Exploring 'Andor': My Thoughts

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I started re-watching Andor after watching Ahsoka. I like both shows but Andor just embodies this feeling of quality story that you can't quite find elsewhere. Andor is about learning to care about wider injustices, among many other things.The characters have depth; they are real people, not props. I already felt this in the first 3 episodes. Even side characters like Brasso, Salman Paak, the technicians and support staff on Morlana One. We are going to meet many more characters over the course of the show, and they all feel like real people.

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The show spends less time on the fantasy part of that universe and more on the personal part. It feels much more real, and the struggles and dilemmas feel very believable and closer-to-home than typical sci-fi or fantasy, and yet it remains consistent with and provides additional depth to the bigger universe already existing in the other stories. It starts out on a very small scale, focused right in on Cassian for those first few episodes, and then once he gets off Ferrix it widens into several different arcs that are all relevant to each other even though they don't always directly cross paths. Those relationships that he has with each character (Maarva, B2, Bix, Timm, Brasso, Xan, Nerchi, etc), they all matter. It builds up Cassian's character to establish who he is now rather than who he becomes in Rogue One, and it also builds up a very real town, a very real community, and believe me that this community of people matters in this show.
A lot of recent straight-to-streaming shows have had disappointing finales because they fill each episode up with hooks, and then run into a wall with nowhere to go. Start strong, finish weak. Andor does not fail in this manner, at all. If there is any single failure with this show, it's that maybe it doesn't give us enough hooks early on. Personally, this felt good to me because I hate condescending transparent manipulation. The show didn't need to lie to us and give us treats to trick us into getting in the car.

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Andor is undeniably the project that feels the "least" like Star Wars to me, but that doesn't make it bad - it just makes it different than what we are used to with the Star Wars franchise. I think Andor was really good, I enjoyed it, but I also saw why some who were so keen on the fantasy and sci-fy aspect of Star Wars didn't jam with it. But, again, that alone doesn't make it a bad a show, or a bad inclusion to the SW catalogue. I believe diversity is good, appealing to multiple demographics is good.

The writing, direction and quality of execution are really solid and effective throughout. Many fewer discontinuities or lampshaded crap or handwavy justifications for things gone bad, because everything is just plain done well. It makes good use of practical effects and it also makes great use of computer generated effects.

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In my opinion, it's head and shoulders above pretty much any other franchise material that I've seen recently. There is a lot of "content" being generated (not just by lucasfilm, and not just by disney) where they already know how much money they will make so they don't even bother making it good, and they force us to accept what it is, and force us to make excuses for them to justify our continued consumption of the media that we want to like. Andor is so different - so different. It does not treat us like idiot consumers. It treats us like an audience and it has respect for us.

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