A Year Later, ‘Star Wars: Andor’ Remains Peak Star Wars
It’s been a year since Andor premiered with season two hopefully coming before too long. And fans still love this series.
It has somehow been an entire year since season one of Andor premiered. But a year later, where does Andor fit in the greater universe and the general feel of where Star Wars is going? And how well does it hold up?
Honestly, Really Well
Rogue One came out back in 2016 and managed something of an impossible feat among Star Wars fans. It was almost universally enjoyed. Sure, there are people who didn’t enjoy it for one reason or another- my mom is on that list; she doesn’t like when movies have bummer endings. And it was a movie that many of us walked into knowing more or less exactly how the movie was going to end. But for the most part, Rogue One managed to be a film that most of us really enjoyed, found meaningful, and would go on to watch again.
So it wasn’t super surprising when they announced a prequel to the prequel movie featuring the character we all wanted to know more about and starring Diego Luna.
Lasting Effect of Andor
A year later, I still think about Andor as a series all of the time.
In general, I like to watch Star Wars as a fun show. It’s got pseudo-science, it’s got space wizards, and it’s got laser swords. This isn’t a series that always needs to take itself seriously, sometimes it can just be fun. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is.
But it’s also a series that has a strong theme of fighting oppression and fascism. So when it wants to lean into those themes, it has to do it well. And Andor did that. Everything from the main character who just wants to fly under the radar and survive, to the honestly distressingly relatable antagonists, is well-written and feels real. Even when we don’t spend a lot of time with a character, it’s hard to not get attached to them–like Andy Serkis’ Kino or B2EMO.
Rising Empire
Perhaps my favorite thing about Andor though, was its focus on normal people. Normal citizens who just want to live through the Empire’s rise. Normal people who get swept up in a fight they aren’t looking for. And even normal Imperial middle-management and office workers. The space wizard and laser swords are fun, but the vast majority of the galaxy is made up of normal folks with no superpowers, and we finally saw that their stories were important.
Not to mention, how sobering and realistic the Empire’s slow rise was in Andor. Some of the same small terrors that we saw on screen, like an absolute trap of a legal system have been seen in our world over and over again. The whole show felt real because many aspects of it have been or still are in our world. They’re just not far far away.
With the end of the writers’ strike hopefully, on the horizon, we can hope for a favorable end to the SAG strikes as well so that the second season of Andor can finally get underway. Because for many of us, Cassian Andor is peak Star Wars and we’d really like to see how we bridge the gap between last year’s season one and Rogue One.
Did you enjoy Andor? Do you still think of this show a year later? What do you think will happen in season two? Let us know in the comments!
May the Force be with you, adventurers!
