Andor (Star Wars: Andor) - Disney+

[sh9000]

https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/andor-tony-gilroy-explains-star-wars-rogue-one-prequel-structure-exclusive/

Please post about toys and other topics in their own threads.

Edited May 12, 2023 by sh9000

[sh9000]

 

[Big s]

Andor seems really long compared to the other shows on d+

[sh9000]

Yeah season 1 will take place over 1 year and season 2 will cover 4 years leading up to Rogue One.

[Roy Focker]

That's too many episodes for Disney's budget and it's writers to maintain quality. They lucked out with season one of the Mandalorian.  Every other show could have really benefitted from having shorter seasons.

[azrael]

On the bright side, we know Andor will only be on for 2 seasons.

[TangledThorns]

On 7/23/2022 at 12:16 PM, azrael said:

On the bright side, we know Andor will only be on for 2 seasons.

Third season is a little short but it's on Disney+ as Rogue One, lol.

[TangledThorns]

I wasn't excited for this series till I saw this trailer. Looks miles above the poop that is Obi-Wan and Boba Fett series.

 

 

[derex3592]

I'll have to agree 100% with @TangledThorns on this!  A week ago I was like "I couldn't possibly care less..." Then I watched the trailer! Looks gritty and dirty and kinda dark. One thing about it, they have a great cast!  Here's hoping! 

[azrael]

I'll reserve judgement until after I watch it. All of it.

[jvmacross]

The Rebels were the good guys.....from a certain point of view

[Mog]

^^K-2SO?  

[sh9000]

Looks good.  Can't wait to watch both seasons and then watch Rogue One over again.

[azrael]

Ah.....Andor has been pushed back to September 21 instead of August 31. And now episodes 1-3 will premiere together.

18 hours ago, Mog said:

^^K-2SO?  

Likely S2.

[Big s]

3 hours ago, azrael said:

Ah.....Andor has been pushed back to September 21 instead of August 31. And now episodes 1-3 will premiere together.

Likely S2.

That would be disappointing. That’s the only character I was actually looking forward to in this

[Bolt]

On 7/26/2022 at 5:11 PM, Dynaman said:

wait is that Weird Al?

Yep. Weird Al does a song too.

21 hours ago, sh9000 said:

Looks good.  Can't wait to watch both seasons and then watch Rogue One over again.

Yep ! Looks better than Boba and Obi wan for sure. (Why?) I won't get my hopes up too much, but I'm definitely looking forward to it! 

[derex3592]

I saw a social media post somewhere that claimed this show was the first one NOT filmed in "The Volume" like Mando and others before it.  ALL sets/backgrounds are apparently practical. 

[Big s]

1 minute ago, derex3592 said:

I saw a social media post somewhere that claimed this show was the first one NOT filmed in "The Volume" like Mando and others before it.  ALL sets/backgrounds are apparently practical. 

Then it’s probably more expensive. Hopefully they had some cash left over to hire better writers than what we got with obi

[derex3592]

@Big s ....not sure they could do any worse....oh wait...forgot who we're talking about...

[azrael]

Since this show is going to go on for at least 2 seasons, might as well split it off to its own thread.

[Roy Focker]

You know you don't have to share every little TV spot and every single pic for this or any other series.  Anything news worthy will be in the main trailers. These spots are often just re-edited footage that's already been shown.  

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Saw this, apropos of nothing in particular, and thought it was maybe worth a share.

https://www.ign.com/articles/andor-showrunner-said-his-mandate-was-to-completely-avoid-fan-service?utm_source=facebook

Apparently Andor's showrunner is indicating he and the writers are committed to storytelling over fanservice and to keeping the series accessible to viewers who aren't die-hard Star Wars fans.  A laudable goal... but probably a fundamentally unachievable one given that the other three shows are extremely fanservice-heavy and that this series is backstory for a character from one of the better-received movies and for the Rebellion as a whole.

[sh9000]

Looking forward to Wednesday.

 

[Big s]

I hope the show is good. It would be nice to be excited for something. She Hulk and Rings of Power are kinda just ok and I’m not a game of thrones person and the last couple Star Wars shows haven’t been so great. I’m not keeping my hopes up, but I’d like at least one show to come out to have me excited for more.

[jvmacross]

Watched the first episode....has a less Star Wars feel to it than any of the other  D+ SW TV series....looking forward to see what other morally questionable acts Cassian is willing to take in the "name of the rebellion"...

[jvmacross]

Kind of a slow buildup, so it was smart that they opted to release all three of these episodes at once because it seems things should start getting good as of episode 4

[azrael]

Yes...definitely a slow buildup.

The only thing I got out of these first 3 episodes is, when your boss tells you drop a subject and just come up with an excuse, you frakin' drop the subject. Or to borrow for another Disney property:

2 episodes could have been save by ☝️ , but noooooo...

[jvmacross]

5 hours ago, azrael said:

Yes...definitely a slow buildup.

The only thing I got out of these first 3 episodes is, when your boss tells you drop a subject and just come up with an excuse, you frakin' drop the subject. Or to borrow for another Disney property:

2 episodes could have been save by ☝️ , but noooooo...

The dynamic between those 2 reminded me of Ozzel and Piett from ESB....I can see how those Corp security guys would want to join the Empire at some point...unless you know about who is running the Empire and how they got there....the Empire is all about law and order.....peace across the galaxy....from a certain point of view...

[technoblue]

What these guys lack is a good HR department.   It’s no wonder Vader had a short fuse in ANH and ESB. Anyway, I’m liking the backwater world environment of the first episode. And I’m curious about the flashback scenes with Cassian and his sister. I get the gist of those fragments but I also kind of wish there was a translation for the dialogue in the subtitle track.

[jvmacross]

40 minutes ago, technoblue said:

What these guys lack is a good HR department.   It’s no wonder Vader had a short fuse in ANH and ESB. Anyway, I’m liking the backwater world environment of the first episode. And I’m curious about the flashback scenes with Cassian and his sister. I get the gist of those fragments but I also kind of wish there was a translation for the dialogue in the subtitle track.

Yeah...they mentioned the "accident" but why were the kids still alive?  Parents massacred during an uprising?  Hopefully they explain more, as I am sure it is directly related to Cassian's world point of view.

[sh9000]

They have the look and feel of this series down like Rogue One and I'm loving it so far.  Looking forward to episode 4.

[jvmacross]

I think Rogue One was still significantly influenced by all things Star Wars...the Death Star, Storm Troopers, ships, prequel characters, Tarkin, Vader, Jedi,  etc....you knew you were watching a Star Wars movie from the very start...

Andor is playing out so far like a story about repression and how that ignites rebellion, which is the whole tag line for Andor....it's trying to minimize everything that you'd expect to see in a Star Wars show, which is ironically what the Star Wars franchise needs badly...to release something that doesn't depend on all the baggage that is keeping it from escaping the Skywalker Saga and truly moving beyond it...

We'll see how far this formula will go...afterall, the events of Andor still lead towards the Skywalker Saga and lives within it...what sets it apart is that these Andor characters aren't driven by the specific actions of the Skywalker family, but by the fact that they just want to rid the galaxy of the Empire...it is a good enough reason to be a part of the rebellion, especially if the Empire screwed you, your family, or your planet over at some point....not every rebel needs to be driven by the truth regarding the Sith behind the Empire’s rise....leave that to the top rebel leaders, Luke and the surviving Jedi....

[Seto Kaiba]

Eech... well, as laudable as showrunner Tony Gilroy's stated desire to keep Andor accessible by prioritizing a coherent narrative over fanservice was, Andor now has a lock on first place with a commanding lead on my personal leaderboard of franchise shows that sent me to Wikipedia to look up some critical bit of info the fastest.  I had to hit pause at only one minute and thirty-nine seconds into the first episode to figure out what the actual hell "BBY5" meant, because the series clearly expected me to already know.

On my way to Wikipedia, I could only think "Wow, BestBuy stock is trading super cheap in the Galaxy Far Far Away" (its stock symbol is BBY)... or if it was some weird sexual thing like "BBW" is.  Nope, we're just marking time relative to an event that hasn't happened yet for some reason.  Were they paying by the letter or something?  Was it too expensive to have this text just say "Five years before the Battle of Scarif", the defining moment in Cassian Andor's life and the movie this is spinning off from?  Why mark time from the Battle of Yavin when this series is about a guy who's been dead for days or possibly weeks by the time that battle takes place?

As for the start... well, I'll just quote from an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation for a second:

Quote

Picard: It was a dark and stormy night... [pauses and sighs] That's not a promising beginning.
Troi: It may get better.

 

EPISODE 1: KASSA

Spoiler

Cold open on a dark and stormy night... yes I am hardcore going to judge them for that... with Cassian Andor moodily walking in the moody rain like the moody mother****er he is.  I'm not sure if this is to its credit or detriment, but this place he's in doesn't look like any Star Wars locale... it looks like your standard grungy used-future city like you'd find in any dystopian future franchise like Blade Runner, Alien, Judge Dredd, Star Trek: Discovery, etc.  He's in some kind of seedy club (brothel?) full of women with hair out of a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival or maybe a late 80's fashion show looking for his sister (ouch).  Two corporate rent-a-cops try to mug him after he leaves, and he kills the first accidentally and the second on purpose before fleeing the planet.

Somewhere else, a droid that looks like a cheap theme park dustbin on four tank treads cruises through the city and gets pissed on by a space dog.  This was clearly a very important scene that needed to be in this series.  Turns out the droid is Cassian's.  Apparently the smell of a droid soaked in spacedog piss reminds him of home, because we're treated to a flashback of him growing up in some kind of tribal setting in the space amazon where everyone speaks an alien language and they watch a ship crash for some reason.  He then wakes up and asks his space dustbin to lie and say that he hasn't seen him and doesn't know where he is before heading into some dirty nondescript town to dictate a complicated alibi to some coworker.

And here we have the first likeable character of the show... a put-upon elderly security supervisor in the corporate sector who has clearly had too much of the starched shirt idiot deputy-inspector standing opposite him and realizes what massive pillocks the dead security guards were.  He immediately jumps to the correct conclusion that they were abusing their authority, up to no good, and subsequently got what was coming to them when they picked a fight with the wrong guy.  He delivers every line in a tone which communicates that he is 1000% done with this sh*t, with his subordinate, and with the Imperial review he is headed to.

Cassian goes to another dingy workshop and gets into an argument with another visibly dirty person as he apparently tries to continue building an alibi and skip town to avoid a murder rap.  Then we're back to the space amazon for some reason, with everyone speaking gibberish that isn't translated and do vaguely tribal things for no clear reason.  A brief shot of the starch-arse continuing to investigate something (presumably Cassian's space car?), and we're back to the streets for more walking around in a dingy city full of dirty people and the occasional alien who is just a dude in a rubber mask.

Starcharse is continuing to investigate the murder(?) Cassian committed, and verbally abusing some operator eating a blue pot noodle.  Riveting.

Now Cassian's rooting around in a ship in a junkyard?  For some kind of identification device?  He seems to be a frightful scumbag given that everyone he talks to seems to either be one of his creditors or someone he's asked a lot of favors of who wants nothing more to do with him.

... and more tribal crap.  Episode's over.

 

As first episodes go, I'm with Captain Picard.  This isn't a promising beginning.  I'd call it a bad sign that the character I most identify with is the security supervisor who clearly thinks the crux of the entire plot is bullshit.  It's an origin story for a character in an another origin story, so my expectations are going to stay pretty low.

I know this is building to something and following multiple characters in their separate stories is helping towards that eventual intersection, but right now it gives me the same badly-paced feeling as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  Like I'm watching two or more separate stories that only coincidentally share the same sets sometimes.  

[Big s]

The first two episodes are pretty dull. What’s with all these new shows and super dull starts. The third episode was better. I still don’t like the character Andor and kinda like him less now. This show does look far better than the obi show. It definitely looks higher budget.

[Seto Kaiba]

Alrighty then... after a first episode so bland, insipid, and lifeless that it felt like it could be dropped into any dystopian sci-fi franchise virtually unaltered and still be unremarkable at best, it's off to episode two "That Would Be Me".

Thus far, I have to say I'm not impressed by Cassian's backstory either.  Han Solo was a scoundrel, but at least he was a scoundrel with a good heart.  Cassian Andor's seems to be just kind of a sh*thead supreme.  Everyone he talks to is either intensely wary of him being a con artist, manipulative dick, or a debtor trying to skip out on repayment.  Admittedly, I guess he never did claim to be a good person, but he's just kind of an unlikeable prick here and I can't imagine he gets any less difficult to tolerate once he launches his career as a remorseless terrorist.

 

EPISODE 2: THAT WOULD BE ME

Spoiler

Right off the bat, we're back in the Space Amazon river basin with Cassian's tribe on Kenari.  If we spend much more time dicking around there I'm going to expect to see Jeremy Wade pop up and announce what river monster he's fishing for this week.

Back on... wherever the hell this is again, I neither remember nor care at this point... we're treated to a scene of a man climbing to the top of a bell tower to manually pound on a big slab-like chime with a pair of hammers to mark the time.  Automatic bell-ringers were patented in the US in 1908.  A galactic civilization that makes casual use of nearly sentient androids for the most menial tasks still has a guy physically climb a belltower to chime the hour MANUALLY WITH A HAMMER.

After that, we're treated to more shots of Cassian just walking down the streets of this dingy, run-down city seemingly for no purpose other than looking shifty.  I'm starting to feel like I'm watching a Let's Play of an Assassin's Creed or Hitman game not a Star Wars TV series, based on the amount of "briskly but aimlessly walking through city streets" is going on.  Perspective switches to the shop girl from last episode and her boyfriend, who sees the APB the cops put out on Cassian.  Cassian's gone home to see his mum, who has also seen the APB and confronts him about it.  So he runs off to see workshop girl, who now realizes why he needs to get out of town.  Her jealous boyfriend seems to be of a mind to turn him in, and seems to think she's having an affair with him or something.  He calls the authorities, who look Andor up and see the fake origin story that his mother provided.  Workshop girl goes to see her boyfriend... apparently it was very important for the plot for us to see these two borderline nameless characters hook up.  The cops, meanwhile, are preparing to move in and arrest Andor on suspicion of murder based on the tipoff.  Starcharse seems to haev found a like-minded goon and they're just jerking each other off up there with rhetoric about being the first line of defense and so on. 

Meanwhile, Cassian's in the junkyard looking at some dingy electronic gizmo he's been hiding in a wreck, presumably the gizmo he intends to sell to get offworld.

... and just like that, we're back in the jungle watching the space amazons chatter unintelligibly to each other as they approach that ship that crashed last episode.

Someone lands a ship somewhere, for some reason.

Then we get more of bell-ringer guy, who looks way too into his job.  Generic boyfriend is just sitting in an armchair watching generic shop girl sleep... that's not creepy at all, no sir.  Why even are these characters?  They contribute nothing to the plot.  

Once again, we're back to the jungle to watch tribal hunters poke dead starship pilots with sticks... until one gets up shoots the lead tribal girl dead with his gun.  There's a brief recreation of that one scene from Indiana Jones where the guy topples over with a ton of blowgun darts in him, and the kids all run down and start screaming over the body of the girl who got shot.  They drag the corpse away and young Cassian dramatically makes a fist!  Truly modern TV at its finest.  A completely pointless digression in the story spanning multiple episode that could be eliminated entirely without sacrificing anything but runtime.

Cassian tries to negotiate discreet passage offworld.  The cops are on their way to his planet, though (what, no local law enforcement?) and between the accents and the relative sizes of the two leaders of the team I feel like I'm watching Hot Space Fuzz.  They're gonna bust this thing wide open, and then do the necessary paperwork.

Now we've got two old men talking on the space bus, griping about the cost of space parking.  We are thirty goddamn minutes into the second episode and the plot STILL hasn't gotten off its arse.

Yay! MORE DRAMATIC WALKING!  IN A JUNKYARD THIS TIME!  Roll credits!  Then check and see if the writer's paycheck bounced.  There's gotta be some explanation for this.

Honesly, the writing on this show is so bad and so badly paced that I actually went and checked and make sure the Writers Guild of America wasn't on strike when it was filmed.

Over sixty minutes of runtime between the first two episodes, and maybe four minutes of actual plot progression, all of which is at the start of the first episode.  You could cut ninety percent of this material and lose literally nothing.

I'll give Tony Gilroy his due.  Two episodes in and Andor is very definitely NOT driven by fanservice... because it's not driven by ANYTHING.  It's sixty-plus minutes of aimlessly f***ing about in a run-down industrial town.  If you took the background aliens out, this could belong to literally ANY franchise.  It's THAT un-distinctive (and I'm sure that's not even a word).  It's padded so heavily I'm waiting for the narrator to cut into the teaser and say "NEXT TIME! ON DRAGON BALL Z!".

Hell, the sheer number of wretched hives in Star Wars and the escalating dinginess of each successive wretched hive has started to make me suspect Obi-Wan's a judgemental dick and Mos Eisley's actually a nice middle-class neighborhood.  It's visibly nicer and a LOT livelier than this place, or that port town on Jakku, or anywhere they visit in the new trilogy except maybe Maz's place.  Why is there seemingly no middle ground in this interstellar civilization between almost-literal ivory tower luxury and squalid borderline slums?