I Share My Dreams With Ghosts

 

Andor

starring Diego Luna, Denise Gough, Genevieve O'Reilly, Stellan Skarsgard, Kyle Soller, Adria Arjona, Faye Marsay, Varada Sethu, Elizabeth Dulau and Fiona Shaw

created by Tony Gilroy (The Cutting Edge, The Devil's Advocate, Michael Clayton, the Bourne films, Rogue One: a Star Wars Story)

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[LOOK, THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS FOR THE SHOW AND FOR ROGUE ONE PROBABLY, YOU'VE BEEN GOOD AND GODDAMNED WARNED]

I know I'm a little late getting to this, but I've been preoccupied since the show ended with World Cup and not watching any of White Lotus. I didn't even realize it was all that big of a deal, this White Lotus, but it's been an absolute nuisance all over Middle Aged White Twitter the last few days. I saw some previews for it, but it looked like a lot of wealthy pale-skins being moody about problems that are only problems if you can afford a gauzy luxury getaway in the first place, which is weird considering that's exactly the same vibe as Succession and I frickin' love that show. I should have given it more of a shout considering it was created by Mike White, the guy who also created the only show ever actually set in my city.

But at the root, the very core of who I am, I'm a giant, predictable pop-culture dork who is going to make time for a Star Wars thing before some show about people doing adultery in beachside tents or whatever White Lotus does. To be fair, that was also a feature of House of the Dragon, which I watched the shit out of, so I really am out of excuses.

No, come on, focus: this is not about White Lotus. This is about Andor, a show I similarly did not really want to watch, but did so begrudgingly because a) there's no more compulsive FOMO than completist FOMO and I've already seen all the other Star Wars things, even the crap ones, and b) my adult kids kept showing up to watch it with me, so what was I supposed to do? Right now, it's holidays, sports and Star Wars/Marvel television that keep us engaged on a regular basis. And probably slightly also the reason none of them have girlfriends, but I'm not going to fault someone in their early 20s/late teens for having slightly shallow priorities. I spent all my high school graduation money on a giant stack of CDs in 1992. It's not entirely not-genetic.

It's not spoiling the end of this convoluted story to tell you that I did end up watching Andor and I don't think I can exactly tell you the point when I first said "holy shit, I think this is actually really good?" It wasn't in the first episode because, honestly, the beats in that one were pretty similar to some of the beats at the beginning of Rogue One where the character was first established. Cassian, in a desperate situation conveyed by S-tier desperation-eyes-haver Diego Luna, does murder. In this case it was a couple of shitty space cops instead of some mouthy Confidential Informant, but just like Rogue One, although this is a clarifying and somewhat catalyzing event, it's not at all The Whole Plot. There's one character, a weirdly romantic tight-ass fash Javert-type played with permanent clenched jaw by Kyle Soller, for whom this event is the most important thing but he's in a different show all by himself for the most part as everything else in this whole-ass galaxy happens, rendering the Catalyzing Event such small potatoes to everyone else by the last episode, it's not a part of the stakes of the show in any way. And that's where I learned to love this show: none of it is plot, not really. Even plot stuff, like police murder, ends up being character stuff as the dense, slow-burning ember of one ineffectual nobody's entirely inconsequential obsession. It's sad and lonely and great.

And that's the core of it, really. It's anti-Star Wars Star Wars. You can't get farther from a Chosen One and a Dark Lord of the Sith and galactic politics than one clumsy, terrified, constantly running thief and the mid-to-low-level cubicle-havers vaguely looking for him, primarily as a means to further whatever other VASTLY more important personal goals they might actually be working. The primary antagonists I suppose are Soller and Denise Hough's walking ball of maxed-out rubber-bands Dedra Meero, bring the expected, almost cliche Empire cruelty an edge of banal remove and petty frustration that is a whole galaxy removed from Ian McDiarmid's cartoon-opera villain we're used to in a Star War. These bad guys are just a couple of careerist office dorks looking to make some lateral moves, and it rules. They're not just shitty people, they're shitty people.

Diego Luna's Cassian isn't really a protagonist in a literal sense as there isn't much to protagonize in a specific plot sense. He's kind of a hand-in-your-pocket grifter cornered and cornered and cornered again by events, the only ones really of his own making the aforementioned cop murder. After that he gets shanghai-ed into a heist movie, then thrown in jail for literally no reason (this is not a plot complaint, it is made explicit in the show, this is how this flavor of fascism works; he doesn't even get to do a specific crime for it!), then pushed to break out of prison by the threat of death (a thrilling sequence rightfully praised as the series' highpoint) and finally returning home to a no-win situation he wriggles out of by the chaos caused by acts of rebellion he had nothing to do with either planning or instigating. Somehow at the end of Episode 12 he's still alive and at large, through really no credit to himself except maybe guile, an instinct to know when to act and a shit ton of luck. But none of it feels cheap or glossed over. This is how things go in real life. Heroism and greatness are things that get decided after the fact, typically divvied up among those who, somehow, survived.

And that's what the show is about really, not hope as such, but survival, the unlikelihood of it, the randomness of it, and then the decision of what to do with it if you find it thrust upon you. It takes 12 episodes for Cassian to get to make his first real choice of the whole season, but even that he puts in the hand (literally, in the form of a blaster pistol) of Stellan Skarsgard's Luthen Rael. But surrender to a fate (any fate) is a choice in itself still, and as such, season one is less a prequel to Rogue One than it is to Andor season two. I know that sounds obvious in a chronological sense, but from a character and plot standpoint, it all ends up feeling a bit more prologue than story, but it's such a quality prologue, I'm excited to see what comes next.

The writing is controlled and quiet, shot through with moments of suspicion and fear and doubt. With no real MacGuffins to chase, the onus for the "action" such as it is falls on the actors, so all the credit goes to them, the casting and the direction. The main core (really just Luna, Gough, O'Reilly and Skarsgard, with an honorable mention for Soller eating Cap'n Crunch Oops All Berries! at his mom's house for like seven episodes) is supplemented by absolute stellar recurrings like Anton Lesser, Forrest Whitaker, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and the always transcendent Fiona Shaw, who brings the same kind of startling living-human quality she is almost uniquely skilled at doing.

Add to that an un-busy, almost droning aesthetic calling back a 1960s and 1970s sci-fi dystopia, where instead of today's vision of dirty animal societies of the post-apocalypse, we get a grayscale monochrome Brutalist future of paperwork and a crushing anti-human anonymity, almost certainly not accidentally recalling THX 1138 but with less Robert Duvall.

The best thing I can say about Andor is I think about it a lot since I finished watching it. It will almost certainly end up with a second watch-through, which is very unusual for me. If you saw Gilroy's Michael Clayton, you'll understand a bit where that comes from. It opens up doors to consider things like the point of resistance in a state where hope itself is a punishable offense. But it's important not to get too carried away finding messages of resistance to the hegemonic overlords in a TV show created by Disney. In the end the cynical point of the show is to get you to not cancel your Disney+ subscription, even though on the journey you get to watch Stellan Skarsgard give an this fucking monologue in Episode 10. The sellout is entertaining, and only like $10 a month!