare it to Andor, which was deliberately constructed as an exception to those rules.
Nobody cares what you think. You’re an ableist, white supremacist piece of garbage.
This was a pretty good way to put it. For a long time there’s been a faction of Star Wars fandom that wants a Star Wars without the more fantastical stuff that, frankly, are cornerstone elements of what differentiates Star Wars from the other spaceship shows. Now that they got one, of course they think it’s the gold standard and that we’re past all those things that make it different from Battlestar Galactica. I liked it too! I’m glad it’s out there! But the thought of this being what Star Wars should be like from now on is somehow even more depressing than empty-headed fan service.
You can like both Andor and The Mandalorian I just checked it’s not illegal…yet
Yes, my appreciation for Brooklyn 99 was greatly diminished after watching The Wire.They’re different types of shows; it’s fine.
Brooklyn 99 wasn’t part of a Wire franchise. Come on with this.
For me, Andor proved that good writing and character work can really elevate Star Wars. I don’t need Mando or the other shows to be as gritty or real as Andor was, but I do hope that the other writers are taking notes and stepping up their game. Just because Mando is pulpy and fun, doesn’t mean that the dialogue has to be as trite as it is.
We all liked Andor, but it was clear about a third of the way through that its big fans were going to be insufferable.
I definitely agree with this premise.Mandolorian COULD be as good as Andor, hell, anything could be as good as Andor. Fucking Goyer’s own pretty awful FOUNDATION could be as good as Andor. It just isn’t particularly easy, sadly, and it’s too easy to hit LCD shots and beats. Or simply miss.Andor was a heap of talent and execution. It’s why Wires and The Bears are rare, narratively.
What made Andor great was the same thing that made Mandalorian season 1 great. A bunch of new characters in new situations doing interesting things. But season 2 Mando was like the opposite of that, a bunch of previously established characters I didn’t really care about (like Ashoka, Boba Fett, Bo Katan and even Luke Skywalker) butting into Mando and Grogu’s story setting up their future stories and linking it to cartoons and other stuff I didn’t care about.
I think the lesson here is that there’s always going to be some stuff that’s good, and lots of stuff that sucks
Eh, the idea that greatness inspires, or calls for more greatness is unproven. There have always been better cop/crime shows around than the various CSI’s and Law and Orders. Those franchises keep rolling along regardless. I also thought “Strange New Worlds” blew the doors off anything they’ve been doing with their recent Star Trek shows. I haven’t seen season 3 of “Picard” yet, but a lot of the reviews and online write ups seem to rate it as different from the first two, but also kinda the same.Mediocrity will always be easier to pull off, and a surprising number of people will always accept it.
Just because you have a $150 Filet does not mean you also cannot enjoy a $4.00 slice of pizza.
Luke did in fact go back to Tatooine after blowing up the Death Star. Or did you arrive half an hour late to Return of the Jedi?
Crazy idea: The Book of Boba Fett should have been called Mandalorian Season 3. Sure, its a different Mandalorian, but that’s fine. I always felt like The Book of Boba Fett was a really shitty title.
A Note: Andor does break the “no knives” rule when a certain character brutally and quietly murders a particularly dickish Imperial intelligence officer late in the first season.
Or maybe you should just let people like the Star Wars stories that they want to like without judgement.
I don’t want people learning lessons from Andor, because the lessons learned will be the same as we’ve seen for 30 years of Batman movies now. “Edgier. Grittier! Darker! The characters say fuuuuuuuuck! Don’t put in any cool aliens or space battles because that’s not STREET LEVEL!” and so on. The show was good because it had good actors and writers and so on, not because of some marketing-derived keywords.
This kinda strikes me as an issue I don’t think an adult should have.
Even great shows have trade offs. Andor attains its intrigue, depth, and emotional resonance by having a cast that’s all humans. Even the funeral crowds and prison inmates and Aldhani natives are just sea after sea of humans. Granted the prevalence of humans, especially within the Empire, is part of the Star Wars landscape even if it’s never openly addressed. And the fishing aliens after the prison break are wonderfully grotesque and inscrutable.Mandalorian, Boba Fett, and Kenobi by contrast revel in the full toy box from Mos Eisley and Jabba’s Palace. Dozens of alien races, monsters, animals, cartoonish Inquisitors, bizarre weapons, and all the fun little vehicles. Mandalorian threads these elements the most gracefully but it’s a miracle it gets such a moving story at times from nothing but puppets, masks, and helmets.Even if you could combine these success elements would you want to? Each show is suited to its pace. Mandalorian moves along relentlessly so you’re not staring at a puppet or helmet for long. Andor sits with its characters and the actors can richly convey their experiences living in the Empire.
Lol no. It actually made me appreciate Boba Fett’s show much more.
Sorry, I liked Mandalorian season one better than Andor. Just how it is. Yes, it was a great show, but the first season was better in my mind. It wasn’t about”avoiding Star Wars” like the writer thinks. It was about letting the show be a show. Like, Mando season two struggled (still good but struggled) because it was clearly slamming five or six stealth pilots into the series instead of it being its own thing. This is the same thing Andor did. Focus on its own narrative corner of the universe without going all… ‘featuring x’ subplots.
I found that, for me, it’s not that Andor made all the other shows look worse by comparison. Rather, in watching these shows post-Andor, I am made much more aware of Lucas pointing out to fans that this stuff was made for 8-12 year olds. Which is totally fine, we all love what we love, but one just doesn’t evaluate it on the same level as a prestige drama.