Friends

I've been watching Andor every week with friends, and honestly I've really liked the three episodes a week release schedule, it's made every week feel like an event, and the show has been mostly immaculate.

Mostly immaculate.

We got to the finale and I was asked what I thought...and there was a long pause...followed by a second long pause....and then, 'I do not think Bix should have been in season two.'

I hated, hated, that the final shot of the show was Bix With Cassian's secret baby. I thought that it horribly undercut his final hero walk through Yavin past the surviving members of Luthen's resistance accompanied by swelling heroic music. I've heard people suggest that it meant that Cassian's sacrifice wasn't in vain, and, like, it already wasn't. He succeeded. He got the plans out. He's the reason that Luke could take out the Death Star, that the Empire was defeated, that Anakin turned away from the dark side.

I've always hated the idea that having a biological child is the only thing that makes your life meaningful or gives you a legacy. It's why I hate the third season of Star Trek: Picard, a competently made season of television that I have borderline violent feelings towards.

I've been thinking a lot about Andor in relation to Arcane, two shows that were originally planned to go five seasons, had excellent, albeit very slowly paced first seasons, then were reworked to be over in two. Andor is admittedly the more sympathetic example, where the creative team were burned out and didn't feel like they could do five, whereas it seems like Arcane was cut down because it wasn't driving enough new players to League of Legends.

And, honestly, no one should play League of Legends, unless your idea of a good time is being called a slur by a child, in which case Go with God.

But Arcane tried to solve the problem by having fours seasons of plot happen in one, and ended up with a season of pretty rushed and occasionally incoherent television. Whereas I think Andor handled it much better; the four act structure, with every act skipping forward a year, really worked for me. I think it also helped that it had the skeleton of Star Wars to hang on, so that when the rebellion jumps from being Luthen and assorted lunatics running around the galaxy sticking spokes in the wheels where they can to a military/government in waiting on Yavin you don't find it jarring, it's like, Oh, yeah, this is where I came in in A New Hope.

And the pacing really worked when it came to the rising tensions of Ghorman, that it took years, but by the time the massacre happened not only did no one come to help, no one was ever going to because the propaganda arm of the Empire had successfully reduced the people there to some kind of inferior, unworthy form of persons who had had brought this on themselves.

Where the pacing didn't quite land for me was with the characters, the show rightly seemed to have some pretty clear ideas about where the characters would end up after five years, but because they only had twelve episodes the character development had to be sketched in broad strokes.

And, yeah, some of them were playing on easy; Luthen dies before seeing his new dawn, just as he said he would; Mon Mothma defects and is an open member of the rebellion, because we already know that's what happens.

Some of them just work; like, I don't need to see any more of Dedra and Syril's relationship to get it. And the endings both characters got were pitch perfect.

RIP Syril, you were this close to being a person; Long life, Dedra, no sympathy for fascism Barbie.

I did really appreciate the way the show showed both that fascism eats its young, and that it took so long for the Rebel Alliance to get its shit together because it was for the longest time a leftist circular firing squad.

But the story pacing v. character development thing brings me back to Bix. Like, it felt like there was a version of this show that went five seasons where Bix dealing with her torture at the hands of the Empire and getting her revenge is her season two arc, but because we have to wrap this up in twelve episodes that gets one scene, and then Bix is just kind of hanging around because her being there with Cas's baby in the final shot has already been penciled in.

The other bum note in the series was the way the Cinta/Vel stuff was handled. And, like, I've been noodling on this, because I don't hate that Cinta died in principle, but I do hate that in an otherwise immaculately written show it was like someone had gone 'Chat GTP, write me a dead lesbian storyline.' I also kind of hate that in the first season Cinta/Vel was written in that annoyingly 'plausibly deniable, live slug reaction, this has to edited out for hostile markets' Disney Star Wars way, only for season two to make it explicit only to kill the the non-white one, like, I have limited patience for straight people being very proud of themselves for reinventing the Hays Code.

I am a fucking hypocrite though, becuase I have been shipping Vel/Kleya ever since Vel eyed her up at the wedding and I was only delighted that she show ended with one of my favourite shippy dynamics: to whit, a literal drowned rat of a woman has somehow become the responsibility of another, differntly fucked up woman who emphatically did not sign up for this,

Anyway, I freakin' love this show. Like, I've got niggles, sure, but it's like.... it's like, Star Wars is never going to feel like t did when you were nine, because you're not nine anymore, but sometimes. when the stars align, it can feel like this.