Things move differently in space. Absent the earthly nuisance of air resistance, objects are free to travel through the vacuum with inertial motion: never stopping until something stops them. So if you ever find yourself floating up there, holding on to precious cargo – a gold watch, say, or a smiling baby – you’d better not fumble it. Once it starts floating away, there may be no getting it back.
This is the image that sprang to mind while I was watching the Star Wars spin-off series Andor, which concludes its brilliant two-season run on Wednesday. An expansive, adult-oriented prequel to 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the Disney+ series focuses on Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a rebel spy during the pomp of the fascist Empire. Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Identity) serves as showrunner; Adria Arjona, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O’Reilly and Denise Gough rank among the superb supporting cast.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Andor is the best Star Wars property in years – since 2017’s The Last Jedi, at least, and arguably since 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. It’s all thrilling set pieces, distinctive and memorable characters, dextrous plotting and taut dialogue.
There’s a structural ingenuity to it: each 12-episode season is subdivided into four distinct arcs, each one culminating in a spectacular finale. Season one reached its apex with a triumphant four-episode arc set largely within a prison labour camp, which led to a stunning escape sequence. Season two has gone on to hit even greater heights: last week’s arc, which followed a massacre on the Imperial-occupied planet Ghorman, produced two coruscating episodes of television, full of twists, pathos and complexity.
And yet, the better Andor gets, the more vexing it becomes that the series has not been a big hit, by Star Wars standards or by those of television in general. It has all the ingredients to become a phenomenon of Game of Thrones proportions – an accessible genre series with enough meat and sophistication to ensnare a supposedly more discerning “prestige”-oriented audience.
That the reviews for Andor have been overwhelmingly positive – and the enthusiasm from the show’s fanbase charged with a sort of quasi-religious zealotry – seems to have made little difference. Star Wars has, it seems, lost its magnetism. Disney has fumbled its multibillion-dollar baby; now all it can do is watch as it drifts off into space.
Think back not to such a long time ago, or indeed a galaxy far, far away, but to Los Angeles in the autumn of 2018. It was in November that year that Disney first announced Andor. At the time, it seemed like the folly of a studio drunk on its own hype, the worst sort of franchise bloat: a superfluous prequel to an already-rather-superfluous prequel, spinning off a character that didn’t really “pop” in the first place.
At the time, Disney was going all in on Star Wars, trying to expand it into a Marvel-style cross-medium universe. Over the course of a few years, a slew of films were announced, many of which never came to fruition, alongside a run of TV series.
The quality of the Star Wars streaming slate varies wildly, from the genuinely fun (The Mandalorian seasons one and two) to the middling but turgid (Obi-Wan Kenobi; The Acolyte) to the downright abominable (The Mandalorian season three; The Book of Boba Fett). Andor is so far ahead of these series – on pretty much every level of craft – that there’s little point in comparing them. But the sheer glut of unremarkable Star Wars content has done Andor no favours whatsoever: it has been dismissed by association. Disney had, in other words, bitten off more than it could chew(bacca).
The hope is that Disney will take Andor’s viewership ratings with the requisite pinch of salt, and regard it as the resounding success story it should have been. If Star Wars is to have a future, then Andor ought to set the blueprint. Give it enough time, and people will start to get the message.
‘Andor’ is available to stream now on Disney+
