Andor Season One (analysis)

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that "Andor" was the wrong name for this series. Cassian is only one of the main protagonists, and I'm not sure at all that he's the most important one. If anything, the show's need to cut to him periodically even when he isn't doing anything feels perfunctory. This is a series about the creation of the Rebel Alliance, from the highest level of its leadership down to the local street activists. Cassa gives us a window into one particular stratum of the process, and other characters give us other windows with just as much (or, in some cases, far more) going on behind them.

Amusingly, I'd actually say that "Star Wars: Rebels" would be the perfect name for this series if it wasn't already taken.

Speaking of which, I think I'll just start this post with a section wrapping up my thoughts on that finale before tying it back in to the rest of the season. I have some strongly positive feelings about that finale, but also some major critiques, so the tone of this review will probably start mixed and get more positive as it continues.


Rix Road

Episode twelve is where the question of who and what the show is about really came to a head. Suddenly, everyone in the story - good guys and bad guys alike - decided that Cassa was the most important person in the galaxy and that they all had to drop what they were doing in the hopes of catching him on Ferrix. Without any of them even knowing for sure if he would be there. I could see the story bending itself around to justify being about this one guy in particular.

Normally, I define unwarranted in-universe importance being lavished on a character for entirely out-of-universe reasons as the core essence of a Mary Sue. I don't think that Cassa is a Mary Sue, though, because it was really just this one plot beat that did this. I can see the corner that the writers were struggling to get themselves out of, and I can sympathize. But it's still a black mark on the show's record, and on the composition of an otherwise really good episode.

Where the episode DIDN'T do this is where it really shone brightly. For instance, the retroactive reveal of just how much Maarva "Mom" Andor had been setting into motion before her passing was masterful, especially given how well all the pieces of it were telegraphed ahead of time once you go back and look for them. Cassian's entire community, despite his estrangement from it at his time of departure, ended up undergoing the same arc that he himself did, spearheaded by his foster mother.

If there's anything that I wish we could have gotten more of in this season, it's the processes that went on that turned that Ferrix town from a hardbitten but generally quiet little industrial community to a hotbed of armed insurgency. You could have had an entire season about that. Hell, you could make an entire show about that. I almost wonder if that show would have been better than the one we got.

For all that the Rix Road incident was inspirational and cathartic, the show did a very good job of not sugarcoating anything. The violence - perpetrated both by the bombers and by the imperial troops - was raw, unglamorous, and actively unpleasant to watch (just like all of the violence in this show that doesn't involve Luthen's space bondmobile). It's clear by the end that the imperials have hurt the community more than the community has hurt the garrison, let alone the regime's planetary administration. This is the price of rebellion. Whether or not it's higher than the price of not rebelling, of course, is a question that needs hard consideration.

Which is why, once you've decided to go for it, one of the most effective things you can do is bait the regime into making other innocent people's lives miserable. Make the cost of not rebelling rise for them, pushing them to come to your conclusion when they otherwise wouldn't. Cassa ended up doing this by accident, when his actions caused the Galactic Empire to replace the corporation's relatively hands-off oppression with its own much more active flavor. Luthen, of course, did it deliberately, on a much larger scale. In both cases, public sentiment is first against the perpetrators of the inciting act, but then it quickly turns against the regime - and often starts outright lionizing the perps - once the crackdown follows.

But I'm starting to go beyond the scope of this episode, and there are later sections for that.

Anyway. Another point of criticism I have of this episode - and this is almost certainly a result of the writers falling back on unconscious biases while racing to tie up this clumsy plot tangle and keep Cassa at the center of it - is the sexual politics. "Andor" has generally been really good about gender. Mon Mothma is awesome. Val was awesome, back when she led the Aldhani operation. Maarva gets to be pretty awesome within this episode. But around the edges of that...

Dierdre and Bix both getting damseled? Really? I'm not going to pretend that seeing Dierdre get hit by a rock and go down like an absolute chump wasn't enjoyable, but that putting her in a situation where a man then has to save her, coming in the same few minutes of screentime as Bix getting rescued by Cassa, well...I don't know.

Val and Sinta ending up doing absolutely fuckall on Ferrix? No payoff to them having been there for all these episodes, on account of Luthen randomly deciding he needs to come and join them in person at the last minute for some fucking reason, and then Cassa just happening to spot him instead of the other two? Totally sidelining them in favor of a guy who already has gotten to do a ton of other stuff in the last few episodes? Like, I get the bookend value of having another one-on-one with Luthen and Cassa on Ferrix, but I think you could get at least as much value out of having that meeting be with Val and paying off on her personal experience of Cassa's honesty and trustworthiness. Personal experience that, as is, never really amounts to anything other than Val impotent whining at Kleya and Luthen in a couple earlier episodes.

Hell, Cassa would even be more likely to recognize Val and Sinta than he would Luthen. He spent a week with the women, and only saw Luthen for maybe a couple of hours.

Either of those things - the damseling and the sidelining - would have been slightly annoying, but I probably wouldn't spend more than a sentence or two complaining about it. It's both of them happening side by side that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The fact that they're also coming in the same episode as Maarva's thing paying off gives me the impression of writers who are consciously progressive, but have ingrained bad habits that come out in places where they aren't paying as much attention.

That's really my issue with this episode as a whole. Good stuff being woven together by hacky, protagonist-centric contrivance, with other kinds of sloppiness kind of spilling into it at the edges.

The final scene of the episode - weird though it was to have it be with Luthen rather than Val, considering the circumstances - was another high point. Putting the cap on both the episode, and on the season as a whole, and drawing on threads that were spun in each of the arcs leading up to it. And, since that strong ending caps off a generally strong series, let's get to the summary.


Enter Cassian

If this series was (I've heard mixed reports about this) originally meant to have five seasons rather than two, some of season one's pace and focus issues start to make sense.

At the beginning of the series, I commented that Cassian Andor is basically an older, grittier, less glamorous version of Luke Skywalker. Orphan (or...kidnappee, in Cassa's case? I still am not sure if the show intended his "adoption" sequence to be as fucked up as it came across) taken in by a kindly old couple from a humble galactic backwater. He comes into possession of a missing machine that brings him to the attention of an enigmatic old wise man, while bloodthirsty imperial agents close in. Etc.

I know that the Campbellian hero's journey has fallen out of favor as a tool of literary analysis, but George Lucas intentionally built Luke's story off of it, so if Cassa is a spin on Luke then it remains relevant here. Basically, looking at Cassa's two meetings with Luthen in episodes 3 and 12, this entire season is the "Resisting the Call to Adventure" phase of the cycle.

It's a little hard to see at first on account of Cassa having already been on a totally self-guided adventure of his own looking for his sister, but if we see the rebellion as the real adventure and file the sister-hunt away in the same category as Cassa's attempts to go to ground with Mom or run away by himself to Niamos then it becomes very clear. Cassian's imprisonment on Narkina, Bix's capture, and the riot-turned-massacre on Rix Road are - collectively - the equivalent of the stormtroopers killing Luke's aunt and uncle. The hero being forced to accept the call to adventure, because the problem that requires adventuring to solve is consuming the entire life that he knew and can't be simply run away from. Joining Luthen's rebellion for real is Cassian's equivalent to heading off for Alderaan aboard the Falcon.

Basically, as far as our main protagonist's arc is concerned, this was 12 episodes of Tatooine. All the other stuff going on at Coruscant and the like are just setting the stage for later stages of his adventure.

Well, that's one strand of this season at least. Another strand of it is that it wants to be a somewhat-realistic depiction of how a rebellion gets off the ground, and those stories are not Great Man narratives about lone heroes making journeys of self-discovery. Hence the pace and focus weirdness as the story tries to be both of these things at once.

Now, funnily enough, on the topic of revolutions mixing awkwardly with Great Man mentalities, I recently ran into another analysis of this show that largely dwelt on the real world history that Andor draws from. It made the case that, as a petty criminal from the imperial periphery inducted into political violence by an older, philosophically-inclined revolutionary mastermind, Cassian Andor's origin story has a lot in common with Joseph Stalin's. If we're following this parallel to its logical conclusion, then it might have been for the best that Cassa ultimately ends up dying before the New Republic is formed.

Less glibly, for all the pacing issues that stretching the "resisting the call" subplot out for a full season creates, it also allows that plot beat to be so much richer and more nuanced for it. Rather than it just being a matter of the bad guys burning his village and forcing him out on the road, Cassa gets a combination of internal and external motivators propelling him forward. Reading Namek's manifesto, after personally fighting alongside the man and feeling a degree of obligation to his memory, is just as important for determining Cassa's course as Douche Force kicking down his mother's door was. Coming in from his childhood on Kenari, he already has a sense of how the march of imperialism isn't something you can just choose to ignore. He tries to deny that truth, both by clinging onto a vain fantasy of recovering his original biological family on Morlana I and by trying to run away to live a life of idle luxury on Niamos. Both attempts result in him being arbitrarily targeted by the empire's agents (the corrupt guards on Morlana, the slavers-with-badges on Niamos). The galaxy is being turned into one endless prison, and all its people into either guards or inmates. It's everywhere. It's in his past, his present, and - as far as he can tell - his future.

The decision to die with some measure of dignity, and maybe just maybe gain a small chance of life in doing so, is one he and the other inmates made on Narkina V. The inescapable reach and unappeasable appetite of the enemy, he learned on Kenari, Ferrix, and Niamos. The high-riding victory on Aldhani gave him hope that the enemy isn't as invincible as it might appear. Luthen and Maarva both gave him ideas about what can be done in lieu of fruitless fleeing or submission. Namek helped him imagine other ways that the world could potentially be. The plight of the Dhani (Sinta's people? Still not sure about that) reminded him that other indigenous cultures are in danger of suffering what his did, and that there might still be time to save some of them. Take away any of those ingredients, and Cassa's ultimatum to Luthen at the end of episode 12 loses some of its power. It's all there for a reason.

And of course, there's still the other thread woven into the season. The less protagonist-focused one.


What Makes a Rebel?

It's a credit to the show that it manages to tell that larger story of organization and radicalization so well, despite its unwieldy composition.

It's the radicalization element that speaks to me the most. In part because I, of course, have no idea how dissident organizing actually works in real life and have no intentions of ever gaining practical experience on that front. Just like all of you reading this don't, and won't. That goes without saying. But watching these characters, from these different walks of life, being forced - as Luthen put it - into the likeness of their enemies, either out of fear, revenge, or simple determination to survive, is fundamentally human.

It really all does keep coming back to that original standoff between Cassa and the corpocops on Morlana I, over and over again, at every resolution. Too hard of a squeeze by greedy, shortsighted thugs with state sanction behind them. Thuggery like rabies, spreading by bite. Or like the python I analogized it to a few posts ago, crushing down harder against any attempts to get out of it. Choices being eliminated with each wriggle until the only option remaining is to be a thug too.

I think the contrast that really drove this home for me was Mon Mothma's disgusted reaction when her accountant friend suggested working with Gul'Dan, specifically speaking the words "He's a thug." Then, in either the same episode or the one right after it, we see her longtime colleague Luthen giving a literal "hey nice family you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it" speech to a lackey who's trying to get out. Like, the most archetypal gangland behavior imaginable. Probably the first sentence that many people imagine being spoken when they hear the word "thug."

I'm not saying that Luthen with his liberatory agenda is "just as bad" as self-interested bankster Gul'Dan, or any nonsense like that. Intentions do matter. But the actual behavior that they need to practice in pursuit of their goals has a lot of overlap. Use of force means threats, bribes, blackmail, and innocent lives ruined or ended. Violence, regardless of the purpose for which it's being employed, is a monstrous thing that causes other monstrous things that cause still other monstrous things.

I'm also don't think that the story is condoning the "hard men making hard decisions" paradigm, even in such grim, violent situations as its characters find themselves in. That kind of moral laziness is a threat that characters like Luthen are shown to need to actively struggle against. Jadedness and apathy are natural consequences of doing terrible things. Intuitive coping mechanisms. But it's all too easy to go from there to defaulting to brutality without first checking to make sure that it is in fact the best approach for this particular situation, and then any good intentions start to decay.

"Be exactly as brutal as you have to be, no more or less" seems to be an intended takeaway. The more important message, though, is how important it is to not create an environment where people have to be brutal.

People do create that environment. ARE creating it. To make themselves one percent richer than they already are. For the equivalent reason to wanting to buy slightly more expensive booze at the Morlana I brothel tonight than they could otherwise. Or even pettier reasons than that. For things as immaterial as ego. Or whim.

Unleashing this is worth it to them. They don't even think about it.

Under a criminal government, every person finds themselves becoming a criminal whether they want to or not.

The sheer amount of hatred that "Andor" wants its audience to feel for authoritarianism is nigh-incomprehensible. Legendary. On the order of "hate inscribed on every nano-angstrom for 3.87 million miles." It points at characters like Cassian, Kino, Val, Luthen, and Sinta, and then it points to the news, and then it turns toward the audience and says "you should hate this as hard as they do."