The finale sequence of the third episode of Andor season 2 will stand among the already superlative show’s top moments. It repeats a pattern from the third episode of its first season, “Reckoning,” which cut between two moments in Cassian Andor’s life when he stood on a stranger’s ship, escaping certain Imperial death at the cost of leaving everything he knew behind — but this episode cuts between places, not time.
It should not be a spoiler to say that none of the various characters in the montage, in their various situations, are having a good time. The weight of the Empire bears down even on those most capable of resisting it. But what really made the moment sing for me, what had me slapping my hands to the side of my face and whisper-screaming as I experienced a kind of pure Star Wars joy, were the choices director Ariel Kleiman made that were the exact opposite of dramatic.
Genre films and TV that take themselves very seriously are not rare at the moment. But the remarkable thing about Andor is that the folks behind it never forget that it exists in a universe where the fantastical is as mundane as the fascism.
[Ed. note: This piece will contain some spoilers for Andor season 2 episodes 1-3.]
Image: Lucasfilm/Disney
Andor works because it films its fantastical story of spaceships, and one-resource planets, and adorable robots who stutter, and silly foods as if it were a fabulously researched historical drama. Its world-building is cohesive to the most minute detail, from costumes to locations, to sets, props, and the design of buildings, and all aiming in the same directions as its overall story. Take an example from season 1, in which the workers of Ferrix, and the abandoned children of Cassian’s home planet, struck by some global workplace disaster, are costumed in the same shades of burnt orange, pale green, and dusty yellow. Andor doesn’t have to say out loud that the missing adult society of Cassian’s home was a similar kind of down-to-earth, community-minded laborer culture that lived with an Imperial boot hovering over it — until the moment it didn’t. It showed it.
Andor’s directors, and every level of craftsperson under them, make choices that hang together, creating some of the richest settings that the on-screen Star Wars universe has maybe ever had. It makes a setting feel like a place where people live, not just characters. It’s jarring when the inexplicable traditions of a Chandrilan wedding ceremony give way to a dance floor rave blasting house music, but it just serves to underscore: The bride and groom are literal children. The pomp allows everyone to pretend that they’re adults, when this is actually a life-altering middle school dance.
I think one could look at Andor and see a Star Wars show that is disdainful of the franchise’s more fantastical elements. Dismissive of lightsabers, and interstellar dogfights, and of a magical force that categorically defines all good from all evil — in favor of a drier, perhaps even self-important, story of traumatized revolutionaries and fascistic bureaucrats.
But to me, the reason the best moments in Andor propel me out of my goddamn skin are precisely when its very real story effortlessly intersects with the full fantasy of the Star Wars galaxy. In season 1, it was Andor’s prison arc, in which fascism enslaves the main character into building the machine that kills him — but all wrapped up in a meticulously designed sci-fi labor prison and an electrifying story of jailbreak.
A similar moment in this first batch of three episodes is the foreshadowed but shocking appearance (and immediate disappearance) of a sort of jungle warthog monster who simply Pac-Man chomps two men in one gulp. See also: The random van-sized bovine munching on hay? I think? In the back of a space-farmhand lunch scene. Because this is Star Wars, and having at least one totally extraneous weird monster is a hallmark of the franchise.
But as much as I love my new large warthog son, nothing compares to when Andor applies its ability to present the dramatic and the fantastic simultaneously directly to its own characters.
Image: Lucasfilm/Disney
In the finale sequence of Andor season 2’s third episode, the mother of the 15-year-old bride is Mon Mothma, a secretly leftist senator. She’s getting shitface drunk in a drop-dead gown and dancing like a wild woman to the equivalent of “Despacito.” This is the day she realized, once and for all, that she’s failed to raise her daughter in her own values, and watched her cage herself in a tradwife prison. She’s also just been told that her childhood best friend, the only person with whom she can be entirely candid, is having an emotional and financial rough patch, and so he must be immediately assassinated to eliminate even the possibility that he might reveal her treasons.
But for a bare second, as Mon Mothma is double-fisting a round of shots — and we must not let the longevity of this character blind us to the fact that she has one of Star Wars’ peak Star Wars names and used to be best known for the phrase “Many Bothans died” — director Ariel Kleiman’s camera makes sure to capture something else behind her. A bug-headed, sunglasses-wearing alien wedding guest, as they hit the Space Griddy to “Space Despacito,” which, by the way, is being played by a sentient, floating, middle school dance DJ droid shaped like a disco ball.
This is precisely when I yelled “I LOVE STAR WARS” out loud in my apartment.
I admit it: I’m a fantasist. I love something that makes me feel such intense feelings about something that’s fundamentally silly, that takes the trappings of the fantastic and does something with them that touches me right in my mundane life.
Andor isn’t good because it’s afraid of Star Wars, or because it’s trying to not be like Star Wars, or because it’s elevating Star Wars. It’s just that it’s a show with a crew that demonstrably tries to treat the Star Wars universe like a real and coherent place. And when you treat Star Wars like it’s real and coherent, it can support tremendously real ideas with devastating coherence.
The first three episodes of Andor season 2 are now streaming on Disney Plus. New batches of three episodes drop every Tuesday at 6 p.m. PDT/9 p.m. EDT.
