Hogan Reviews

As a big fan of Rogue One I was really excited to see the further adventures of Cassian Andor and was mildly annoyed as large (or at least vocal) parts of the Star Wars fandom who bemoaned the idea of the series. Well, now it’s over I can sit back smugly in my chair as it was fantastic! A more mature view of the Star Wars world, and mature as in well paced and not afraid to tackle more adult themes of politics and the grey area between right and wrong rather than excessive violence or swearing that some (mostly younger) people think adult content is. With several three-episode story arcs to look at, lets not waste any more time!

Set five years before Rogue One the first season focuses in on Andor (Diego Luna) before he had any interest in joining the rebellion, which at this point is just bubbling under the surface. He’s a bit of a loser living on the planet Ferrix, still with his adoptive mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw) and your classic Star Wars heart-warming robot called B2EMO, constantly helped out by his friends Bix (Adria Arjona) and Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) but when he offs two members of the Empire-backed Preox-Morlana Authority after a bar scuffle his life starts to fall apart. As Pre-Mor start to crack down on his home town his talent for stealing has put him on the radar of the charismatic Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) who visits Andor not just to get a rare piece of Empire tech from him but mainly to try and recruit Andor for a heist he’s planning. Andor has no immediate interest but ends up escaping on his ship anyway and so eventually goes along with the plan, meeting up with Rebels Vel (Faye Marsay) and Kaz (Varada Sethu) among others. It’s here where a rather crazy series of events starts to slowly but surely put Andor on the path to becoming a Rebel, but its certainly not a straight forward one!

Luthen uses his silver tongue once again. Now if only he’d stop pronouncing it as “Andar” rather than Andor…

Luthen is a great character as well because apart from meeting with various rebel cells with the hope of uniting them (including Saw Gerrera’s Partisans, with the man himself once again played by Forest Whitaker) he is also a big time player in Coruscant, owning an antiques shop (a.k.a. Star Wars easter egg shop!) and rubbing elbows with high society. His speech at once point saying that he’s well aware he won’t live to see the dawn of the new day he’s building but that he’s happy to take on any sin it takes to get there gave me shivers. Speaking of high society one of Luthen’s regulars includes future Rebel Alliance leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) who at this point is still active in the ever-dwindling Imperial Senate and is secretly funding rebel efforts but is too afraid to do much more than that. Her struggle against the people she works with and her husband Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie) who is happy to turn a blind eye to suffering if it means he can continue to have a good time are genuinely great TV and often just as gripping as the action on screen. It’s almost a shame that he big announcement of the Rebel Alliance formation and her escape has been shown on Rebels as it would’ve made a big moment in Season 2. Maybe they’ll do it anyway and just not show which rebel cell picks her up…

*Gasp!* Rebels! … In an actual location rather than a set! Blimey.

Then we have the other side of the coin in the Imperial characters, mainly the snivelling underdog with delusions of grandeur Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) who starts off as a Deputy Inspector for Pre-Mor but when his investigation into the two officers Andor killed goes off the rails and ends up with more officers dead as Andor and Luthen escape he finds himself sacked. He soon works in a dead-end office job but never forgets his prime suspect in Andor and desperately searches for a way to get revenge against him and move up the ladder. At the same time Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is a member of the Imperial Security Bureau who is among the first to believe there is an organised rebellion in the works and grows frustrated as her superiors continue to be blind to it. She actually begins to rise in the ranks as it becomes harder and harder to ignore that she’s right and becomes more and more cold-hearted as she does so. Well, more like we get to see more and more of her cruel dedication to increasing her status in the Empire rather than ever actually being nice…

There’s obviously so much more to talk about, and a lot of it I will in the Spoiler section, but rest assured the series just keeps going from strength to strength. The whole season, while full of many different characters, is really one big origin story for Andor, including some flashbacks to him as a child being picked up by Maarva and how she clearly had a rebellious streak in her before the Empire even rose. If Rogue One is the end and this is the beginning then it’s already one hell of an amazing trilogy, and I have no reason to believe the up-coming middle will be anything less either.

Overall Thoughts:

Genevieve has come a long way from a deleted Episode III scene!

Andor Season 1 is a masterclass of perfectly timed storytelling, deep and layered characters and one hell of a central performance, all set in the always fun and familiar backdrop of Empire Era Star Wars. With The Mandalorian ticking the box of “pulpy sci-fi action” Andor has now ticked the box for more grounded sci-fi storytelling in Star Wars. Frankly it’s damn near perfection in my view…

I don’t want to be here all day so I’ll touch on the other Arcs. As mentioned Andor gets involved in a heist, in this case a massive amount of Imperial payroll on a planet called Aldhani. While most of the crew dislike Andor being added so suddenly a young man named Karis (Alex Lawther) welcomes him and shows him his anti-Empire, pro-Rebellion Manifesto but is disappointed when Andor reveals he’s here just for the money. The heist goes down and its great, full of twists, turns and great visuals as it takes place during a meteor-like shower. Andor, Vel, Kaz and a man named Arvel Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) survive but when Arvel admits to Andor that he’s also a merc and that they should leave with the money Andor shoots him dead, leaving soon with his promised cut and leaving the rest. Before he goes though the now-dead Karis had left his Manifesto to Andor in his last moments, so he takes it with him. It was such a great story arc.

Luthen is thrilled that his first bit hit against the Empire was a success, even celebrating an increase in sentences and innocent people being arrested as it will just drum up more people to join the Rebellion, an idea that frightens Mothma. Sadly for Andor he gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and arrested for literally no actual reason, then sentenced to a prison planet called Narkina 5. There he meets a grumpy “line manager” called Kino Loy (Andy Serkis) who just wants to keep his head down and get out, and future Rogue One squad mate Ruescott Melshi (Duncan Pow) who wishes to get out because he believes the Empire won’t ever let them, and together they all make random mechanical parts like a production line. Of course, over two soul-crushing episodes Melshi proves to be correct when an entire floor of prisoners are executed when they find out that when your sentence ends you’re just moved down to another floor of the prison. So everyone plans and executes a breakout in a fantastic episode, with Andy Serkis putting in an amazing performance as someone finding his courage to fight again, only to have to stay behind because the only way out is across water and he can’t swim. Heart-breaking, but once again Andor learns a valuable lesson from seeing what was essentially himself in Kino and getting angry as someone is just keeping their head down, actually inspiring him to rise up despite the fact that a few episodes ago he was the exact same. Great stuff.

Andor finally appears in this review… I should’ve taken a shot of the man himself earlier so he can visually appear in the non-spoiler part, but oh well. At least this way we can appreciate the sterile white prison!

The final two episodes are where everyone heads back to Ferrix, Andor heads there because Maarva passed away, Luthen, Vel and Kaz are all there because Luthen is desperate to kill Andor because he could link him to the big heist, Dedra is there to catch the illusive head of the formalised rebellion she still doesn’t know the name or face of (Luthen, obviously) and thinks Andor will come to his mother’s funeral and correctly believes he would know the leader (and she’s been torturing Bix for the same reason, by the way), Syril makes his way to Ferrix as well to finally get revenge on Andor as well, meanwhile the people of Ferrix are reaching boiling point due to the Empire’s harsh control over them. It really showed how all this smaller arcs were part of one big one and they all came together so well here. A riot breaks out after Maarva’s funeral message turned out to be a demand for rebellion, meanwhile Andor, fresh from listening to Karis’ Manifesto, rescues Bix and gets her and his other friends to a ship so they can escape, but stays behind. Syril saves Dedra from being trampled to death in the riot and clearly hopes this is land him the job he wants, and finally Andor shows up in Luthen’s ship with a gun placed on the table, begging Luthen to either kill him or recruit him, because he can’t go back to being anything other than a fighter. *chefs kiss*. Perfect. That’s all I can say…

Oh, and as for the post credits scene, it reveals the random parts they were building in the prison are part of the Death Star, the very thing that Andor gives his life to bring down… at the cost of his life. What a fantastic final shot…