Star Wars: Andor

[hammerofglass]

The Empire's response to the attack is straight out of the counter-insurgency manual. Specifically the section that says "for the love of God don't do this you idiot they're trying to bait you into clamping down so everyone hates you"

That the characters notice is a nice touch.

[CharlesPhipps]

The thing is the Empire has been salivating for the chance to do it from the beginning.

They were eager to take away the corporate territory.

[hammerofglass]

I'm starting to think Bleven might be a Rebel agent. He sure does seem efficient at derailing ISB operations that might uncover the network.

[hammerofglass]

Why is everything in the prison in units of seven? Seven floors of seven rooms of seven tables of seven workers in a prison with seven sides. Is this secretly a temple of Nurgle or something?

[Nobody700]

Finally saw episode 1 of Andor.

I can best sum it up as 'Andor does stuff and people are not happy at all.'

Gonna watch the next few before I say anything of real substance.

[Mabus]

Well, I'm glad I binge watched this show, because from what I've seen, the pacing is just too slow to work on a weekly release, not sure what was Disney thinking on releasing the first three episodes first, before releasing the rest of the episodes one per week. None of the episodes had enough story to leave me satisfied, and I kept having to watch the rest to make sense what was happening. At best you can split the show into three (uneven) parts, since that's pretty much how the show is structured.

Thankfully this isn't much of an issue since I feel that the show is excellent, the visuals are great, the acting is excellent (bar a few exceptions), the setting feels solid, the worldbuilding is mostly alright. It's a show I really feel I can rewatch it any time and not be disappointed. Lots of great moments, and even "unintentional" funny moments (like when Syril stalks Dedra outside the ISB is the funniest thing I've seen in Star Wars in a long while), and the fights were well done.

Although I do have to nitpick a few things. I don't know how good of an actor Diego Luna is in other films, but here he's like a plank of wood, I honestly can't remember one memorable scene with him, apart from him gunning down (again) another injured dude. Everyone else in the show is more interesting than the main star of the show, lol. Second, while I understand the need to focus more on the human characters, I feel that the almost complete lack of alien allies in the show narrows the Galaxy too much. Why would Mon Mothma even have issue financing the Rebellion? Surely there are still thousands of unihabited planets in the Galaxy (there still are by the time of TESB), and there's no reason why there couldn't be a few hidden CIS bases that the Empire overlooked or didn't get around to nuke them from orbit, that the Rebellion could loot for their own needs (in AotC, Dooku nonchalantly announces that 10,000 more systems will join the CIS, so the final number of the planets could have been even 100,000). The Mon Calamari were already helping the Rebels by the time of Rogue/One/ANH, they didn't join the Rebellion after the Death Star blew up. The show reduced the entire galaxy to a few sparsely populated planets and the Rebellion is basically just a bunch of Scottish Taliban, even though the story takes place 5 years before ANH, meaning that somehow the entire Rebellion just suddenly gets built in the next 5 years, which is odd. Thirdly, the prison arc, while excellent, in the end it goes pretty much nowhere. Since Luthen's idea was to make the Empire become more and more erratic and totalitarian, which will cause more and more people to become angry at the Empire and join the Rebellion, several thousand people locked in the most extreme prisons for nonsensical crimes would be the most eager people to join the Rebellion, thus fulfilling Luthen's plan. But instead, almost everyone that broke free just... disappears. They are completely forgot after that episode, and instead the only conclusion to Luthen's plan is a confusing shot where upon seeing the Empire massacring rioting civilians, he becomes horrified by... what he always knew it was gonna happen? As nice as the prion arc story was, in the end it was completely pointless, since not even Andor tells anyone about it. Only the other guy goes to spread the word or something.

Curious how season 2 will wrap the show, there are a few too many plots that might be hurt by the time skip, hopefully it won't end on a disappointing note.

[hammerofglass]

This didn't really sink in until now, but it's weird Disney of all megacorps put out an entire series of blatant antifa propaganda.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

This didn't really sink in until now, but it's weird Disney of all megacorps put out an entire series of blatant antifa propaganda.

It's a telling of perspective, I think. Fox for instance had been recognized as a media company with populist (or just overtly moderate) facets with its news which was met surprisingly with conscious material being written for the small screen.