Star Wars has never been short of weight issues at the core of its storytelling.
From the moment A New Hope, then just good old Star Wars before it begat a sprawlingly beguiling franchise, scrolled in memorable yellow and black across cinema screens in 1977, George Lucas’s take of good versus evil has always traded in big ideas and epic emotions.
At various points, it has taken on fascism, colonisation, genocide and a host of other issues that are distressingly still highly relevant in today’s world, and does so in ways inventive and clever.
To date though, and this is not universally the case, it has chosen to slide its substantial messaging inside a light and bright 1950s serial-style sensibility where the characters wisecracked and got out of trouble by the skin of their teeth, always triumphing in the end to cheers and applause from the audience.
It’s a very spoonful of sugar makes the galactic evil medicine go down approach and its meant that Star Wars could be lightweight escapist and thoughtfully meaningful all at once, giving us the best of both storytelling worlds.
There have been highly serious, introspectively intense exceptions of course, such as The Mandalorian and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the latter of which is most pertinent with the release of the first three episodes of Andor, which gives us the origin of one Cassian Andor (Diego Luna returns to the Rogue One role) who —– SPOILER ALERT! —– gives his life in the film in the service of the fascistic Empire-defying rebellion.
While Rogue One was brilliantly well done and gave us a good sense of who each of the main characters were and why they were dealing to put so much on the line to oppose great evil, Andor, naturally enough, goes one step further, giving us a deep dive into what made Cassian Andor the type of person who would sacrifice himself for the greater good.
Appealingly, and aware it has two seasons to tell its tale, Andor is content to take its time to tell Cassian’s story – thought the pace does pick up towards the end of the third episode when Andor’s reckless devil-may-care, no-commitment life ends up catching up to him in rather spectacular fashion – giving us a look at the grown man and simultaneously the boy abandoned in a Lost Boys-style world on the discarded quarry planet of Kenari where survival is never guaranteed.
Rescued from the planet by his adoptive mother, Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw), Cassian has made a life of sorts for himself on the salvage planet Ferrix, a desert-style planet – once again Star Wars embraces its love of dry, near-lifeless planets, most famously realised in Tatooine where the franchise’s tale began – which seems to be wholly given over to recycle industrial castoffs and spacefaring waste.
It’s not a rich or salubrious place, and after a childhood on Kenari where he was scrabbling for survival and reasonably threadbare, if loving, existence on Ferrix, Andor is someone all too well-acquainted with the bottom of the social pile.
If that leads you to believe that would make him no fan of the Empire in any way shape or form you would be right, but it isn’t until he tries to sell some super valuable Empire tech to Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) in a deal brokered by his close friend Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) that he is asked, or rather forced to decide, exactly where his allegiances lie.
With Rael turning out to be more than a simple trader of highly-valuable blackmarket goods, and Cassian’s seeming ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time meaning that Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), ambitious Deputy Inspector of the Empire security organisation, the Pre-Mor Authroity, is hot on his tail, coming into play on one dramatic day on Ferrix, Cassian has to make a split second choice – is he a commitment-phobic chaos merchant who is loved but not trusted or someone who can make a real difference and translate his hatred of the Empire, which is rife on Ferrix as a whole by the way which we see in dramatically unnerving fashion, into concrete, worthwhile action?
Admittedly, if you’ve seen Rogue One, you know which of the options he takes, but even so, the first three slow-build, gritty episodes of Andor, which is more Star Wars noir than the serial freewheeling of old that’s so charactrised much of the franchise to date, do a superlative job of helping us to understand how it is Andor becomes the kind of guy who does what he does later on.
He’s not even remotely positioned as any kind of hero, nor anti-hero either really, which is actually pretty refreshing in a streaming world in love with people inhabiting the moral greys of the universe.
Cassian is, and this is a good thing, simply a flawed man with good intentions who has the skills and aptitude to do some Very Good Things and put considerable flesh on Empire-hating bones but who hasn’t really found his calling to this point, preferring to place self interest before active work for the common good simply because he had no real idea how to make hate become something active and significantly productive.
He is positioned in these opening episodes as a man of great skill and conviction who just needs the right place and time to make a difference, all of which is given to him in three tight interlocking stories which are quite demonstrably part of the Star Wars storytelling universe while feeling gritty and weighty in a wholly unique way, all of which augurs well for the next nine episodes of season one.
Andor promises to be like no Star Wars story we have seen before which can only be a good thing since while Star Wars is largely a very well realised franchise which has made mostly good use of its potential, it’s also needs some freshening up and enlivening and I suspect this is just the show to do it.
Andor is currently screening on Disney+