Andor Season Two uneasily rebels against Star Wars, and itself | Canada Voices

A long time ago, in a studio far, far away, Disney decided to do something radical: produce a Star Wars story that was inventive, thrilling, complex, and beautiful – the exact opposite of the largely disposable and janky sequels and spin-offs that the company had been churning out since the Mouse House acquired Lucasfilm back in 2012. When the first season of Andor landed in the fall of 2022, it felt safe to assume that series mastermind Tony Gilroy had staged a genuine coup inside Disney+, so fresh and fierce his show felt.

Set a few years before the events of 2016’s Rogue One, which itself ends about two minutes before the start of Episode IV: A New Hope, Andor’s first batch of episodes chronicled the adventures of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he evolved from a selfish thief into a politically charged leader of the rebellion. While the series got off to a slow start, Gilroy – best known for overseeing the Jason Bourne franchise, as well as such adult-minded thrillers as Michael Clayton – quickly steadied the galactic ship, offering a genuinely fascinating geopolitical window into a universe that most fans were right to assume had been strip-mined of anything fresh.

While Star Wars devotees always knew that Cassian’s days were numbered – it’s surely no spoiler by now to note that Rogue One ends with every major character sacrificing themselves so that plans for the Death Star can be smuggled to Princess Leia – there were still large gaps in the character’s history and general franchise lore to fill in, and different corridors of power to explore. But could a second (and final) season of Andor live up to the level and intensity of storytelling already set by Gilroy? To borrow the syntax of a franchise-favourite hero: largely, no, the answer is.

Spread across 12 hour-long episodes, the new season of Andor represents a steep drop-off for Cassian and company. Small problems from the first season – the hefty amount of time it takes to set up conflict, a proliferation of side characters who are neither compelling nor narratively important – become distressingly big and insurmountable obstacles this time around. And whereas Gilroy was previously able to chronicle Cassian’s development (and the evolution of the galactic uprising itself) via a series of wonderfully tense mini-arcs – including a nail-biting heist and a rousing prison break – the showrunner doesn’t have quite enough material to grip onto here. It is almost as if, faced with Cassian’s unalterable fate, Gilroy fell into a deep well of narrative despair all his own. The only way to rebel against the inevitable? Stretch things out as long as possible.

Practically, this means that the first half of the new season frustratingly grinds along as Gilroy struggles to inject thematic weight into of a half-dozen storylines of varying interest, the countdown to the franchise-defining Battle of Yavin (in which Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star) ticking away in the background. Mostly, the entire season builds to a canonical event on a certain planet that has long been discussed in the margins by hardcore Star Wars fans – but the road toward that pivotal and ultimately pulse-pounding moment is paved with too many bumpy, go-nowhere detours. The first season’s strength was its slow-burn tension. Here, almost all the storylines are lowered to more interminable temperatures.

This includes a frustratingly long multi-episode sequence in which Cassian is caught between bickering bands of rebels; faux-comical scenes between Imperial bootlicker Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and his neurotic mother (Kathryn Hunter, a great actress stuck in a sitcom-stock role); endless scheming from Imperial psychopath Dedra Meero (Denise Gough); and a post-traumatic-disorder subplot for Cassian’s love interest Bix (Adria Arjona), which lands as hollow even before Gilroy shamelessly tries to tie a too-neat bow on it.

Like the first season, the very best parts of Andor 2.0 follow Luthen Rael, a merciless rebel who will stop at nothing in his quest to topple the Empire. Stellan Skarsgård once again embodies Luthen with an ice-cold zealotry that matches the fervour of his Imperial enemies, the actor’s performance anchoring a universe of pew-pew laser guns and beep-beep droids into something devastating and real. And whenever Gilroy convinces Rogue One co-stars Ben Mendelsohn (as the Death Star’s delightfully evil project manager), Forest Whitaker (as an eccentric rebel at odds with his comrades), and Alan Tudyk (the voice of a flippant droid) to pop back in here and there, the series’ energy climbs considerably.

Perhaps the whole stretch is worth spending an entire day binge-watching if only for the opportunity to watch Episode 9, in which the heroic politician Mon Mothma (a sturdy and steely Genevieve O’Reilly) delivers a blistering speech in the Galactic Senate. Pivoting around a single-word utterance that surely set off alarm bells inside Disney HQ, the monologue is destined to cause the internet to lose its mind for at least a few days.

Yet the obviously Middle East-inspired moment both crystallizes the heavy themes that Gilroy is wrestling with – the banality of evil, the suffocation of imperialism, what happens when good people say nothing – at the same time that it reveals how ungainly and ill-suited a popcorn property like Star Wars ultimately is at treating those ideas with the rigour and gravity that they require.

So much of Andor’s new season is spent with Gilroy picking apart the contradictions and conflicts that arise with any kind of political uprising, without the writer realizing that his show is so often in conflict with itself. Perhaps that internal creative rebellion is the whole point – the particular force flowing through Gilroy’s universe – but it still doesn’t make for consistently successful television. Andor tries. But this is a galaxy of do, or do not.

The first episode of Andor Season 2 premieres on Disney+ on April 22, with subsequent episodes debuting each week.