Andor (Star Wars: Andor) - Disney+

[Hikuro]

6 minutes ago, Roy Focker said:

I have theory. B2emo's brain will be installed in K2so. Like how Lando's droid was installed in the Falcon. It would explain how they override the deflaut Imperial programming from taking over and how k2so acts.

Spoiler

After watching Episode 3, I'm gonna venture probably not, I mean, they left B2 back on the wheat planet and all that. Who's to say they'll even come back? 

I dug the three episodes, 3 being the best one of the batch so far, but episode 1 was interesting. 2 I could not stinking believe 

Spoiler

They were all gonna settle it playing F*)(&H rock paper scissors, my god....dumbest wanna be rebels I've EVER seen. 

 

[Mog]

Someone referred to B2 as a loyal doggo that misses his human.

I never get that feeling from K-2SO.  Bastard loves Cassian, but will happily kill anyone else (either physically or with his sarcasm).

Edited 20 hours ago by Mog

[Seto Kaiba]

Caught the first three episodes of Andor S2 in my weekly watch group.

It's good.  It's real good.

I am a bit disappointed, but not the least bit surprised, that Mon Mothma's part is once again a largely unnecessary sideshow about covering her own arse.

Spoiler

Cassian's theft of that TIE Fighter prototype is delightfully awkward.  Everything's fine until he has to actually fly the bloody thing and discovers its controls are nothing like what he trained for, leading to some really spectacularly undignified figuring-things-out on the fly.

Even more undignified and entertaining is that rebel group who accidentally spoils his attempt to hand the TIE off.  Never mind a boot, those idiots would struggle to empty water out of a colander.  I'm not sure what part drives it home best... that they're trapped in the jungle with no survival training to speak of, that they almost immediately fall out over the question of command and start killing each other, or that they try to settle the matter with an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors that not only distracts the whole group enough for Cassian to escape but also leaves them defenseless against the local predatory fauna.  With allies like that, who needs enemies?  

The Imperials on that farming world are surprisingly scummy even by Star Wars standards.  Hasn't Bix suffered enough?  First her idiot boyfriend sells Cassian out driven by meatheaded misplaced jealousy, then he gets shot dead attacking Pre-Mor security, then she gets captured and tortured by the Empire, and now an Imperial officer attempts to sexually assault her after she refuses his advances?  Yeesh.  Brasso doesn't make it out alive, and B2EMO is left behind.

Mon Mothma's portion of the story is rather disappointingly still focused on covering up her early financial contributions to the rebellion.  She's not really involved with any of the day-to-day business of running the rebellion.  She's just one of their sources of funding now that she has a proper money laundering apparatus in place.  She spends her segments of the story this time fussing over her daughter's arranged marriage to the son of the guy who's laundering the money for her... perhaps nonsensically so, as she's upset about it even though her daughter is clearly and unambiguously indicating she's not just a willing participant she's an eager volunteer who would be actively seeking out such a traditional union anyway.  The only thing keeping it relevant to goings-on at all is that her middleman for the arrangement starts getting cold feet about it due to how the rebellion is affecting his business, and so she has a breakdown and gets white girl wasted at the reception and starts drunk dancing while Luthen deals with that liability she's created. 

All in all, a pretty damn great story.  

 

Between this, Rebels, Ahsoka, and The Mask of Fear, I'm really starting to think that Disney or someone in charge of the creative team (e.g. Filoni) has something against Mon Mothma as a character though.

[Roy Focker]

I never really saw Mon Mothma as some great leader. Her first appearance in ROTJ she appeared to be more a figurehead. As an elder stateman she brought a sense of legitimacy to the Rebellion. Mon Mothma was part of the Senate when there was a Republic. It was people like Ackbar and Madine that really ran the Rebellion. As for her portrayal in Andor the years leading up to the Battle of Yavin. Mon Mothma contributions to the Alliance is her bank account, political connections and ability to freely travel about. She doesn't have to be a good senator to be of value to people like Luthen. Just being a senator makes her a valuable asset.

 

[Duke Togo]

I agree with Roy, I think her value is pretty clear. 

[Duke Togo]

In a new interview with THR, Genevieve O'Reilly refers to Mon as a "tool of the Rebellion."

[F-ZeroOne]

Really enjoying this - I didn't expect the first couple of episodes to have something of a "Monty Python" vibe! And neither did I ever expect "Star Wars" to almost certainly directly  reference

Spoiler

the World War II docu-drama "Conspiracy".

And in other ways "Andor" is shaking up "Star Wars", a Stormtrooper...

Spoiler

aiming! 😄

 

Edited 3 hours ago by F-ZeroOne

[Duke Togo]

2 minutes ago, F-ZeroOne said:

And neither did I ever expect "Star Wars" to almost certainly directly  reference

 

Yeah, that's not a movie reference. It's directly referencing

Spoiler

the actual "Wannsee Conference," where the Nazis planned out the final solution.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

I never really saw Mon Mothma as some great leader. Her first appearance in ROTJ she appeared to be more a figurehead. As an elder stateman she brought a sense of legitimacy to the Rebellion. Mon Mothma was part of the Senate when there was a Republic. It was people like Ackbar and Madine that really ran the Rebellion. As for her portrayal in Andor the years leading up to the Battle of Yavin. Mon Mothma contributions to the Alliance is her bank account, political connections and ability to freely travel about. She doesn't have to be a good senator to be of value to people like Luthen. Just being a senator makes her a valuable asset.

She's supposed to be way more than just a figurehead, though... she's described as being one of the key founders of the Rebel Alliance and the commander-in-chief of the rebel forces during the war.  🤷‍♂️  Someone who commands respect and actual authority.  The more I watch and read, the more it feels like Disney is walking back every positive aspect the character had piece by piece.

She just feels unnecessary in Andor.  Like she's only there because it's a story about the early rebellion and they felt they had to include her somehow because she's meant to be one of the rebellion's bigshots later on.  Her segments of the story don't really connect to the rest of it in any meaningful way thus far.  You could delete most of her scenes and there'd be no real impact to the plot.  As beautifully composed as this whole wedding thing is, it's completely unnecessary to Cassian's story.

 

Spoiler

The Clone Wars didn't really depict Mon Mothma at all.  She was present, she was just one of many minor senators caught in Padme's orbit.

Rebels S3 depicted Mon Mothma as kind of a bigshot.  Someone who commands enough respect and wields enough influence in the Senate that her public denunciation of Emperor Palpatine was a Big Deal and a Real Threat to his authority.  Enough so that multiple rebel groups were willing to give their lives to extract her from Coruscant and get her to safety.  Later seasons depict her as having actual command authority over the rebel forces too, with Hera, General Dodonna, and other rebel leaders deferring to her on strategic matters.  (She's treated as a weak and overly cautious leader, publicly mocked by Saw Gerrera, whose main role is to be the narrative speedbump ensuring the rebels arrive just in the nick of time instead of well in advance because they have to talk her out her opposition to The Plan.)

Rogue One depicts her as the leader nobody respects.  She clearly believes she's in charge and acts like it around Jyn and the others, but her own rebel faction consistently ignores her orders and plans and launches rogue operations behind her back.  It's ultimately Organa's faction and Raddus's faction who do most of the heavy lifting.

Andor depicts her as a sheltered and naive idealist and socialite living in a literal ivory tower on Coruscant.  She's shown to be an ineffectual senator who seemingly doesn't command any real respect in the Senate or at home, even from her own husband.  She talks a big game about having learned from Palpatine's example and and being the secret orchestrator of the rebellion to her childhood friend, but she's actually completely uninvolved in the rebellion's business and is just a financial backer whom the real leaders of the rebellion consider an irritant or even a liability.

The Mask of Fear is almost the coup de grace, walking back the idea that she ever wielded any significant influence or commanded any real respect in the senate. 

Spoiler

Instead, she's depicted as being an experienced senator with little-to-no influence or popular support and a failing political career.  Her pacifist opposition to the Clone Wars left her heavily dependent on Padme's clout politically, and when Padme passed away the anti-war caucas she led fell apart.  She looks down on most senators either as corrupt or as hypocrites of some stripe for things like representing the views of their constituents that they don't agree with personally or compromising on legislation.  She's so unpopular and so lacking in credibility that Imperial security forces who are afraid to do more than mildly inconvenience the likes of Bail Organa arrest and torture her at with impunity, and even her own staff are quitting because they can tell her political career is basically over.  

She spends the entire novel trying to gather enough votes to support a bill that will restore the separation of powers in government.  Ultimately, she obliviously plays right into Palpatine's hands by buying votes with all kinds of corrupt amendments and riders.  When the bill finally comes up for a vote and passes, Palpatine simply vetos most of its provisions and gains even more public support for quashing such open and blatant corruption in the senate.  Mon further tanks her own reputation and that of the senate's, loses any influence she had left, and accomplishes nothing but strengthening Palpatine's support.  She even foils an assassination attempt being made on Palpatine because she can't bear to hurt anyone (even the guy torturing her), and for all her trouble the Grand Vizer just thanks her for being a useful idiot and takes her to see an Imperial reeducation center being built to illustrate that she and Palpatine weren't even playing the same game, never mind by the same rules.

 

Ahsoka and the sequel trilogy kind of cap it by revealing that she was a weak and indecisive leader post-war who reimposed the same failing system of government that existed before the war largely unchanged and then proceeded to weaken it further... resulting in the New Republic collapsing in the middle of her successor's first term in office.

 

4 hours ago, Duke Togo said:

In a new interview with THR, Genevieve O'Reilly refers to Mon as a "tool of the Rebellion."

Now that is an assessment I can agree with.

That and Tony Gilroy's remarks about how she's really a well-meaning person at heart, but just doesn't realize or can't accept that she's fighting for a lost cause trying to fix the system from within because Palpatine et. al. do not care about the norms and mechanisms of the Republic's democratic system that she holds sacred.

Edited 19 minutes ago by Seto Kaiba