blogging andor: people of the sun

andor season 1, episode 1

in honor of andor season 2 coming up, i thought i’d blog the first season of the show, a la the bear, over the next few weeks. this entry is about season 1, episode 1: “kassa.”

let’s get my star wars bona fides out of the way first. i want to level set here.

i would not call myself a star wars fan.

of the core 9 films in the canonical star wars series, i have seen the following: 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. i have vivid memories of 4, 5 and 8, and the rest is sort of a blur. i have also seen rogue one.

and that’s it! i have not watched the mandalorian—i even had to google how to spell it and i’m still pretty sure i’m wrong. i have also not seen any of the various animated shorts/series, or any of the other recent shows (the acolyte, skeleton crew (?)) recently dumped onto streaming by disney.

i was, however, a big fan of the nintendo 64 game shadows of the empire in my youth, and as such read a novel about the game’s protagonist, dash rendar (sick name). but i am not sure if that’s canon.

and yet, even as a total star wars dilettante as detailed, i think ANDOR season 1 might be the greatest season of television of all time. i think anyone could watch it with literally no knowledge of star wars otherwise and come to the same conclusion.

it’s that good.

it has a few competitors: friday night lights season 1. any of the first four seasons of the wire. true detective season 1. russian doll season 1. barry seasons 1 and 2. the bear season 2. the west wing season 2. the leftovers season 2, and damon lindelof’s watchmen series. as far as i am concerned, that’s mount rushmore. i know, kind of a big mount rushmore. more of a range.

is ANDOR better than all of those shows? possibly yes. and maybe just particularly right now, as it is a remarkably radical antifascist text. in some ways, this totally makes sense (the original star wars was written as a vietnam-provoked moral fable; george lucas has said our heroes are the viet cong) and in some ways it is totally shocking (it was financed by the disney corporation).

episode 1 of andor shows us the status quo of fascism in a galaxy far, far away— how it grinds along, subsisting on laziness and fear. and yet it also shows us how people band together to survive it in the dark and forgotten places, skimming off the top and keeping an eye out for each other.

and it shows us how ambition, petty jealousy, and dumb luck can metastasize within that status quo to disrupt even that little peace.

so. fade up on cassian andor, a charming rogue, who is on a planet called morlana one looking for his long-lost sister.

(say what you will about morlana one and its constant rain and shoddy corporate governance, but the streets are beautifully lit!)

we’ll get the sense that this is an ongoing task for cassian. he makes a little money on the black market, borrows rides from friends who manage shipyards, pays off who he needs to, pokes around the shady sections of nearby planets, and then makes his way home — undetected, because nothing really happens.

but this time, something happens. he runs afoul of two mall cops and kills one by accident in an act of self defense. as the other one begs for his life, cassian shoots him point blank in the face. this is like five minutes into episode 1, by the way.

the legend of the sopranos episode “college” is that HBO executives didn’t want to depict tony soprano, the main character of a tv show, murdering someone in cold blood. doing so was shocking—they thought, how can the audience ever recover from this? this was of course the exact point david chase was trying to make. he won that fight — tony indeed strangles a mob informant to death and then resumes a college tour with this daughter — but i think ultimately struggled to make his overall argument. try as he might to get us to root against tony, we didn’t. i think chase found that sort of grimly fascinating, but never embraced it.

tony gilroy, however? he’s embracing it!

cassian returns to his adoptive home planet of ferrix to cover his tracks. first, he has a charming encounter with his droid B2EMO (which coincidentally is what chandler bing used to always say to me when i was in high school) and then he tracks down his boy brasso, immediately one of the truest Gs in the history of star wars. brasso “yes ands” the alibi that cassian asks him to provide if need be and then continues on with his day like nothing happened. love you, brasso. finally, cassian talks to vix, played by adria arjona, who is possibly the most beautiful woman to ever exist in any galaxy, far or near.

tony gilroy is maybe the greatest dialogue writer in the history of media on screens, but the true testament to his writing is that i was able to pay any attention to what was being said even when arjona was around.

vix has a connect with some kind of black market electronics dealer; cassian has been casually in on this grift for some time, but he’s got a special part to sell now and wants to do so immediately. vix calls him out for holding out on her — this device he has is likely something he’s been sitting on for a while, and she resents the idea that he has a backup plan on her. even still, she makes the call.

one of the best things this episode does is show us that cassian andor is kind of a dick. he’s a local fuckboi and he owes everyone money. everybody we meet is at least a little tired of him. but they love him, and they let him get away with it even when they say they won’t anymore. this kind of writing is not just a character beat, it’s a community detail. we understand what ferrix is like, and we like it here.

but cassian knows he has to bail, at least for a while. he wants to sell his rainy day black market widget and get out of dodge.

and, as this episode shows us repeatedly, this plan would probably have worked, or may not even have been necessary at all, except for a few extraneous factors. one of whom is a real motherfucker named syril karn. who is maybe the greatest character in all of star wars. this is a performance for the ages, man.

syril is an overly-officious prick who we first meet in this banger of a scene, a tony gilroy fireworks show about the comedy of the banality of evil. his boss tries to bury the murder of the two mall cops because he's met them, didn’t like them, and is leaving to file a report with his superiors anyway and doesn’t need this shit on his books. but syril can’t let it go, and launches an investigation in his boss’s absence.

meanwhile, vix’s boyfriend, who should be counting his blessings and minding his own business, instead starts following her around town, suspicious of whatever she’s got going on with cassian.

we don’t yet understand how these two threads — one motivated by ambition and the other by jealousy — will conspire to make cassian’s life very complicated, but we understand that they will. and what the show seems to be telling us is that this is what always happens.

even inside an evil system, there is mostly laziness, mostly excuses. and there are endless ways to protect each other, even under the boot. but there are always places where the malice compounds, where the darker human impulses clash with that inertia of bureaucracy and are aided by bad luck to do real damage.

and yet — ANDOR will go on to argue — there’s something else that always happens in response.