When a murderous campaign of wholesale destruction abroad is used to justify widespread repression at home, when few members even of the nominal opposition party will say the things we know to be true, when no one seems willing to use the words we know must be used…I’d like to say it’s heartening, even thrilling, to hear the word “genocide” used by a fictional senator on a television program. But it’s also humiliating that our leaders don’t see fit to talk to us with the honesty of a Star Wars character — and frightening to see how rapidly speaking honestly about what is happening both in Gaza and here at home is being criminalized.

I reviewed the ninth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

It’s frankly astonishing how well writer Dan Gilroy and director Janus Metz create a taut and tragic political action thriller, working within the contours of the Star Wars sensibility and aesthetic while making them feel fresh and new. In much the same way that the previous episode recaptured the magic and mystery of the Force, this one conveys the menace of the Empire as though we’d never seen it in action before.

The stormtroopers’ death’s-head helmets are menacing, their meaning plain. When Syril walks into a safe room in the Imperial building only to find it primarily occupied by hulking security droids with their own skull-like faces, his fear is easy to relate to. The TIE fighters screeching overhead once again come across like the cries of the sorcerous Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings. This is the machinery of death, and not even Syril and Dedra can deny it any longer. 

But the superb costuming and sound design put a new spin on the look and feel of the Rebellion, too, from the World War II–era costuming to the unique and unsettling noise of the airhorns the protesters blow on their way to the plaza. Syril and Cassian’s brutal, sloppy fight scene is unique in the entire history of the franchise, a Duel of the Fates set in a hotel bar with glassware instead of dual-bladed lightsabers, thrumming with the violent energy of a Sopranos beatdown rather than a wuxia showcase. Actor Kyle Soller makes these final moments of catharsis feel appropriately out of control, as if this one man, this fascinating character study in how functionaries function, is a stand-in for a galaxy on the edge.

Moving, beautiful, angry, and desperately sad, Andor has done something very special here. That song is still ringing in my ears.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Cassian Andor has flown from one end of the galaxy to the other. He’s seen a lot of strange stuff. But he’s never seen anything to make him believe there’s some all-powerful Force controlling everything.

Han Solo’s doubting Thomas routine, paraphrased above, applies both to the hardened Rebel soldier and the show that tells his story. The Force, the Jedi, the Sith, Darth Vader — maybe I’m forgetting something, but I’m not sure any of these mystical elements of the Star Wars legendarium have been so much as mentioned, let alone factored into the plot. Star Wars in general is science-fantasy, or space opera; Andor is science fiction.

This has worked well for Andor. In the real world, there’s no such thing as a verifiable religion, no magical power that can be wielded either to fight or to heal. By eliminating these elements from the story while still looking and sounding and feeling very Star Wars — this despite its comparatively adult approach to the material — Andor has brought Cassian’s experience of oppression and rebellion more in line with our own. 

But keeping the Force out of its Star Wars story makes Andor‘s sudden introduction of it feel more magical and beautiful than it has since Yoda lifted Luke Skywalker’s X-wing out of the swamps of Dagobah. 

I reviewed episode 7 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

I can’t tell you how much good it does my heart to watch a Star Wars show that’s horny. Actually horny, not just “oh look, it’s a hunky guy with his shirt off, aren’t we all excited” Kylo Ren/Steve Rogers/Disney horny. Horny enough to make Dedra Meero topping Syril Karn more or less canon. Horny enough to finally, finally have a queer kiss onscreen because, despite their danger, it’s been years, and Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz can’t keep their hands off one another. Horny enough for Bix Caleen to only semi-jokingly ask her boyfriend, Cassian Andor, to bring his glamorous fashion-designer cover identity home with him one night so she can have sex with someone “very, very pretty.” I’m all for a smoldering kiss between Han Solo and Princess Leia, don’t get me wrong, but this is something else. This is sex, not romance, or not just romance, and it makes Andor feel alive even in the midst of death.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Syril Karn is living the life of his dreams. He’s involved in highly classified work for the Imperial Security Bureau, pretending to chafe at the Empire’s yoke while secretly setting up its opponents for a sting. He’s working directly with his girlfriend, Dedra Meero, a relationship he has to keep a secret from everyone including his ghastly mother. In both cases, I can only imagine the thrill leading a double life gives to this man — particularly when one of those double lives involves Dedra in all black, commanding him to turn out the lights because they only have an hour together and they need to get down to business. Oooh-whee. Even though House of Cards creator Beau Willimon wrote this script, it feels like erotic fanfic where these two are concerned, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

I reviewed episode 5 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

But the highlight of the episode is quiet, wordless. It’s the moment of parting, when Cassian and Bix simply touch each other, hand to hand. Composer Nicholas Britell’s music is minimal yet lushly romantic here — like their love itself, I suppose, which they’ve forced into the tiny compartment left available for love by the world they inhabit. There’s something truly beautiful in that moment. These people are not deluding themselves that the world is okay, that life is okay, that their own lives are okay. But they love each other anyway, because while the government they live under does not value the things that make us human, we do, we can, and we must.

I reviewed episode 4 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There is an audience — a massive one, as Sinners proves — for forceful fuck-yous to fascism, racism, willful ignorance, gleeful sociopathy. There’s nothing delicate, nothing safe about any of it, either. People want to see antivax moms get yelled at by the guy from ER. People want a supervillainous politician as openly awful as the people currently occupying the White House and Gracie Mansion, and they want heroes who’ll take the fight right to him and his goose-stepping thugs. (You would be shocked at the sheer number of uniformed NYPD the Punisher murders alone.) They want to watch the Empire go down in flames not just at the hands of sword-wielding space wizards, but regular people who said enough of this shit and had the courage to walk the talk.

They want to see the Klan dead, and they want to see it happen at a Black man’s hands. They’re rewarding the movie that serves this up as its grand finale with history-making amounts of money. 

I wrote about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, as well as Andor, Daredevil: Born Again, and The Pitt, in a new piece for Welcome to Hell World on audiences’ voracious hunger for watching cool tough people stomp fascism into the dirt.

Andor feels designed to prove that the Star Wars setting can do anything any other science fiction can do. If it’s ugly, if it’s sexy, if it’s violent, if it’s pathetic, if it’s human, it can be done way out there just as surely as it can be done down here. The Star Wars branding is just plausible deniability. This isn’t a show about the Empire and the Rebellion. It’s a show about us, because we’re both.

I reviewed the third episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

The second of three episodes released simultaneously as this season’s opening “chapter,” this episode doesn’t pack the wallop of its predecessor. That’s understandable: The thrill of being the first new episode of Andor in two years is something you can really only capture once, even if you’re debuting three of them at a time. Since the first episode already gave us the “where are they now” for almost all of these characters, there isn’t that same rush of new information to contend with either.

For the most part, anyway. Dedra and Syril forming a romantic relationship is a genuine shock. Dedra running her thumb tenderly around Syril’s mouth because her baby’s afraid of his mom is an even bigger shock. I genuinely didn’t think she had it in her! But fascists are human too, which makes this scene even creepier. Watching a genocidal space Nazi comfort the man who loves her is like watching a Black Lodge entity pretend to be human on Twin Peaks. It’s uncanny, and it only gets more so the closer to human they get.

I reviewed the second episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There comes a time when the price of inaction outweighs the price of action. There comes a time when the cost of living with your failure to do something outstrips the cost of doing something and paying the price. What Andor’s talking about is integrity — integrating your thoughts and your words with your actions. Anything less is a betrayal of your soul, and on some level you know it. That’s why committing to the fight against oppression feels so freeing. It’s not because you’re now in less danger, quite the opposite. It’s because it makes you feel like a whole human, maybe for the first time ever. Andor’s quest is to capture that feeling and transmit it to the viewer. What you do with it next is up to you.

I reviewed the season premiere of Andor for Decider. This is one of the best television shows of al ltime.

That Andor, a Star Wars television series on Disney+, received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama doesn’t tell you much about Andor. Like all awards shows, the Emmys are ultimately about themselves; following their nominees and winners from year to year is less a way to keep track of what’s actually good and more a way to track the values of the Academy of Television Arts & Science’s values and preferences as they change, or don’t change, over time. For example, the acting on the satirical HBO dramedies Succession and The White Lotus was very good, but please take it from someone who covers this stuff for a living: In no way did these two shows alone contain the eight best supporting actor performances of the year all by themselves, unless they were the only two shows you watched.

Similarly, Andor’s nods for Best Drama, Best Directing, and Best Writing — three of its total of eight nominations — are very nice for Andor, a show acclaimed by nearly every critic from nearly every quarter. But please note that the rote exercise in IP management Obi-Wan Kenobi, aka Ewan McGregor’s Divorce Attorney Needs a New Pair of Shoes, also landed a nomination in the historically competitive Best Limited Series category. Put it all together and what you have is evidence that Emmy voters listen when the Mouse tells them something is For Your Consideration, that’s all. It’s just like how the capture of an entire category by two shows that aired on the same network/streamer in the same time slot on the same night while parodying the same kinds of people tells you more about how Emmy voters like spending their Sundays than anything else.

Fortunately, what Andor’s success in the gold statuette realm really means is that we have another opportunity for us, you and me, to talk about just how good Andor is. 

I wrote about Andor for Decider.

The new Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! Stefan Sasse and I discuss the season finale of Andor, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

And remember, the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is brought to you by Manscaped! Groom your area and save 20% plus get free shipping when you use the code BOILEDLEATHER at manscaped.com!

Our latest patreon-exclusive Andor podcast is about that big final post-credits scene. Listen and enjoy1

If anything ties Andor together, it’s this: a conviction that great things are made from small pieces, painstakingly assembled. It was true of the bomb, it’s true of whatever they were building in that prison (a post-credits scene reveals it to be components for the planet-killing weapons system on the Death Star), it’s true of the growing Rebellion, and it’s true of Cassian Andor himself, a lowlife who’s gone from scrambling to survive to fighting for something much larger than himself. It’s amazing to see a Star Wars story this thoughtfully constructed, adding brick to brick to brick until the most impressive story that universe has seen in two decades is right there before our eyes.

I reviewed the season finale of the truly excellent Andor for Decider.

One of the most unusual things about the show is that, especially in the early episodes, Cassian Andor is not particularly charismatic. We’re used to dramas centered on the most magnetic guy in the room.
You probably were in a room with him and never noticed. Cassian had to be that guy because this is a big show that wants to tell the story of people that big shows never cared about before. It’s the only way to be honest about a revolution.

Yes, there are leaders, but revolutions are not made by leaders. They’re made by numbers, by conviction, by regular people thinking they can do something extraordinary. This is the story of one of those people that was never celebrated. Oh, this person is going to bring change, this person is different — no, not really. The strength of community, that’s what the show is about.

You cannot fall into the trap of making the charismatic, funny guy who you know from the beginning is going to find a way out. You have to think the opposite. You have to question, Why are we supporting him? I was always saying, “Let’s avoid movie moments as much as we can.”

I interviewed Diego Luna about his incredible Star Wars show Andor for Vulture.

Stefan Sasse and I discussed the penultimate episode of Andor‘s first season on the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast!

There had to be a comedown. By the standards of Episode 10’s for-the-ages, nothing-left-to-lose prison break, the penultimate installment of Andor’s first season is a quiet, somber episode. It’s more concerned with moments of individual sadness than collective action, with frustration and powerlessness rather than catharsis. But still there are unexpected reprieves, dry humor — and, in a move that ought to delight longtime fans of the franchise, some of the most Star Wars-y stuff this Star Wars TV show has ever attempted. That these attempts are so successful should come as no surprise: This is Andor, and Andor doesn’t miss.

I reviewed today’s episode of Andor for Decider.

In the latest Patreon-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, Stefan Sasse and I discuss Andor‘s magnificent tenth episode. Subscribe and listen!

Star Wars means a lot to me. The original film is the first movie I can remember watching, a copy taped off of CBS by my father, who carefully paused the recording to cut out the commercial breaks. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater at age 5. I had all the action figures I could get my hands on. My Millennium Falcon hangs from the ceiling in my children’s bedroom; my AT-AT passed into the possession of my niece. During my adolescence and teenage years, when nerd culture was a complete non-starter, I kept that love alive like a secret fire, wolfing down the Expanded Universe novels. When the characters in Clerks had that conversation about contractors on the Death Star I nearly lost my mind. At age 18 I got my first tattoo, the Rebel Alliance insignia. I waited on line overnight for the Special Edition theatrical re-releases, and for the first prequel. (I’m a prequels guy, for the record.) Once I had children of my own I took my daughter to every new Disney Star Wars movie, though admittedly I tapped out on The Rise of Skywalker; better for her not to sully the memories with that thing. So yeah, Star Wars means a lot to me. 

But nothing in any of the Star Wars media I’ve consumed over the years ever brought me to tears, until now.

I reviewed today’s magnificent episode of Andor for Decider.

Another week, another podcast from me and Stefan Sasse on Andor for our Patreon—subscribe and listen!