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To no one's surprise I really dug Andor, the show that is theoretically about Cassian Andor from Rogue One but in practice about systems and abuses of imperialism, colonialism and the carceral state and the various shapes taken by resistance to those systems!
Not that it's not about Cassian, in that he's often either the focus of events or the conceptual pivot point that sets other things into motion -- and also he is in a lot of ways going through quite a traditional refusal of the call/acceptance of the call kind of journey -- but this really is much less I think a show about individuals as individuals and much more about the glimpses we get of individuals as part of very specific systems, contexts, groups, cultures, in a way that I thought was really interesting to see.
I was a little bit spoiled for it going in but fairly minimally, and all of the plot points I knew about or thought I knew about ended up playing out in ways that were a step or two sideways from what I expected. "Surprise! here's a twist you can't predict!" is for sure not the thing that I most value in storytelling, and that's not the thing the writing of Andor is generally doing either -- just as often the broad narrative beats are exactly what one would predict (or, occasionally, symbolism so aggressively on-point that I didn't actually call it and then ended up staring at it with my mouth open like the moment when the setup for someone else's pun pays off and slams into me like a train) -- but frequently a storyline that seems to be building in one way gets abruptly derailed by anticlimax, in a way that couldn't possibly have been predicted but feels inevitable within context.
My personal favorite small example of this is when Cassian comes home in the middle of the show and tells Maarva with a great sense of importance and urgency that there's a rat in the community, somebody sold him out and he has to find out whom, and Maarva's just like 'oh honey this is a small town, we've all known who did it for weeks, and why, and he's dead now anyway," and Cassian is just kind of left gaping at the way this great mystery is just irrelevant now! But also Cassian's arrest is in this category for me -- I knew he did get arrested, but the manner of it was a complete surprise -- and I knew Maarva died, but I absolutely had the impression it was a dramatic & heroic sacrifice and did not at all expect the slow sad storyline of ungraceful aging we got instead. And also Saw Gerrera deciding he's been convinced by Luthen Rael's arguments about the necessity of collaboration towards the success of the struggle just when collaboration becomes impossible, and Kino Loy's sad little "I can't swim" halting the triumphant rush of the prison break, which hit me like a brick.
(Although, speaking of bricks, Brasso beating up stormtroopers with a brick made of Maarva's literal ashes is the visual pun I was thinking of above that absolutely took me out at the knees ajsk;ldfjdl)
Anyway, the other thing I like is the show's commitment to showing various forms of resistance and the pros & cons & messiness thereof -- there are long-running cells like Saw Gerrera's, there's flash operations and ideological infighting and Le Carre-esque , and then there are popular movements that arise naturally from ordinary people within their own contexts fighting their own particular and personal battles, and these things all happen individually but also the ripples and runoffs of those things play into each other like. Hmm. Not just streams running into the same river but a complex tidal system? My metaphor may be running away with me here but either way it's a kind of storytelling I like.
In other news within a few weeks of starting to watch this show I was required to make a character for an RPG and I said "hey is anyone else planning on making a manifesto kid because I kind of want to make an annoying manifesto kid --" and then everyone laughed at me. I did love Nemik and this was very predictable of me.
I also loved getting to grab![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti by the elbow and hiss in delight "IT'S THE PRIDE LESBIAN! THE LESBIAN FROM PRIDE! SHE'S HERE!" perfect typecasting no notes
Not that it's not about Cassian, in that he's often either the focus of events or the conceptual pivot point that sets other things into motion -- and also he is in a lot of ways going through quite a traditional refusal of the call/acceptance of the call kind of journey -- but this really is much less I think a show about individuals as individuals and much more about the glimpses we get of individuals as part of very specific systems, contexts, groups, cultures, in a way that I thought was really interesting to see.
I was a little bit spoiled for it going in but fairly minimally, and all of the plot points I knew about or thought I knew about ended up playing out in ways that were a step or two sideways from what I expected. "Surprise! here's a twist you can't predict!" is for sure not the thing that I most value in storytelling, and that's not the thing the writing of Andor is generally doing either -- just as often the broad narrative beats are exactly what one would predict (or, occasionally, symbolism so aggressively on-point that I didn't actually call it and then ended up staring at it with my mouth open like the moment when the setup for someone else's pun pays off and slams into me like a train) -- but frequently a storyline that seems to be building in one way gets abruptly derailed by anticlimax, in a way that couldn't possibly have been predicted but feels inevitable within context.
My personal favorite small example of this is when Cassian comes home in the middle of the show and tells Maarva with a great sense of importance and urgency that there's a rat in the community, somebody sold him out and he has to find out whom, and Maarva's just like 'oh honey this is a small town, we've all known who did it for weeks, and why, and he's dead now anyway," and Cassian is just kind of left gaping at the way this great mystery is just irrelevant now! But also Cassian's arrest is in this category for me -- I knew he did get arrested, but the manner of it was a complete surprise -- and I knew Maarva died, but I absolutely had the impression it was a dramatic & heroic sacrifice and did not at all expect the slow sad storyline of ungraceful aging we got instead. And also Saw Gerrera deciding he's been convinced by Luthen Rael's arguments about the necessity of collaboration towards the success of the struggle just when collaboration becomes impossible, and Kino Loy's sad little "I can't swim" halting the triumphant rush of the prison break, which hit me like a brick.
(Although, speaking of bricks, Brasso beating up stormtroopers with a brick made of Maarva's literal ashes is the visual pun I was thinking of above that absolutely took me out at the knees ajsk;ldfjdl)
Anyway, the other thing I like is the show's commitment to showing various forms of resistance and the pros & cons & messiness thereof -- there are long-running cells like Saw Gerrera's, there's flash operations and ideological infighting and Le Carre-esque , and then there are popular movements that arise naturally from ordinary people within their own contexts fighting their own particular and personal battles, and these things all happen individually but also the ripples and runoffs of those things play into each other like. Hmm. Not just streams running into the same river but a complex tidal system? My metaphor may be running away with me here but either way it's a kind of storytelling I like.
In other news within a few weeks of starting to watch this show I was required to make a character for an RPG and I said "hey is anyone else planning on making a manifesto kid because I kind of want to make an annoying manifesto kid --" and then everyone laughed at me. I did love Nemik and this was very predictable of me.
I also loved getting to grab
genarti by the elbow and hiss in delight "IT'S THE PRIDE LESBIAN! THE LESBIAN FROM PRIDE! SHE'S HERE!" perfect typecasting no notes
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Andor is so good!:D
I don't have anything else to say because I wailed about it as it came out but YEAH ABSOLUTELY CORRECT on all accounts, it's so good, I gotta rewatch it in one emotionally devastating go at some point.
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I loved the marching band at the funeral, like a cross between a colliery band and a second line.
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YES. I feel like this is a kind of narrative that is so rare in television? And it was so incredibly gratifying to see it?
and all of the plot points I knew about or thought I knew about ended up playing out in ways that were a step or two sideways from what I expected.
YES!
(Although, speaking of bricks, Brasso beating up stormtroopers with a brick made of Maarva's literal ashes is the visual pun I was thinking of above that absolutely took me out at the knees ajsk;ldfjdl)
Right???????????
God, I love this show. So much.
Yeah, everyone called Nemik being my fave too. I am always in love with the manifesto kid.
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I love Nemik ... I love that he was convinced that all he had to do was talk enough and everyone would obviously come round to his way of thinking ... bless that child!
(Though I just went back and read your post and I also agree about there not being enough aliens! Show us more about how the Empire is hitting the wide variety of people across the galaxy who don't fit the mold of what the Empire thinks people ought to be!)
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I forgot to mention that Skeen is played by a high school friend of
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I love that he was convinced that all he had to do was talk enough and everyone would obviously come round to his way of thinking ... bless that child!
I relate deeply to this. I always thought that if I could just articulate my ideas well enough, people would agree! It's only the past few years that I've figured out that...this is not true.
Show us more about how the Empire is hitting the wide variety of people across the galaxy who don't fit the mold of what the Empire thinks people ought to be!
I want that so badly!
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Say more? I usually hear Blake's 7 described as the better version of other shows.
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Andor seems to have been visualized from beginning to end as a single story, and it's shaped carefully so everything furthers its themes. It's bleak but there's hope that comes from many directions: the slow build of individuals being radicalized, and people theorizing and writing, and individuals organizing to take care of each other and take political action, and politicians politicking. I was mesmerized by every episode, even when I saw failure coming at the characters like an oncoming train. At the end, I felt...not victorious, but maybe at peace? I felt seen, in a political way.
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Thank you! I have been frequently warned about the productions values of Blake's 7, but it has generally sounded more thematically coherent.
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(Another thing I loved about this show, which is apparently also owed in large part to Gilroy as a director: everything was either filmed on-location somewhere with CG added later or actually had a set built! They built a sizeable town for Ferrix, with fully operational doors and interiors! They—obviously—built huge sets for Narkina 5, and had to film in there for weeks! And of course you can really tell, the way the actors are able to exist and interact with their environment really pays off in such a big way. A lot of the other recent SW shows were filmed in large part on Disney’s new 3D The Volume stage instead of going on-location anywhere and I tend to find that very noticeable, the absence of actual interaction with the environment is hard to miss. Definitely something valuable to be gained from committing to filming in real spaces!)
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(YES all the material culture in the show feels incredibly lived-in ... these are spaces and items that people interact with and it shows so clearly. Ferrix, especially, is just such a thoroughly real place, and it's so important that it is or else none of the rest of it would hit.)
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Yeah, exactly!! (And the outdoor filming locations stood out to me too, especially after watching a bit of Obi-Wan Kenobi—Aldhani and Narkina 5 were filmed in real places in the UK and feel that way, whereas a lot of the Kenobi locations felt distinctly false/empty because they were…clearly filmed on The Volume, lol. Granted, I’m sure budgetary constraints combined with the fact that one of the main settings in Kenobi was a desert played a role there, but still! Lugging your crew out to The Middle of Nowhere, Scotland pays off, actually,)
Also, a cool thread comparing o.g. locations with the CG-augmented results for scenes on Coruscant:
https://twitter.com/TSoS_/status/1575409833536266245
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and to look at names so I can stalk more DW people who like Andor.My favorite surprise about the show is not actually within the show - it was learning that Tony Gilroy wrote the script for The Cutting Edge. :D
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Tony Gilroy was responsible for one of my favorite modern neo-noirs—Michael Clayton (2007), which I still think deserved a whole lot of awards in its year which it didn't win—and one of the things I love so much about that film is its avoidance of almost all the obvious moves of its genre while engaging wholly with its ethics and themes and I was delighted to find Andor working the same way, since I got inevitably pulled into it after
The brick joke for great justice was exactly what Maarva would have wanted.
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And then maybe when there isn't time anymore someone will turn you into a brick joke for great justice, which is indeed exactly what she would have wanted!
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The Maarva situation is definitely messy! She's a very complicated character and her relationship with Cassian is complicated in a way that I thought was really interesting and challenging - similar to Luthen, tbh, and really deliberately paralleled, too, and both of them sort of representative of the way that it's easy to make harmful choices when the situations offered under imperialism don't present any good ones. I'm extremely curious to see how stuff with Luthen is going to play out next season.