Andor Was A Great Achievement, But Not For Star Wars Reasons

Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist

Andor is enjoying near unanimous approval rating after wrapping up its 12 episode season this year, with critics and fans praising its grittiness and captivating drama. I also give it two thumbs up, despite the slow opening episodes and parallels to many a BBC show as far as the dialogue writing and pace.

There is much to enjoy about the show, and I personally loved the homage to the great Nicolas Cage/John Travolta action movie “Face-Off”.

However, as much as I liked this show as much as The Mandalorian, and way more than any other Disney TV property, I remain guarded about what lessons Disney might learn from this show’s critical success and how they roll it out to future properties.

In short, Andor was a great show but was only a mediocre Star Wars show.

Let me explain.

First, you may want to read a piece I wrote years ago defending the Star Wars prequels from the haters. If you don’t want to read it, here’s the 5-second summary: the prequels seemed like Star Wars movies way more than the sequels, not from a character point of view, but from an atmospheric, environmental point of view. There were rich galactic landscapes in the prequels, whereas the sequels had a lot of settings that looked and felt like familiar places on Earth.

I feel similarly about Andor, not strictly from its settings, but more from how the characters talked and little stuff that made this story feel a little too close to home. For example, Reddit user BiggsDankLighter pointed out how Cassian Andor used a secret knock with the same rhythm as “Shave and a Haircut”. The odds of a galaxy far, far away developing the same iconic secret knock as Earth is about 1 and 10 gazillion.

Does it detract from the story? Objectively, no, but it speaks to either the laziness of the writing team or the weird desire to have a Star Wars be more relevant to traditional Earthly story-telling. Either way, it deviates significantly from the creativity we were accustomed to seeing from the Star Wars Universes.

There are other examples of anachronisms: characters spoke of their wallets, Empire security staff using some very specific American tactics at crowd control in the season finale, and other characters being stabbed to death with knives. The last one is what bothered me the most: in a world where there are all sorts of fantastic weapons, they still knife people to death?

Every example of this took me out of the Star Wars universe just a bit.

The other issue is whether Star Wars has a story to tell beyond the rebels vs. the Empire. The Mandalorian has been mostly able to succeed outside of this plot structure, with a massive assist to discovering another creature from the same species as Yoda. But, you don’t need me to tell you Star Wars has been hugely reliant on this plot archetype for most of its properties.

I hope the success of Andor isn’t a signal to Disney to continue to find windows between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope to tell stories because at some point, I repeat, AT SOME POINT, they must be able to tell a story that takes place before or after the Skywalker timeline.

The story of Andor, as good as it was, was overly reliant on looking and feeling like a story straight out of Earth. I fear that may be the model going forward for at least some of its storytelling. If my fears come to fruition, our collective imaginations will suffer. That would be a shame because Star Wars was so important precisely because it opened our imaginations to previously impossible concepts on Earth.

Let’s hope I’m wrong.