There’s a great and powerful beauty in giving voice to true things that are forbidden to say. This is why authoritarian governments work so hard to keep you from saying them. They will arrest you, they will disappear you, they will strongarm you, they will blackmail you, they will bribe you, they will kill you to keep you from saying them. Nemik’s manifesto points this out when it talks about how frantic tyranny’s efforts have to be to control all the spontaneous outbursts of freedom that threaten it. People want to hear true things, say true things, share true things. True things shield us from the fascists. Eventually, with effort, with sacrifice, when enough people try, true things can be shaped into a sword to kill them with. 

Andor has spent two season avoiding “May the Force be with you.” It’s nearly ignored the Force entirely, except for these last handful of episode, in which its presence is minimal still. This was in large part the point of the show. Stripped of good and bad samurai wizards whose powers effectively demonstrate who’s good and who’s evil, the Star Wars galaxy was remade by showrunner Tony Gilroy and his collaborators into something, hopefully, more recognizable to us. A galaxy of slave labor in prisons. A galaxy of dehumanizing propaganda campaigns against scapegoated groups. A galaxy of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and execution. A galaxy of rapists and torturers and murderers in uniform, swaggering around like they own the place. A galaxy of dead friend after dead friend after dead friend, the bodies piling up all around. Andor ground its title character’s face into this dirt over and over again.

Then this man, a kind man, a good man, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s friend, Princess Leia’s dad, walks up to him and says “May the Force be with you.”

These, too, are the words of a dead man to a dead man. Bail will be killed when the Death Star destroys his home planet of Alderaan. Cassian will be dead before then, perishing in the fight to transfer the battle station’s plans to Bail’s daughter Leia. But that doesn’t matter. Forget what Cassian’s done, what he’s seen, what he’s lost, what he stands to lose. There’s good in this world. He’s a part of it. It’s a part of him. He is one with the Force, and the Force is with him.

As if to honor all this, John Williams’s magnificent Star Wars theme actually plays over the end of the closing credits, if I’m not mistaken the first time in the history of the Disney+ Star Wars TV shows that this has happened. Someone up there knows we’ve watched something special.

There are no Jedi in the world we live in, no Sith. No one will deflect a blaster bolt with a lightsaber or choke you out with a gesture. We’re not so lucky to have definitive proof of good and evil. But we can recognize it when we see it; only years, decades of conditioning can convince us otherwise. That conditioning is unnatural. Freedom is not. That’s the force we can be a part of, not a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but here, now.

After forty years of fandom, forty years of it being a catchphrase, “May the Force be with you” meant something to me again. It moved me. Sitting there with the television paused, I was unable to continue until I processed this feeling — the pure, simple hope for good things to happen to other people rather than bad. Rebellions, of course, are built on hope.

Hearing those words spoken aloud in this moment feels like a miracle. Four decades after it was first said on screen, “May the Force be with you” made me burst into tears. That is the power — the force, if you will — of Andor, one of the best television shows of all time.

I reviewed the series finale of Andor for Decider. This show is a masterpiece.

The miracle of this penultimate episode of Andor is that despite knowing how everything turns out for just about everyone left on the show — their futures are spelled out in the prequel film Rogue One, their legacies cemented in the original Star Wars film, A New Hope — it’s one of the most suspenseful 30-odd minutes of television I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed episode 11 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

The zeal of the convert is a fearsome thing. The classic Biblical example is Saul, persecutor of Christians, taking the road to Damascus and becoming Paul, Christianity’s greatest and most strident proselytizer. Paul famously saw the light. A man named Sgt. Lear saw the darkness. 

In this episode of Andor, chronicling the final hours in the life of Luthen Rael, we learn that he was once an Imperial soldier during what seems like its birth and initial establishment of dominance. But the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations wrought by his brothers in arms leaves the sergeant cowering in his ship, chanting “Make it stop! Make it stop!”, sometimes in his native language, “Rosh ne luts” — the first and only time we ever hear him speak it. 

I reviewed episode ten of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

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.

From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver. 

But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offender, never grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time. 

Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win. 

I reviewed the season finale of Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Jod Na Nawood is not a nice person. Considering his occupation, the outer-space equivalent of De Niro and Pesci hijacking trucks in GoodFellas, maybe that should have been obvious. But this is the Star Wars Galaxy, where you can personally slaughter younglings and blow up entire planets but still get a cozy fireside ghost appearance once you die. We’ve been taught to forgive much worse. We’ve also been taught, via Han Solo, that preposterously handsome and charming lawbreakers are heroes at heart more often than not. 

Well, Jod appears to fall firmly in the “not” category. Though his charisma and fast-talking power him through the beginning of the episode, as he repeatedly avoids being airlocked while Captain Brutus and his men try to penetrate At Attin’s Barrier, that’s not what actually gets him to his destination. To do that, he shoots the helpless Brutus to death at point blank range, beheads SM-33 with a lightsaber, bullies and mocks four frightened children, and threatens to kill their parents if they talk. That last bit is textbook child abuser stuff, and Skeleton Crew is having Jude Law say it to a little blue elephant boy. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Skeleton Crew is good clean fun. That may sound like faint praise, and in the context of, like, Mad Men and I, Claudius (and Andor, for that matter), it is. But in the context of The Acolyte and Ahsoka, the Disney Star Wars Universe’s last two TV outings? This show is an enjoyable, zesty enterprise, with big ugly creatures, cool little droids, frequently inventive action sequences, and Jude Law as a scoundrel who my even turn out to be a real scoundrel this time. It has a pulse and a purpose. It justifies its own existence by being entertaining. 

[…]

But even in Star Wars, you’re asking a lot of your audience’s suspension of disbelief in this sequence, when you probably could have just crafted an escape that didn’t depend on four little children all acting like a cross between R2-D2 repairing Luke’s hyperdrive while flying through space and Captain America keeping that helicopter from flying away with his bare hands. I enjoy space werewolves and space kaiju and space Urkel and space Kelly MacDonald as much as anyone, but they can’t compensate for underbaked writing, which is what keeps Skeleton Crew from making the jump from fun to special.

I reviewed last week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

One last thing: Wim. Sure, it’s funny to see him mean-mug Jod with a lightsaber in hand as if this is his moment of destiny, then promptly switch it on upside-down and drive it into the ground, knocking himself ass over teakettle. But “I wanted to have an adventure, and now I regret it because adventures are scary” is a movie motivation, not a real-person motivation. Luke Skywalker was a bored teenager wanted to see the universe, not have adventures in it. Indiana Jones wanted fortune, glory, and presumably tenure. The Goonies wanted to save their parents’ homes from foreclosure, for crying out loud. None of them was like “Oh boy, I hope I get into all kinds of danger so I can show how kickass I am!” It’s both unrealistic as a motivator and unlikeable as a personality trait. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

I guess some points about the kids’ comfortable lifestyle’s pros and cons are made in the back-and-forth between Hayna and Neel over the course of the episode, for what it’s worth. It makes you soft, but that softness is your strength, or something. They tried. I dunno, it’s little tough to take a lesson in heroism from a company selling out trans kids as we speak.

To me, the pleasures of this episode are a lot simpler to appreciate. SM-33’s creepy heel turn, Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s fine performance as Fern, Neel and Hayna’s charming friendship, some pleasantly Star Warsian armor and weapons designs, and a sense of forward motion almost entirely lacking from several of the franchise’s other small-screen efforts — that’s time I don’t regret spending long, long ago.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Without Law’s star power and talent, carefully honed over decades, the kid characters just don’t hold up by comparison. Wim remains simultaneously defiant and credulous, two annoying traits that make him hard to take under almost any conditions. Fern, whose ability to take charge of the situation made her the hero of episode 2, comes across as boringly one-note in her opposition to Jod’s very clearly necessary involvement in their escape. Neel is cute, obviously, but cloying, and the lack of nuance in his voice acting can’t be made up for by physical performance since it’s just someone in big blue elephant mask or whatever.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew

Aliens, droids, starships, a dangerous spaceport, a Jedi in hiding, and not a lawn in sight. Now that’s more like it! Directed with an eye for both creatures and color by David Lowery, this week’s episode of Skeleton Crew is good harmless Star Wars fun. That’s all I ask! Oh, and it also brings Michael Jackson’s Captain EO firmly into Star Wars continuity, for some reason?

I reviewed the second episode of Skeleton Crew, which is perfectly fine, for Decider.