Andor (Disney+)

[MahrinSkel]

I don't think it even means that any more, because I'm sure there are things which contain only white men that are still "woke".  It's come to mean "anything that doesn't cater to my fee-fees in exactly the right way."  You can probably find somebody out there complaining that Fox News is too woke.

Not just 'somebody' like it is rare. They're the entire audience for OAN and NewsMax.

--Dave

[Surlyboi]

I've been stretching my brain trying to think of things and all I can come back with is the hyper-competent woman in the ISB who keeps proving she's better than her male peer.

Yeah, but the male peer was a Black guy so Wokeception.

[HaemishM]

Just a thought experiment to see if I could find a valid argument there, especially since this show has much less meat for the complainers than something like a She-Hulk.

There isn't a valid argument. Again, it's mostly from guys who "refuse to watch Star Wars because it went all woke." That is just an absolutely stupid statement regardless of what justification they try to use.

[NowhereMan]

I can 100% see someone making the argument viewing the Corpo security guy as a direct attack on them. White guy with delusions of grandeur who is adequately competent and ends up getting absolutely fucked and sent into a meaningless desk job. From the viewpoint of the 'wokeism everywhere all at once' lot I can see them viewing this as basically a direct attack considering the competent Imperials that we see are women or black men (there are clearly competent, more senior Imperials but we don't spend enough time with them to really register). On the Rebel side we've got the art dealer and Andor himself (As someone from the UK I really struggle to get the Latino element, is Andor white for purposes of this or is he hispanic?). We've got two white guys in the rebel group but one of them's a scumbag so that's clearly an attack on white men as well.

Now I think that's a really surface level read of what the Corpo character's story is meant to show. I think he's got something set up for Season 2 but he's also meant to demonstrate that the Empire isn't a good thing even for people who are genuinely dedicated to its ideals, it's an uncaring system of repression that crushes anyone who isn't already in power. However on the surface level it's a white man who is humanised but not sympathetic and who ends up in a shitty situation. If the character had been played by a woman I imagine the complaints would just switch to having too much screen time and a boring storyline. Which really is another big element.

I think this one is going to get hate because like Rogue One it really does reject the heroic Space Opera nature of Star Wars and I think that's the real underlying complaint from the MRA crowd. Wokeism is wrapped up in it because there are women and people of colour given prominence and treated as normal characters but ultimately it's because this is rejecting the good/evil and heroic Star Wars conception. The 'bad guys' are still people, with motivations and consequences we can relate to and sympathise with. The 'good guys' actions have consequences for people that are negative. It's a real world and they don't like that. I don't know most of them would realise that's their problem here but I think deep down that's what's making them uncomfortable when watching it and they're blaming it on the surface thing. Except for the ones that saw a black man in a trailer and lost their shit, they're just mindless racists.

[Surlyboi]

The white security guy was forced to move back to Coruscant and live with his mother so that might hit some of the chuds close to home too. As for his competence, he still got in over his head and got a bunch of people killed on a hunch and is now making a nuisance of himself because he still thinks he did the “right thing” despite a bunch of evidence to the contrary.

The stuff they’re building in a he prison this episode? Guaranteed it’s materiel for the Imperial war machine, like TIE fighter parts or some such. The Saw Gerrera cameo was also a solid bit of worldbuilding. From the “was that you?” back and forth denials to the obvious signs of Saw’s already started descent into the mad state we found him in by Rogue One.

[Threash]

(As someone from the UK I really struggle to get the Latino element, is Andor white for purposes of this or is he hispanic?)

He has a noticeable Mexican accent.

[Sky]

The white security guy was forced to move back to Coruscant and live with his mother so that might hit some of the chuds close to home too.

His mom is one of the standout actors thus far. Completely nailed the role.

[Threash]

The white security guy was forced to move back to Coruscant and live with his mother so that might hit some of the chuds close to home too.

His mom is one of the standout actors thus far. Completely nailed the role.

Most instantly hateable character since Joffrey in GoT.

[Trippy]

(As someone from the UK I really struggle to get the Latino element, is Andor white for purposes of this or is he hispanic?)

He has a noticeable Mexican accent.

The in-universe explanation is “Galactic Basic Standard” (i.e. English) is not his native language. The tribe he’s from has its own unique language so his Galactic Basic is tinged with the phonemes of his native language.

More details here (you can dismiss the adblocker pop up):

https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/andor-diego-luna-reveals-significance-cassians-accent.html/

[Samwise]

I've been paying attention to the accents of different characters and have appreciated that they seem to be making an effort to have it make sense, with the core-world imperials mostly having stuffy British accents and everyone else having varying (if largely American-ish) accents.  Stellan Skarsgard being a possible exception but I guess we don't actually know where he's from originally even though he's now a rich guy living on Coruscant. 

[HaemishM]

I just kind of handwave the accents away. After all, if we're being really real, none of these motherfuckers are speaking English anyway. 

[Teleku]

Just binged this up to the current episode.  Overall great show (though wish maybe the episodes were longer and the story moved faster so as to show him getting up to more different adventures).  I agree with most things written so far.  Catching up with this thread, a few things in response...

Wokeism:  Agreed this is about the dumbest show to bring that complaint on, as it avoids any of the usual clichés.  Though I notice you all were trying to figure out what could possibly be woke about this series, and didn't hit the number one thing that stood out to me.  Two of the main'ish characters are bi-racial lesbian lovers.  Like, when I saw that it made me instantly think the usual suspects would throw a hissy fit.  I assume that's probably the main reason people on twitter scream about it and nothing else, because there is pretty much nothing else about it that comes close.

On the Rebel side we've got the art dealer and Andor himself (As someone from the UK I really struggle to get the Latino element, is Andor white for purposes of this or is he hispanic?).

I mean, they made his entire planetary culture a ripe off of indigenous Latin American culture, so makes sense they run with him having an accent.  I wouldn't classify any of his tribe as 'white'.  The actor himself is Mexican.

[HaemishM]

Wokeism:  Agreed this is about the dumbest show to bring that complaint on, as it avoids any of the usual clichés.  Though I notice you all were trying to figure out what could possibly be woke about this series, and didn't hit the number one thing that stood out to me.  Two of the main'ish characters are bi-racial lesbian lovers.  Like, when I saw that it made me instantly think the usual suspects would throw a hissy fit. 

I don't think it's that. The criticisms I saw were published before the episode introducing their relationship even aired. I think the character of Bix annoyed them (competent, smart woman).

[Threash]

There was more black people in that jail than in the rest of the star wars universe combined.

[Abagadro]

Finally got around to this and watched all the available eps yesterday.  Jumps up into the very top tier of SW stuff.  I was not prepared for Smoke Show Mon Mothma.

[Threash]

I was not prepared for Smoke Show Mon Mothma.

Same actress played her in Rogue 1, she also did the voice acting for Rebels.

[HaemishM]

This show is just consistently great. For an episode where not a lot happened, holy shit, a LOT happened. I'm not sure how watching an episode of "Death Widget Factory, The Movie" through the lens of Cool Hand Luke in space while advancing a plot line of "bankers moving money on the downlow" and "stalker lusts after spy" was so engrossing, but there it is.

Also, Bix is just perfect eye candy and turns out is a decent actress.

[Surlyboi]

Yeah, she’s been hot since her turn as Dorothy in Emerald City.

As for the intrigue? All of that shit was super intense. From the “we’re gonna fund the rebellion with mob money” to “the guys on level two figured out that no one’s actually getting out, so they murked the whole level.”

Tense as fuuuuuuck.

[Samwise]

I expect this will eventually go the way of Mando/Boba -- he'll team up with a Jedi, he'll move to Tatooine, and it'll be back to being every other Star Wars thing.  But for now this show is fuckin great.

I just wanted to say I'm really happy to have been completely wrong about this.

[Tebonas]

Well, at least until we all realize Luthen is a secret Jedi and we have to congratulate your foresight! 

[Trippy]

And there's still plenty of time to jump the shark in season two.

[Surlyboi]

Honestly, I could see Luthen being a Jedi. It’d be particularly ballsy running that kinda shit in Palpatine’s backyard while being Force sensitive.

[Draegan]

This is the best Star Wars. I mentioned it in Discord, but this has some of the best world building I've seen with this IP. It just makes me angry because this is the shit we should have had but we've had nothing but garbage with the exception of things like Solo/R1.

I'm really enjoying the ride with this show, but in the grand scheme of things, we're just wasting our time because we know how it ends. Disney will probably just keep making different stories inside the Skywalker saga timeline and never stop. Hopefully we get more Andors and less Boba Fetts.

[Sky]

Filoni should go, imo. Put whomever is the big brain behind this R1/Andor production team in charge of overall properties for SW. If we have to keep Filoni around, keep him in cartoons I can safely ignore. I tried to like the Bad Batch, I really did. I made it maybe 4 episodes.

And I love Favreau, but he's done his Iron Man thing, injecting money and life into the SWCU (or whatever). Helped develop a style working within the Volume. Got some nice practical sets and costuming to set the tone. Now it's time to go, or be limited to a one-shot movie here and there. I still think there's a place for the pulpy kind of stuff the IP grew from, and he hit a lot of good notes (mostly in Mando S1), but it got out of hand and sucked up too many resources for not enough payoff and kept getting more absurd. I don't dislike it as much as most, but given the alternative, I'll take more Andor, even when it's a show about factory workers. More tension around what's going on on Level 2 than basically everything that happened in Mando.

Rogue One had already been a high water mark for the New Era, Andor shows it wasn't a fluke.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who liked Solo. I was sad it cratered a lot of development, especially when it was (imo) better than the Ep 7/8/9 movies.

[eldaec]

Filoni should go, imo. Put whomever is the big brain behind this R1/Andor production team in charge of overall properties for SW. If we have to keep Filoni around, keep him in cartoons I can safely ignore. I tried to like the Bad Batch, I really did. I made it maybe 4 episodes.

And I love Favreau, but he's done his Iron Man thing, injecting money and life into the SWCU (or whatever). Helped develop a style working within the Volume. Got some nice practical sets and costuming to set the tone. Now it's time to go, or be limited to a one-shot movie here and there. I still think there's a place for the pulpy kind of stuff the IP grew from, and he hit a lot of good notes (mostly in Mando S1), but it got out of hand and sucked up too many resources for not enough payoff and kept getting more absurd. I don't dislike it as much as most, but given the alternative, I'll take more Andor, even when it's a show about factory workers. More tension around what's going on on Level 2 than basically everything that happened in Mando.

Rogue One had already been a high water mark for the New Era, Andor shows it wasn't a fluke.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who liked Solo. I was sad it cratered a lot of development, especially when it was (imo) better than the Ep 7/8/9 movies.

The trick to Filoni series is to ignore the first couple of seasons. I'm not saying you have to watch through the early seasons for a payoff, just literally skip them. I think he underestimates his audience early on for whatever reason. I think the first two Mando seasons are overrated, but I am interested to see where it goes now.

And solo is a good movie except they should have a word with their lighting guy. I unironically want to see solo 2. I know I never will.

Tbh apart from the two JJA movies and Boba Fett, all the Disney star wars has been at the least fine.

[eldaec]

This is the best Star Wars. I mentioned it in Discord, but this has some of the best world building I've seen with this IP. It just makes me angry because this is the shit we should have had but we've had nothing but garbage with the exception of things like Solo/R1.

I'm really enjoying the ride with this show, but in the grand scheme of things, we're just wasting our time because we know how it ends. Disney will probably just keep making different stories inside the Skywalker saga timeline and never stop. Hopefully we get more Andors and less Boba Fetts.

If knowing the ending spoils a story. Then it is a bad story and not worth your time.

[Draegan]

This is the best Star Wars. I mentioned it in Discord, but this has some of the best world building I've seen with this IP. It just makes me angry because this is the shit we should have had but we've had nothing but garbage with the exception of things like Solo/R1.

I'm really enjoying the ride with this show, but in the grand scheme of things, we're just wasting our time because we know how it ends. Disney will probably just keep making different stories inside the Skywalker saga timeline and never stop. Hopefully we get more Andors and less Boba Fetts.

If knowing the ending spoils a story. Then it is a bad story and not worth your time.

Andor is great tv and I want more of it. I love every single second.

However, my commentary is about Star Wars as a whole and what the future will look like and it looks like shit mostly. We know how it ends, it ends with Palpatine returning with a fleet of a 1000 ships somewhere and the good guys win because they held a knife the right angle and someone brought horses to fight on the outside of a Star Destroyer.

I hate that we have clown shoes writing and plots and then we have gems like this.

[Khaldun]

Maybe the way to think about it is this: World War II ends with two atomic bombs but in between there's a lot of other stuff that mattered, from Stalingrad to breaking Enigma, etc.

Mind you, the last 'main' SW movie is just completely shit and a shit end to the 'main' war but maybe everything else mattered. (After all, no Rogue One, then the Death Star blows up the Rebel base or worse, end of story.)  There are a lot of stories to tell that are powerful that arguably have to have happened for any of the rest of it to work out.


Maybe they can even do a Rogue One like the "it just so happens there was an unshielded port vulnerable to torpedoes" and make some of the last movie make some slight sense, I suppose. (Like, what if Shmi Skywalker was always deranged/lying about the 'there is no father' and the father was just actually Shreev Palpatine all along and Rey is in fact also a Skywalker? What if the whole "I need this knife" is just some nonsense and the knife actually has some kind of telepathic message in it? It's not really worth saving, mind you, but maybe someday some genius will do it somehow.)

[eldaec]

I guess I can see the argument that it's ok we know it ends with OT, but less OK that we know know the OT was pointless.

I think my brain has rewired my own personal star wars canon to say that we know Finn, Poe, Rey and Kylo are cool canon characters but just have no idea what adventures they might have been part of. Sadly there's just no way to know what they got up to.

I say this as a certified tLJ enjoyer. Even though the film was fine, the universe it describes makes not a jot of sense.

[Draegan]

Maybe the way to think about it is this: World War II ends with two atomic bombs but in between there's a lot of other stuff that mattered, from Stalingrad to breaking Enigma, etc.

Mind you, the last 'main' SW movie is just completely shit and a shit end to the 'main' war but maybe everything else mattered. (After all, no Rogue One, then the Death Star blows up the Rebel base or worse, end of story.)  There are a lot of stories to tell that are powerful that arguably have to have happened for any of the rest of it to work out.


Maybe they can even do a Rogue One like the "it just so happens there was an unshielded port vulnerable to torpedoes" and make some of the last movie make some slight sense, I suppose. (Like, what if Shmi Skywalker was always deranged/lying about the 'there is no father' and the father was just actually Shreev Palpatine all along and Rey is in fact also a Skywalker? What if the whole "I need this knife" is just some nonsense and the knife actually has some kind of telepathic message in it? It's not really worth saving, mind you, but maybe someday some genius will do it somehow.)

I will further clarify what I meant. Because the Star Wars franchise isn't moving forward in any discernable way the efforts of Andor seem wasted on a macro level for the SW franchise as a whole. I don't mind wonderful stories that are told in the universe between larger events. However when you have a show like this, when it's surrounded by terrible story telling, it's just feels awful when you want more of this, and you'll likely get none of it.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. I'm surprised myself that I haven't been more turned off by everything Star Wars in terms of just how much I absolutely hated RoS; it is one of the worst things in any franchise ever in my view.

[NowhereMan]

I still haven't watched it. Not even out of any especially visceral reaction but just total lack of interest, couldn't even be bothered to watch it on a plane. I hadn't watched Solo either because it seemed like such a dumb prequel premise so I'm kind of intrigued that people think it's good. This has been genuinely well done TV and is a really good story, even if it ultimately ends up as part of an unsatisfying trilogy of trilogies. As other people have said, if a story needs some kind of uncertainty in the outcome in order to be enjoyable then it's a bad story. I think of this a bit like Sharpe novels i.e. historical fiction where knowing what the big events are doesn't change that these individual characters are doing stuff and having arcs within those big, known moments. It doesn't hurt that this particular bit is setting up the Original Trilogy and is doing a frankly amazing bit of work showing what the move from the last days of the Old Republic into the Empire proper is actually like in a more or less believable way.

I'm also not sure why I thought episode 7 was the end of the season but for some reason I thought that was some mega-ballsy dystopian ending. My head canon now insists that everything since then is a recently released season 2.

[Threash]

I still don't get the hate for the new Star Wars stuff. It is obviously not on the level of Andor, but its at least on the level of the originals. Spoiler alert, none of them are great they are just highly entertaining schlock.

[Samwise]

frankly amazing bit of work showing what the move from the last days of the Old Republic into the Empire proper is actually like

Andor has done such a good job of this that it simultaneously makes the OT better (by providing a better backdrop for what the Empire was like and what the Rebellion was all about) and worse (by highlighting how badly ANH failed at that particular piece of worldbuilding).

[Khaldun]

Honestly, the only things I've absolutely hated have been Boba Fett and RoS. As you all know, I quite loved Last of the Jedi, even despite valid reasons why I should not have, because it opened up rather than closed down storytelling possibilities beyond the story we already knew.

Everything else they've done? It's at least fine, including Solo, which mostly errs in trying to explain things that don't need explanations (like his name).