Andor and the Reimagining of Star Wars

Star Wars, as a franchise, is almost 50 years old. It remains extraordinarily popular—as much or more than any other cinematic universe. At the same time, nearly all Star Wars properties are divisive in some way.

As I noted in the introduction to our special series Star Wars Subjectivities:

...search around the internet and you'll find many a lengthy opinion piece on which Star Wars properties are good and which ones are bad. Some will be Original Trilogy fanatics like me, others will tell you how secretly great the Prequels are. Others still will opine on how The Last Jedi is really a Top 3 Star Wars film sandwiched between two cinematic commercials for Disney theme park rides.

This is not only true for the films, but also for the various television shows, animated series, video games, books and comics that bear the Star Wars logo. Except Andor. I have yet to meet someone who loves Star Wars but dislikes Andor. Sure, I've met people who found the first season a bit dry and joyless (as I did, at the time), but not one fan who thinks it's bad. Nearly everyone—fans and critics alike—agree that it's good. Many think it's the best Star Wars property ever made.

I'm too heavily invested in the Original Trilogy to go that far—after all, it did change the way we think about movies. But after the masterpiece that is season 2, I think there's a serious case to be made for Andor. I want to delve deeper into why this show is so compelling to so many people—and, in the spirit of Star Wars Subjectivities, why it is so compelling to me.

(Before getting started, I'd like to note that Phoebe has written extensively on the show, including a great review of Andor Season 1, as well as an essay for Star Wars Subjectivities on Andor as community action—and is currently running a weekly review series breaking down each episode (ep 1, ep 2, ep 3, ep 4, ep 5). All are must reads, if you ask me. This will be a complementary take.)

Andor is a grown-up story for grown-ups

Star Wars has always tried to thread the needle between its two core audiences: adults and children. I discovered the Original Trilogy as a boy—and it captivated me the way media only can when you are that age. But the genius of the Original Trilogy is that it continues to captivate as you grow older. However, when George Lucas launched the prequel trilogy in 1999, it was obvious to all of us who were now teenagers or adults that these films were not aimed at us, but at a new generation of children. At Cannes in 2024, Lucas said that people like me were just grumpy because we weren't looking at the films through 10-year old eyes.

It's true that I never saw the prequels through 10-year old eyes, but I have consumed a metric ton of children's media over the years—as an adult—and can say with confidence that The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones are not good, not even by the relaxed standards of children's media. As I wrote about The Phantom Menace:

The writing is bad. The acting is bad. The direction is bad. The production is bad. The pacing is bad. The design is bad. The effects are bad. The characters are bad. The plot is bad. The concept is... well... okay, maybe this could have actually been a good movie, in theory, but unfortunately... the execution is, in a word, bad. Like, bad on a very basic, fundamental level.

Or as Vance more succinctly put it in his piece on Attack of the Clones:

Of all the millions of stories that could exist in that galaxy far, far away, Lucas picked the wrong ones to tell in these prequels.

Nearly everyone, including yours truly, agrees that Revenge of the Sith is a much better film. The story is actually interesting—and highly political, weaving the tragedy of Anakin's turn to the dark side alongside the broader tragedy of the Republic's dissolution and the death of democracy. It has its cringe kid content moments ("Nooooooooo!"), but ultimately Revenge of the Sith aspires to be a serious film for whoever is watching, regardless of age. Like the Original Trilogy, Revenge of the Sith successfully threads the needle between its core audiences.

Most Star Wars content since has attempted the same feat. In the Disney era, this has worked sometimes (e.g. Mandalorian, Ahsoka) but more often not (e.g. Solo, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan). You could argue that success just boils down to quality, but the fact is that designing content for the broadest possible audience usually leads to bland, mediocre fare that is passable to everyone but not great to anyone.

Perhaps for this reason, Disney has recently grown more and started to develop properties specifically for each audience. I'm focusing on Andor here, but Skeleton Crew is also worth mentioning—it's a true kids' show designed for parents to watch with their little ones. And it's good!

Meanwhile, Andor is a mature show written for adults, a complex political drama set against a dark background, featuring hard-boiled characters who shoot first and don't fight according to Queensbury rules. There are no adorable creatures, no comic relief characters and no Jedi. Instead, there are real people struggling against very real oppression, making tough choices that don't always work out—and which almost always come at a high cost. Yet it is also a moving, sensitive and stirring portrayal of those people and the terrible world they were born into. I'm still astonished that this is a Star Wars story—and that it is almost the exact Star Wars story I've long wanted to see told.

The best Star Wars stories enhance the Original Trilogy; the worst cheapen it

This is something I've been chewing on since we ran Star Wars Subjectivities back in 2023. The Original Trilogy is the keystone for the Star Wars universe. All subsequent works—whether in film, television or other media—are essentially contextualizing those films. More precisely, they try to either (a) help you understand why things happen the way they do in the Original Trilogy; or (b) explore the aftereffects and consequences of what happens in the Original Trilogy. The good stuff adds richness, depth and gratifying exposition to a story with a lot of whitespace, or render something silly, well, less silly—in all cases enhancing the Original Trilogy.

Consider this example: In A New Hope, we learn that rebel spies managed to obtain plans for the Empire's Death Star. When Darth Vader boards the Tantive IV, he is specifically looking for those plans—which Princess Leia gives to the droid R2D2, with instructions to hand them over to the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. The plans demonstrate a fundamental weakness in the Death Star's design, which the Rebel Alliance hopes to exploit, thus winning a first major victory in their rebellion against the Empire.

Rogue One tells the story of how those rebel spies obtain the plans and transfer them to the Tantive IV. Andor then gives us the backstory for one of its main characters, Cassian Andor. But it doesn't only do that. We get a deep dive into Mon Mothma, the political leader of the Rebel Alliance—who has a small but compelling role in Return of the Jedi. And we get to see the Rebellion—and the Empire—from a range of perspectives, from Senators to regular people (none of whom, I'll note, are lightsaber-wielding Force sensitives of destiny).

In every way possible, Andor fleshes out the story and world presented in the Original Trilogy, enhancing our understanding of what happens, why it happens and who is important to the story it tells.

Contrast this with the Disney-era Sequel Trilogy. In The Force Awakens, director JJ Abrams eschews the opportunity to explore the New Republic's struggles to govern under the power vacuum left by the Empire's dissolution (which all of us who participated in this roundtable were keen on), in favor of... just remaking A New Hope with new, less interesting characters and cheaper-looking sets. As Haley put it, Abrams remade A New Hope for Gen Z. And that's probably the nicest way to put it.

The Last Jedi is more daring, but its aspirations are weighed down by inconsistent writing and direction, plot holes and—again—the misguided urge to just remake a film that everyone already loves (in this case, The Empire Strikes Back). As I wrote in a (fairly grumpy) review back in 2017:

This brings us to the on-going Disney trilogy, which so far has presented a vision of... the exact same one as the Original Trilogy. Actually, there is a mild subversion of the original trilogy’s meta-narrative, but one so mild that it's barely a critique. Once again, we have a ragtag group of plucky individuals who confront immense power and (are sure to) triumph against all odds. And the films hit you over the head with the referential frying pan. Starkiller Base from The Force Awakens is the Death Star, but bigger! Kylo Ren is Darth Vader, but emo! Luke’s island is Dagobah, salt planet is Hoth, casino planet is Cloud City and so forth and so on. It's the same old same old, only with crappier design and little romance—the kind of thing dreamed up by corporate executives with checklists in hand and theme park rides in mind.*

So how does the Sequel Trilogy function as Star Wars canon? Not well—and especially not well when the big reveal occurs in Rise of Skywalker (which all of us in the Disney Star Wars roundtable agreed is the worst of the three). All it achieves is to make the Original Trilogy less consequential in terms of canon, while rendering the few redeeming bits of The Last Jedi null and void in favor of insipid fan service that didn't even appeal to the fans who complained about The Last Jedi. I can say one good thing about it, though: it features such an unsatisfying ending that this instantly rendered all those contrarian critiques of Return of the Jedi null and void. After all, why would anyone complain about that ending when there's another one that's so drab, colorless and utterly devoid of life?

We finally see the Empire for what it really is

Back to Andor, this is the first major piece of Star Wars media where we truly see the Empire for what it is. And I don't mean that we get a quantitatively higher level of grimdark badness (the Empire destroys a planet in A New Hope, after all, and it's hard to get much worse than that). What I mean is this: in Andor, we get to see how Imperial rule is experienced by noncombatants; we get to see what animates the Imperial project; and we come to understand why the Empire behaves the way it does.

These are not zealots of the 20th-century grimoire, animated by nationalistic hatreds, a radically remade society or a murderous desire for purity. Rather, the Empire is more or less a traditional empire. It is a fundamentally extractive enterprise, the way Dutch colonialism was fundamentally extractive in present-day Indonesia—that is to say, the Empire is motivated by the straightforward desire to take and hoard.

For example, in Season 2, we learn that Director Krennic needs a mineral called kalkite for his top secret Death Star project; a rich source of the mineral exists beneath the crust of the planet Ghorman, a sparsely populated colony world whose leadership had backed the Separatists during the Clone Wars, but mining the kalkite from Ghorman would render the planet unstable—and unsuitable for habitation. Krennic gathers a council of officials from the various military branches, directorates of the Imperial bureaucracy and, of course, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) to discuss their options. The meeting is straightforwardly designed to evoke the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where a group of 15 Nazi officials decided to exterminate Europe's Jewish population (as Tony Gilroy himself has stated).

But while there's no doubt that the Empire will commit genocide, if it decides that doing so will further its goals, the Empire isn't motivated by any specific hatred for the people of Ghorman. Rather, the people of Ghorman are an inconvenience, as is the need for their removal—so the conspirators decide to look for alternatives, but ready a plan to reduce any blowback they might face if they ultimately decide to commit genocide and the mass ethnic cleansing of the planet.

Despite the aesthetic similarities between the Empire and Nazi Germany, this is not at all like the Holocaust, which was the culmination of several decades of consistent, ideological antisemitism from a political party founded on the premise that Jews were to blame for just about everything. It is, I'd argue, much more like the atrocities committed by both land-based and seafaring empires: there was something the empire wanted, there were people in the way—and if there was no more expedient way to take it, they would deploy extreme levels of violence to get it. This is bad, by the way—very bad; just not bad in the specific way the Nazis were bad, or as consistently bad as the Nazis were.

For me this as a refreshing take. Popular media routinely ignores 95% of human history while obsessing over a few historical cases, relating anything and everything to said cases. But there is a lot more material to draw on, and the fact that Andor steps out from the shadow of the ever-present Nazi analogy to portray the Empire in ways that evoke other things is, to me, one of the things that give the show depth.

Andor is about people making difficult choices

One of the show's main subplots focuses on the radicalization of Mon Mothma, who by Return of the Jedi has become the leader of the Rebel Alliance. But when we are introduced to Mon Mothma, she is if anything a beneficiary of the Empire. That is not to say she supports the Empire (we know she does not), but that her class privilege—being a wealthy, connected human from the core worlds—gives her the option to pretend the evil isn't happening and keep living her life of luxury. She does not, but we see, by the end, most members of her social circle will choose to follow the path of least resistance.

This contrasts with life outside the core worlds, where societies are mixed (human and non-human), few people are rich, life is harsh and the decision to rebel is more often imposed than chosen. As it is for Cassian Andor. Resistance, though, comes in many forms—and requires many kinds of sacrifices.

Andor portrays a range of resistance fighters—from the patrician senators Mon Mothma and Bail Organa to art dealer turned spymaster Luthen Rael and his indefatigable protégé Kleya Marki (played by a scene-stealing Elizabeth Dulau); from the hard-boiled Cassian Andor and Lezine to Supervisor Jung, Luthen's mole within the ISB. None are "chosen," none are Force sensitives; all are simply people trying to do the right thing as best they can under terrible circumstances. These are heroes every resistance movement can claim, from the mighty to the ordinary. All play their part, at great cost, because they cannot simply stand by.

Andor isn't just great Star Wars; it's great science fiction

If it isn't clear already, I see Andor as a triumph. It is—easily, in my view—the best Star Wars story since the Original Trilogy. It achieves this feat by taking bigger, bolder risks than any other film or series since Return of the Jedi hit theaters in 1983.

But it isn't only one of the best Star Wars stories ever told—it is also one of the best science fiction stories ever developed for television. Indeed, if you were to swap out all the Star Wars content and replace it with standard space opera content, it would be just as effective a story. This is rarely true, even for the Star Wars stories I love. It is very difficult for me to see, to cite one example, how The Mandalorian would work outside a Star Wars context—and I love The Mandalorian.

Hats off, then, to Tony and Dan Gilroy, to Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O'Reilly, Elizabeth Dulau, and to everyone else involved in the making of this absolute masterpiece.

***

(My view is not an institutional one. There are other ways of looking at all these films and shows, which are well represented across our flock. Haley loves the prequels—all the prequels. Paul enjoyed The Force Awakens—even I did the first time around, as did Joe. Arturo has argued that The Last Jedi is significant, in that it redefines what it means to be a Jedi—and then poses a novel theory, that the film is about the meaning of fandom. It's definitely an interesting theory, one worth engaging with.) 

***

POSTED BY: The G—purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather  founder/administrator, since 2012.

Star Wars Subjectivities: TIE Fighter video game (1994)

Some folks just really wanted to pretend to fly for the Imperial navy in the 90s, and this old-school, lo-fi PC video game let us have a blast while doing it. 

"Enter your name, pilot!" is the first thing you hear when the log-in screen pop up in the Star Wars: TIE Fighter video game. That's right, you're a new pilot recruit in Palpatine's space navy. 

First, though, let's set the scene.

POV: 13-year-old me, obsessed with flying (for years I wanted to grow up to be a naval aviator, and I so much spent time playing Jane's US Navy Fighters video game, another fun romp) and finally getting to pilot a space fighter! (I sometimes jokingly say that the great tragedy of my life is that I'll never be able to join a spacy navy. Thank god for Battlestar Galactica Reruns). 

How was I playing this game? In my bedroom, on a huge clunky Compaq desktop. It ran through MS-DOS (ancient technology). The graphics? A few steps above 8-bit. The sound? Oh the sound card was MIDI, most definitely. 

But it was fun. 

More Than Just a Space Shooter

Galaga was just a button masher. The Rogue Squadron N64 game? Just a console button masher. You flew and pressed shoot, sometimes launched a missile. 

TIE Fighter, on the other hand, actually made you a pilot. You used an actual joystick. You know, like a pilot. 

But the fun and strategy of this particular game lies in how much control you have over the tools in your cockpit—and you have a lot of it. 

In the top corners, you have scanner screens that tell you who's in front and behind you, so you can juke at opportune times to evade laser fire. 

You have shield and engine gauges, and if you want to go faster, say, you can shunt power from the shields to the engines for an extra boost — and vice versa. Granted, not every ship in the game even has shields, but there are some fun advanced ships that do. 

In the center of your screen is a display that lets you toggle through nearby ships, both friendly and enemy. You can see how much damage they've taken, how far away they are, and their name and cargo, if you get close enough to scan it. 

When you're in the pilot's chair, you have to make a ton of small adjustments and decisions to gain that competitive edge, and you actually feel like you're keeping the wheels on the damn thing just to make it to the end.

You're Just a Hardworking Pilot Trying to Make Their Way in the Galaxy

Before this game came out, there was an X-Wing game, told from the POV of the good guys. It's not as fun! I can't explain it, but becoming a cog in the Imperial navy is so, so much more entertaining. 

You're not just fighting rebels, either. This game surprisingly introduces a more nuanced approach to "the bad guys." As a pilot, you help planets having a civil war, battle space pirates, and root out traitors. Just every day military stuff. 

After each battle, if you're good enough, you obtain decorative ribbons and awards. You can also follow subplots that place you into the Emperor's secret circle — you even get rewarded with special tattoos. 

Did I take pride in my Imperial navy decoration book? 100%. Was I a weird kid? Duh.

A Glimpse into the EU

TIE Fighter also played into the Expanded Universe of Star Wars content (thin though it was in 1994). You see a blotchy, digital Thrawn (and Pellaeon!) throughout the game, fresh off his appearance in the Zahn book trilogy just a few years before. 

Not only do we get Thrawn, we also get our first-ever view of Coruscant! At least, I think it is — would love to know if someone else can find an earlier visual depiction of our favorite capital city-planet. 

Later Iterations

It's amazing how quickly graphic technology progressed in the 90s. Just a few short years later, X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter was released, and the screens were so much clearer and more impressive. The score was instrumental, not MIDI keyboard blops. There was also a multiplayer capacity, but I didn't have good fast internet until I got to college in 2001. 

Then, 2 years ago, I heard they were releasing a modern version for PlayStation called Squadrons. I purchased the game, and then a VR headset, and then also a throttle and joystick. 

It was incredible. You look down wearing the headset and see a body clad in an orange jumpsuit, flying an X-wing through space in full surround-sound and view. 

I only played it for a few months, but it was worth every penny to be able to relive my love of space dogfighting with modern, mind-blowing technology. God bless adult money! High-five, 13-year-old Haley.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, Vidalia onions, and growing corn and giving them pun names like Anacorn Skywalker.

SWS Roundtable: Let’s Talk Disney Star Wars!

 Life is a Theme Park

G - Let’s start with a quick show of hands: do you give the Sequel Trilogy a thumbs up, thumbs sideways or thumbs down? As succinctly as possible, tell me why you feel that way.

Haley - I give two thumbs sideways. I enjoy and appreciate any glimpse into the Star Wars universe —and I mean that!— but there’s not enough groundbreaking ideas in it for me. Loved The Last Jedi, the other two are meh.

Arturo - Sideways. Episode 7 is meh, Episode 8 is a spectacular masterpiece, and Episode 9 is unsalvageable trash.

Vance - Definitely sideways. I dig The Last Jedi and I’ll throw some more love in The Force Awakens’ direction than Arturo and Haley, but Rise of Skywalker…oof.

G - I’m a thumbs down for the Sequel Trilogy. Force Awakens got the aesthetics right, but at the end of the day these films don’t have much to say—at least, not to me.

Let’s start with The Force Awakens—which sets the Trilogy up as more reboot than sequel. Now allow me to rant for a minute. Rather than set the drama within the context of a nascent New Republic, The Force Awakens tells us there’s this new Empire stand-in, led by a Palpatine stand-in, whose apprentice is “Emo Darth Vader” and whose military has developed a Death Star stand-in. You would think this new Empire stand-in would draw the attention of the New Republic, but you would be wrong. Instead, this new Empire stand-in is opposed by…a ragtag band of plucky Rebel stand-ins getting zero support from the New Republic even after they use their fucking Death Star stand-in to blow up a planet. Can we pause for a second and just consider how stupid this is?

Granted, there were things I liked about TFA. The “world” is suitably junky, I like the core characters Rey, Finn, Po and Kylo Ren and BB8 is very cute. It’s just…well, see above. Now, tell me why I’m right or wrong.

V - You’re not wrong. I love Rey, and I love that they got the feel of the original trilogy right, but everything else is a lazy re-hash. “Lazy” probably isn’t the right word—more like “lowest common denominator.” Like the movie only exists to reinvigorate the franchise merch sales. The new characters are fun and charismatic, the world feels like Star Wars, and the sense of adventure feels like it’s on the right scale, but the criticisms that peg The Force Awakens as essentially a remake of A New Hope are valid. The movie’s logic takes a back seat to the safest possible version of, “People liked the first movie, so let’s do that again, maybe?” So the bad guy is essentially the same, the obstacles are essentially the same, and the Death Star is essentially the same.

Personally, I didn’t mind it in the theater because the prequels were like grounding into a triple play and at least this movie got somebody on base. Not a high bar, but I’ll take it. Then The Last Jedi, for me, advanced the runner (It’s a baseball metaphor!). But unfortunately that lowest common denominator, safety-first mindset prevailed in the execrable Rise of Skywalker, and everything that seemed possible in The Force Awakens and seemed an interesting possibility in The Last Jedi just evaporated.

H - Yeah, the idea of the Resistance definitely confused me. I think I kind of understand the New Republic’s reticence now (thanks Dave Filoni!), but at best it’s not explained well and at worst it’s just silly. I saw a TikTok the other day that was like “who the hell was funding the First Order?!?!” They had ships and infantry and a literal planet-sized Death Star dupe. Why wasn’t that enough for the New Republic higherups to be like “Well we should really address this.” I wanted to love The Force Awakens, and I still think it has some very cool things, but it’s A New Hope for Gen Z—which isn’t a bad thing, but I expected more.

A - The Force Awakens had one great idea: Finn. He's the most interesting character concept of the trilogy, and consequently the most wasted. We could have had an insider view of how evil insidiously drags ordinary people in, how it may take a long time to undo lifelong brainwashing. Instead, Finn was reduced to Rey's sidekick.

Rey is also a good concept (until Episode 9 destroyed everything that made her interesting). Her relationship with Empire junk establishes her as a newcomer Star Wars fan, which is a great way to use an audience stand-in; newcomer Star Wars fans was exactly what this movie needed to create. (No one gets to call Rey a Mary Sue until you admit that Luke Skywalker is the Mary Suest Mary Sue who ever Mary Sued.)

G - I’m with you on Finn, Arturo. The best thing about TFA (in my opinion) is how they set up Finn’s character. And then he gets progressively less interesting and less central to the story as the Trilogy unfolds. 

Okay, let’s talk The Last Jedi. This is the most polarizing entry in the Sequel Trilogy—but for a few different reasons. A certain subset of fans don’t seem capable of handling a movie that has a diverse cast—which is bullshit. These films are set in space and populated by aliens and droids; those are okay but skin color or female characters are…to be honest I’m not even sure what the complaint is supposed to be here. But whatever it is, it’s dumb, stupid and dumb again.

All that said, I did not love the film! What about you guys?

H - I absolutely loved it. In fact, I cried three separate times while watching it in the theatre! It felt the most like Star Wars to me of all the sequels. I especially loved Leia’s Mary Poppins scene. I know people hate it, but it’s the first time in any new canon Disney movie where we see Leia’s force powers—it reminded me of when Luke was training her while she was pregnant in Heir to the Empire. She was essentially a cardboard cutout of herself in TFA, so this scene helped breathe some life into her in a way that I absolutely adored. I also loved Holdo, and Crait, and Luke’s arc. The Last Jedi is the only sequel film that I return to, time and again.

A - Ooohhh, you're getting me started on The Last Jedi.

*cracks knuckles*

Let's do this.

The Last Jedi takes everything that the prequels exposed as wrong with the Jedi Order and carries it to its logical conclusion: the Jedis were a rigid hierarchy with too high an opinion of itself, and that made them oblivious to the darkness growing under their nose. If the Force is to be once again harnessed to ensure peace in the galaxy, it can’t be done with the old methods. There’s only so much Luke can teach; the rest must be left up to Rey. That is not a disrespect of the old characters. That is how sequels are supposed to work.

The transformation that The Last Jedi presents within Luke has been tragically misunderstood by the angry manchildren. You already saw Luke as a powerful kickass swordsman with a clear sense of his place in the war; where’s the excitement in seeing more of the same? To demand that Luke be unchanged from Return of the Jedi is to demand that no time have passed at all. Instead, something much more interesting happens to Luke: he’s faced with a problem he can’t Force-punch his way out of. In a crucial moment of bad judgment, he failed his nephew and indirectly pushed him toward evil. Again, that is not a point against the movie. That is how you’re supposed to challenge an established hero.

The ethos of The Last Jedi is summarized in Yoda’s final lesson to Luke: “We are what they grow beyond,” the best line in the movie, and the only time Yoda actually says something wise in the entire movie saga. Luke isn’t in this movie to kick ass. He’s here to hand over the baton. It’s not the movie’s fault that manchildren missed the message.

V - I think I appreciated the film more than I liked it. With all the reasons we’ve discussed about The Force Awakens being a safe play, I dug that The Last Jedi reached for something, and I thought it was setting up what could be a more interesting third film (joke’s on me!). 

But I think the reach exceeds the grasp. Intellectually, I *get* the undermining of the wahoo-wild-west mentality of Han Solo…er…Poe Dameron, but I didn’t *feel* it. I found the commentary on capitalism taking the side of profit over the side of human suffering interesting, but the Canto Bight sequence takes foreeeeeeeever and feels like it distracts from the spine of the film. I mean, when you really zoom out, the whole film seems to take place across the space of a few hours, judging by the Dameron-Holdo conflict…except that such a compressed timeline doesn’t comport with the other plotlines. They feel like they take much longer.

So for me it’s an interesting movie that didn’t really withstand scrutiny. I give it more credit than The Force Awakens because it does take big swings, and I loooove that it undermines the Force=bloodlines narrative. I *want* Rey to be nobody. I want Ren to feel stupid and embarrassed for wearing a silly mask. I like Luke hiding away—a grizzled rejection of his earlier, wide-eyed idealism. I like Admiral Holdo. I think the red/white imagery of Crait is a singular, iconic Star Wars image. I *love* Rose’s line to Finn about how they will win the war.

But I think space-Leia is dumb and the ForceTime calls between Rey and Ben make my tummy hurt. In re-watching it, I thought for a minute, “Sure, this is a really good bridge film between part one and part two…not perfect, but serving up cool patterns.” Then I remembered that The Empire Strikes Back is the best movie of the original trilogy, and the bridging film between one and three can excel on its own terms. And I realized that The Last Jedi felt OK, but could have been so, so much more.

G - I’m mostly with Vance on this one. As with TFA, there were things I appreciated about TLJ. I thought they took Luke in an interesting direction and the Rey/Ben storyline grew more interesting in this installment. Making Force sensitivity more open and less dependent on bloodlines is also a good innovation for the series. The Original Trilogy never says outright that bloodlines matter, but the implication is there (especially when Yoda implies that Leia could be a candidate if Luke falls to the Dark Side, Leia being Luke’s sister).

Here’s what I didn’t like: Canto Bight, Flying Space Leia, Salt Hoth, underdeveloped Snoke and the general need to rehash what’s already been done rather than tell a completely different story. That last one is a problem with the whole Sequel Trilogy, not this installment specifically - but TLJ doesn’t go far enough in breaking the mold in my eyes.

Okay, Rise of Skywalker, the last film before we move on from the Sequel Trilogy to the broader Disney Star Wars universe. This is the worst one of the three, isn’t it?

V - Oh, for sure. I disliked it in the theater, but despised it on a re-watch. It’s a $200-million, stupid-ass response to 4-Chan trolls that didn’t like an Asian woman being important in The Last Jedi. The movie is a wholesale rejection of all the potential of The Last Jedi, in favor of lowest-common-denominator fanboy pandering.

I felt like the prequels were incompetent, but this one was cynical, pandering trash. Disney chose the wrong “fans” to listen to, and poisoned the well.

Not a fan.

A - Canto Bight is the best hidden message in The Last Jedi! It’s a perfectly camouflaged middle finger to Disney, the actual profiteer whose bottom line needs the Star Wars to go on warring forever.

Now, about Episode 9: Chewbacca’s medal is the condensation of everything wrong with it. It feels like the movie was produced with a laundry list of long-standing fan complaints that had to be “fixed.” Luke tossed a lightsaber to the sea? No, now he preaches respect for lightsabers. Rey learned the Force too easily? No, now she has to start the movie with a training scene that adds nothing. Poe and Finn were getting too close? No, now each has a designated girlfriend.

Every single decision in the making of Episode 9 was the most risk-averse possible, the most people-pleasing, the most unimaginative. Including the not-quite-confirmation of Reylo, which joins Disney’s bizarre ongoing trend of trying to redeem Star Wars fascists.

H - It’s a fun enough watch (I enjoy any time I get to drop in on the Star Wars universe) but it’s got no heart. It’s contrived and boring with brief flashes of some pretty cool stuff. I personally loved Sith Threepio, and Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine is always, always a good time. But it just lacked oomph — it’s so clear that it was a course correction from TLJ. Call me a hater, but I don’t trust a man that does both Star Trek AND Star Wars (looking at you, J.J. Abrams).

G - And makes them both forgettable!

I guess, for me, this is how I feel: if Rise of Skywalker wasn’t a Star Wars film, hadn’t been preceded by The Last Jedi and I saw it on a plane, then I probably would have found it okay but forgettable. It isn’t per se a terrible film on its own merits; rather, it’s an unremarkable film on its own merits. But as a Star Wars film it’s just a huge disappointment. Making matters worse, it reverses most of the things I did like about TLJ and then…brings back Emperor Palpatine? That was some of the dumbest shit ever.

Oh, and when the armada finally arrives to bail out The Resistance…it’s not even the New Republic! I know I’m beating a dead horse here but this really irks me. Disney told the wrong story and told it badly.

Thankfully Disney has done other things with the franchise and many of those are cut or ten above the Sequel Trilogy in quality and depth. Let’s talk about Rogue One and Andor together, since they are related. Rogue One tells the story of the covert mission to steal the Death Star plans (which Darth Vader is looking for at the beginning of A New Hope). Andor tells the story of how Cassian Andor, hero of Rogue One, ended up on Scarif.

Of all the Disney Star Wars properties, Rogue One and Andor are the most universally loved. Maybe not the most watched, but the ones everyone seems to agree are great. What makes them work so well? Arturo, I know you have thoughts on this.

A - To me, the key theme of Andor is illustrated in the first shot of the first episode. Andor is walking down a long street lit by lampposts, and the camera does a truck motion in front of the lights, showing us in sequence: Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Then we’re shown the full extent of the street, with no visible beginning or end. I read this shot as establishing the standard Star Wars plot: an unbroken succession of Light and Dark that has gone on forever. And then comes the crucial moment: Andor steps out of that street. This story begins by taking a route that deviates from the eternal thread of Light and Dark. It dares do its own thing.

It’s a risky statement, to put it mildly. Disney very much doesn’t like to take risks, and yet here’s Andor telling us that Star Wars can be much more than space wizards. There’s enough space in the galaxy to tell stories that don’t invoke the Force, stories where people of limited resources have to make complicated choices without the help of magic.

Because the Force has never had precise rules, it has become an authorial wildcard that can fix any story beat. The Last Jedi is aware of this problem, and compensates for it by making the awesome Force projection cost Luke’s life. Evidently not having learned anything from it, Rise of Skywalker has Rey summon the power of every Jedi ever, and it has no consequences for her.

So how does this relate to Andor? In Andor and Rogue One, regular people have to figure out how to bring down a galactic dictatorship with mundane means. That’s orders of magnitude more exciting than space wizards. Starting with The Empire Strikes Back, the franchise fell into the trap of reducing the galactic war to the personal dramas of the Skywalker family, and Andor’s focus on a multitude of nobodies is a small step toward reversing that mistake. History according to the trilogies is steered by Great Men, missing the fact that there already was an active Rebellion before Luke ever sat in a cockpit. Rogue One and Andor acknowledge that history moves by an accumulation of numerous small forces, and I find that a more compelling mode of storytelling.

H - I think that it’s because a brand-new story told with just the barest touchpoints of the originals. We inherit the framework (stolen tapes, a ship that carries them, a rough rebellion trying to make it all work), but everything else is entirely new. Also young Mon Mothma! That was such a treat. And we can never forget that Vader lightsaber scene — our first glimpse of him in his full powers pre-ANH (and that Obi-Wan battle is so poorly filmed it’s laughable).

V - I have not seen Andor —I promised my wife I would wait for her— but I can say that it is the exact type of storytelling that I hoped would happen with the expanding Star Wars canvas. I’ve talked about that concept a few times here over the years. Getting away from the Skywaler family and exploring the galaxy holds as many kinds of stories as storytellers can imagine, and I am much more excited for those journeys.

I do love Rogue One, and echo the shout-out to the Vader fight scene. As we discussed here years ago when Vader got his own title in the Dark Horse comics run, if you base your understanding of the character exclusively on the movies, he’s kind of a dipshit. Everything he tries backfires. So the comics gave us a glimpse of a powerful Vader who earned the respect and fear that we see others around him display in the films. Seeing that same type of brutal competence onscreen was in so many ways the “right” way to tie into the larger canon of films. So much better than the pandering on display in Rise of Skywalker.

G - I love that Disney decided to explore the purely science fictional elements of Star Wars in these properties. I love how gritty they are—and how political. Andor really feels like commentary on the present in a way Star Wars usually doesn’t. Should every Star Wars film or show go this route? No. But I love that there’s room for it. Not everything needs to be Jedi and Sith. That said, Darth Vader’s appearance at the end of Rogue One is bonkers. 

Ahsoka takes a completely different direction—but I loved it almost as much as Andor. It’s an artful show: there’s an elegance and majesty to the way it’s shot, to the way fights are choreographed that feels deeply indebted to Kurosawa and classic samurai films. And it’s pure fantasy, leaning hard in the opposite direction of Andor.

Mandalorian is the other one I fell in love with. It’s basically a Spaghetti Western set in space. The hero, unlike Luke or Rey, doesn’t even want to fight the good fight; in fact, he’s only doing it because the baddies are threatening his adopted child. I’ve always been attracted to stories that center this kind of hero—the Witcher novels do as well. Whereas Andor leans into political science fiction, and Ahsoka into space fantasy, Mandalorian leans into the junkyard Wild West that Ralph McQuarrie developed for the Outer Rim.

H - I’m the only person in the world that thinks this, but Andor to me isn’t Star Wars—it’s just military sci-fi. It’s objectively good, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. It wasn’t fun for me, barring the prison subplot with Andy Serkis. I’m definitely more in the Ahsoka and Mando vein of things—I want to have a little fun and cheek with my Star Wars.

G - That’s completely fair, Haley—and I think I broadly agree. Mandalorian is my favorite of all the Star Wars shows because I think, more than any other Disney property, it epitomizes what I find appealing about Star Wars: compelling characters inhabiting a complex, chaotic world that feels “lived in,” which is full of horror but also full of joy. With Andor, it actually took to the end before it really clicked for me—precisely because it’s so joyless. Mando, by contrast, was love at first sight.

V - Yep, I’m with G here on Mandalorian. I love me some Spaghetti Westerns, and this Spaghetti Western in space scratched a lot of the same itch as Firefly, with the added bonus of the Man With No Name hero. Like you said, the episodes felt grounded in really cool, memorable characters, and the world felt lived-in, which is probably the first, most powerful thing I ever connected to in Star Wars. I think the characters also felt lived-in, which gave each episode —with the possible exception of the Seven Samurai episode, which was very much just Doing Seven Samurai— a certain empathy and heart that resonated deeply with me.

A - Unfortunately, I can’t comment on any Star Wars TV shows apart from Andor. When The Mandalorian was announced in terms of a tribute to the Western genre, I was instantly turned off. Western movies have never appealed to me. Same with Boba Fett; the bizarre fascination that fans have developed over this most unremarkable of characters has always puzzled me. As for Ahsoka, I would first have to watch that 2000s cartoon, and thanks but no thanks. Life is too short. And the mere existence of the Obi-Wan series just reeks of desperation. Star Wars is going to have to try much harder to get me to care for any of its future projects.

G - As far as Book of Boba Fett goes, Dean put it well—the character deserved better. Boba Fett had built this mystique over several decades, largely via the old Expanded Universe, where he was this ruthless but unsentimental bounty hunter. Like Parker in the Richard Stark novels, Boba Fett isn’t cruel, sadistic or megalomaniacal—he just wants his money. The “Town Marshall” version the show gave us is…not that. The story would have been a better fit for Timothy Olyphant’s character. But for Boba Fett? It just isn’t what fans had been waiting for. Also it wasn’t very good.

Ahsoka, though…I absolutely loved it. And Arturo—you don’t need to watch Clone Wars or Rebels to keep up. There are added layers for fans who watched those shows, but it’s not required reading, so to speak. What I loved most about Ahsoka is the cinematography, which brought to mind Kurosawa and the great European directors of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The last TV show I remember that looked this good was the first season of True Detective. [Link: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2014/03/true-detective-conquers-all.html]

Okay, last question: where would you like to see Disney take the franchise next? No wrong answers here, and please assume that you have full creative control!

V - You can miss me with the 10,000 years ago caveman Jedi from the Dark Horse series, and I’m going to echo the no-more-Skywalkers sentiment. Like I argued over a decade ago regarding superhero films, “superhero” was going to become an umbrella category that encompassed many different kinds of genre fare—noir, Western, family drama, etc. I think Star Wars is the same. I think what I would most like to see is a story that centers the development of some of the technology on display. Certainly there’s the Oppenheimer route, where somebody creates the technology that winds up powering the Death Star and has to wrestle with the ramifications, but there’s also the Hidden Figures route, where people crack the code of lightspeed and open up the galaxy. Or —and this is a really deep cut— a show like the 1980s fever-dream D.C. Follies, where puppet versions of characters from throughout the Star Wars canon all mingle for drinks with an affable bartender. I’d eat that up.

A - As I wrote in another roundtable: look at the rest of the galaxy. I find it very concerning that Matthew Vaughn is saying “Star Wars is the Skywalker family,” and therefore a hypothetical Star Wars reboot would have to retell the Skywalker saga. That is exactly the wrong approach. The Empire Strikes Back may be very well written and crafted and acted, but it hurt the narrative possibilities of Star Wars by reducing the franchise’s scope to one family. This hyperfocus on Luke’s lineage makes the galaxy feel very small, and before you know it, we’ll have a Disney+ series about the youth of his adoptive uncle and aunt. Star Wars urgently needs to stop eating its tail and look farther and wider.

And I’m probably sounding like a broken record, but The Last Jedi showed the right way to go. Show us how the Force manifests in ordinary people across the galaxy, of all lineages and species. Explore how the Force can be channeled in more interesting ways than wire-fu. And stop being so reverential for the franchise’s past. I may be the only one here who didn’t care for Vader’s fight at the end of Rogue One, but that scene illustrates a big problem with today’s Star Wars: it’s too focused on people-pleasing to the detriment of creativity and experimentation.

H - All I really want immediately is for them to keep their promise of a Rogue Squadron movie! The Michael A. Stackpole novels are some of my favorites of the EU, and I think they would do well now! Captain Teva in Mando and Ahsoka is proof positive that we want our space jocks! If Top Gun: Maverick saved the movies post-pandemic, imagine what an X-wing Top Gun could do!

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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.