Finally Getting to See Andor Season 2

 Well, I've finally got access to Disney Plus again, and the first thing I rushed to do was start the second season of Andor.

As I'm sure I've written here before, I fell in love with Star Wars when I was in elementary school, watching the original trilogy on laser disc in a loop for a good chunk of 4th grade. My feelings toward the franchise were... altered by the prequel trilogy, and while I still have a great affection for that world, it wasn't the unadulterated fixation that it had been in my childhood.

Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in the early 2010s more or less guaranteed a sequel trilogy, and while I thought the Force Awakens had a lot of promise and the Last Jedi did some very clever complication of the formula the sequels were hinting toward, the awkward U-turn that was the Rise of Skywalker felt like such a garbled mess that it left a really sour taste in my mouth. While I roll my eyes at my contemporaries who have tried to gaslight us all into thinking that the prequel trilogy was good, actually, I will say that while I fault the prequels for their poor execution of a truly different story that Lucas was trying to tell, the sequels wound up being a halfway-competent execution of an utterly unambitious story (again, which veered away from the ambitions of The Last Jedi).

Disney has tried to take the Marvel approach to Star Wars, with mixed results.

Look, I get that Star Wars has always been meant to appeal to a young audience. I got into it when I was 9. But as someone who is now 40, the idea of Star Wars has always held the potential, in my opinion, for more mature stories. And it's Andor, building off of the artistic success (and chutzpah) of Rogue One, that came out of left field to deliver that adult take on the Star Wars saga that I had been craving.

And let's be clear: this hits a lot harder when we're watching the United States descend into authoritarianism. The subversive thing about Star Wars, which seemed to fly over the heads of the Reagan-era people who embraced it as part of their own jingoistic, anti-communist politics, is that while the Empire is very Nazi Germany-coded, there are parts, like the fight against the Imperial forces on Endor, in which the Empire is standing in for US imperialism, with Lucas confirming in interviews that the Ewoks were basically like the Viet Cong fighting against America.

We've spent the last decade watching the stable order of how America is supposed to work collapse, with government agencies like ICE being unleashed upon the country to terrorize us into compliance. In the first arc of Andor's second season, Andor's friends (practically his family) are hiding out on an agrarian planet, working without documentation. While the planet seems idyllic (if probably a little boring - it's basically grain fields as far as the eye can see,) the safety it represents is torn apart when the Empire begins an inspection looking for undocumented workers.

We follow basically three threads in this first 3-episode arc. One with Bix, Brasso, Wilmon, and B2EMO on the farming world, one with Andor getting stuck on a jungle planet with the most dysfunctional rebel faction we've encountered, and one with Mon Mothma overseeing her daughter's wedding and realizing to what degree her personal life is falling apart as she secretly works for the rebellion.

Andor's plot, I think, was controversial because the people he's with are just such fuckwits. By the time of the original trilogy, the Rebellion is an organized, professional, and competent force. While we do see them getting massacred by Imperial troops frequently, the cause is not any real fault in the Rebels' methods - just a matter of being outgunned and outnumbered.

But one of the key ideas of Andor is that before the Rebel Alliance is an entity, the many, many factions that will form that alliance vary greatly in terms of how competent they are. And the Maya Pei brigade does not seem like it's going to be very helpful to the Rebellion.

We first see Andor when he's snuck into some sort of skunkworks-like place where new TIE fighters are being designed and tested. With the help of an asset inside, who is absolutely terrified at the fact that she's risking her life to help him steal the new prototype, Andor manages to break out (after fumbling through the controls of a ship that works differently than expected and having to fight his way out) but when he gets where he's supposed to hand the experimental fighter off, he finds that his contact isn't there, and instead, a ragtag group of rebels who did not get the message about his mission are waiting for him there.

This Maya Pei brigade, led, one learns, by the now-late Maya Pei, who evidently didn't declare a successor should something happen to her, has been stuck on this jungle planet for a couple days without food, their old ship (I model I vaguely think might have been in the prequels, so it's presumably an old ship) is wrecked on the surface. They see Andor in an Imperial flight jacket and assume he must be an Imperial, and so take him prisoner. But in-fighting leads to the brigade splitting into factions and killing a bunch of one another. Eventually, Andor takes advantage when the two sides try to reconcile to escape with the ship and leave them to the wild beasts of the planet. (A planet that I think is actually meant to be Yavin IV, where the rebel base is in the original movie.)

Sidelining the main character in this plot is... ok, it's a little tedious, but we're meant to feel it's tedious as much as Andor does. It demonstrates how resistance to an evil empire doesn't automatically make you competent or even particularly good people. There's ego and mistrust even when you're just a group of maybe 20 people on the outside. The level of management and organization required to corral an entire galaxy's worth of resistance cells is truly a monumental task, which at this point is basically being done entirely by Luthen and Kleya.

On Chandrila, Mon Mothma gets to briefly escape the politics of Coruscant to watch as her weirdly regressive trad-wife daughter (presumably an embrace of conservative traditions born out of rebellion against her busy senator mother) gets married into the sketchy Sculdun family. But as distressing as it is to see her relationship with her daughter disintegrate in front of her, her beloved childhood friend Tay, who has been helping to shield the money she has been moving around to help fund the rebellion, decides that he wants a bigger cut, blackmailing her.

Unfortunately for Tay, also at the wedding is antiquities dealer Luthen Rael, and when he finds out the position that Tay has put Mon and the rebellion as a whole in, the answer is clear: Tay leaves the wedding party early, and his driver is not his usual, but actually Cinta, whose mission is clearly to help Tay Kolma find his way to a lethal accident.

She has to stand by as one of her oldest friends is sent off to his doom, watch as her daughter embraces this life she always wished she could have avoided, and all while she needs to keep a bright smile on her face as the proud mother of the blushing bride.

Actually, the fourth storyline here has us keeping up with Syril and Dedra. Syril's weird obsession with Dedra has, actually, led the two of them into a romantic relationship. Syril has been doing well in his bureaucratic job on Coruscant. In a scene that truly flips our sympathies, when they have Eedy, Syril's mother, over for dinner, Dedra gives her a warning: that she has to stop being so terrible to her son or she'll never get to talk to him again.

It's honestly one of the rare times that we can kind of cheer for Dedra, because Syril's mother is the worst.

But lest we forget just what kind of person Dedra is, we actually open the season with her being invited to a super top-secret meeting in a mountain fortress somewhere remote. There, Director Krennec (the main villain of Rogue One, and head, as we'll discover in that movie, of the Death Star project) explains that the Empire needs a rare mineral for its "Energy Project," which can only be obtained in sufficient quantities from the planet Ghorman. Ghorman, a vaguely-French world, is not some backwater, but a culture famed for its luxurious textiles. The problem is that the mineral would have to be extracted in such quantities and with such haste that the planet itself could collapse.

And so, the meeting is there, essentially, to plan out a way to either get the Ghormans off their own planet, or more likely, to find a way to turn Galactic opinion against them enough that the Empire can justify massacring the planet's 800 thousand citizens.

While a pair of representatives from the "Ministry of Enlightenment," a sufficiently Orwellian name for the Empire's propaganda agency, suggest painting the Ghormans as snobs that are out of touch with the rest of the Empire, Dedra is the one who suggests empowering a militant resistance there to work as unwitting agents provacateurs and give the Empire an excuse to crack down.

So, yeah, as great as it is to see her telling off Eedy, let's not forget that Dedra Meero is fucking evil.

But if Dedra is the kind of person who just doesn't think morality has any basis in truth, Syril remains, I think, someone who is deeply misguided about what is "good." He gives a speech to an incoming employee at the Bureau of Standards about how it might all seem boring, but he did a lot of bureaucracy that caught some people... stealing. I mean, that... could be exciting, I guess? But for Syril, who believes that following the rules is so central to whether you're a good person or not, he must think that this was an act of epic heroism.

I did start episode four, which jumps a year ahead, but I haven't finished it yet, so I won't comment on it just yet.

Once again structured in these three-episode arcs, we're given a glimpse of what we can assume is a long and dense struggle against the Empire. Andor's time dealing with the Maya Pei Brigade is only notable in what happens when he finally returns to his family, and the terror and loss they suffer. (I doubt that they'll still be there by the time the Rebels establish their base on Yavin).

Star Wars was built, of course, to be a high-adventure throw-back to old serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but I think the cultural impact Lucas achieved has inspired a lot of examination of the world that he created. While it should absolutely be the place for mythical heroes and spiritual forces, I'm so happy to see someone take the complex politics implied by the premise and really drill down into them with a series like this.

By reputation, I've heard that season two is an improvement on the excellent first season. It's a bit early for me to see if I agree, but I'm very happy to finally get to see it.