My One Note for “Andor” Is: Does It Need to Be in Space?

This would be better without all the lasers and shit

Andor is now streaming on Disney Plus.

This article DOES NOT contain spoilers for Andor unless you consider general descriptions of the show to be spoilers.

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When people told me to watch Andor — the Star Wars universe show that aspires to be Banana Republic to the recent films’ Old-Navy-that-burned-down-and-is-now-a-crack-den — I was skeptical. “Watch this new Star Wars thing” hits my ear like “try this new treatment from the Wuhan Institute of Virology” — I’m really not a fan of their recent work, and I’m not champing at the bit to try their new shit.¹ But people were right: Andor is good. And I say that as a person who dislikes basically all modern entertainment except for The Holdovers and YouTube videos of rabbits drunk on wine.

I have one question for the makers of Andor, though: Are you absolutely married to the whole space thing? Hear me out: Miami. Or Prince Edward Island. Or some location that provides color but doesn’t distract from what’s ultimately a well made but not-unprecedented cat-and-mouse thriller. Ironically, by making the rare Star Wars thing that’s actually good, Disney has highlighted the shortcomings that have caused much recent Star Wars stuff to be an exploding supernova of space trash.

Andor is the story of a cuddly outlaw who gets on The Galactic Empire’s Galactic Shit List for a crime he didn’t commit only sort of committed and hides out in the Los Angeles space underground. It’s extremely well written and acted, and please note that I don’t automatically think “British = quality” the way that “french fry with potato skin on it = ritzy french fry”. And, yes, basically everyone on the show is British, because for some reason the demographics of space are similar to the demographics of ‘70s glam rock, meaning: conspicuously British.

Even the fucking Bay City Rollers were from Scotland — I guess the bay in question was Orkney’s Bay of Skaill.

In my opinion, Andor works because it feels very real. This is where the high quality writing and acting come in: Scenes feel real when they involve quality actors speaking the way that people actually speak. This contrasts with most recent Star Wars movies, in which you typically find actors cast for their looks delivering lines that seem like they were written by believers in the Jack Donaghy method of starting with the catch phrases and working backwards. And maybe your life involves a lot of barrel-rolling through space while sitting next to a conventionally attractive and racially diverse 24 year-old and yelling “Take that bacon to the BANK, Homie!”, but mine does not, and scenes like that fail to draw me in.

My one criticism of Andor is that all the space stuff makes it feel less real. It’s strange to have a scene that feels like a warts-and-all depiction of how interpersonal dynamics can override organizational goals — something that feels like a deleted scene from The Wire — and then the scene ends with a character saying “Then it’s decided: I’ll hyperport to the Flurgon System.” And then they put on their laser glasses, sip of one of those mist-producing drinks that we’ve all decided exist in space, and leave. It’s like if after the iconic “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” line, Jack Nicholson said “And now off to battle the Glaxicons,” hopped on a flying motorcycle, and sped away.

Consider the very first scene in the show. It’s well done and establishes the show’s gritty realism, but I struggled to get past this character’s haircut:

It’s hard for me to focus when the character looks like Diana Ross after a close encounter with a helicopter blade. This isn’t a big deal, and the haircut was surely deliberately chosen to add exoticism, but when watching the scene, my brain is 40 percent on “this man is looking for his sister” and 60 percent on “that prostitute looks a bit like the guy from Kid ‘n Play.”

Above: ‘90s rap group Kid ‘n Play, possibly while attending prom.

Screenwriters sometimes talk about the three elements of a story: character, plot, and world.² Andor is outstanding at character and plot. Its world is inherited from probably the most extensive world-building project in the history of entertainment; say what you will about George Lucas — and I’ve said a lot! — he imagined an entire galaxy with its own unique culture. When you make a Star War, you make it with the spaceships and jazzy tailoring and aliens who look a lot like humans getting SAG hardship pay for wearing 40 pounds of prosthetic makeup — those are just the rules. Andor succeeds by dialing up the realism on the plot and characters, but the exotic, strange-feeling world doesn’t quite fit.

The makers of recent Star Wars movies seemed to understand that the world is what makes the franchise stand out. It’s worth remembering that Star Wars debuted when movies like The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and other hyper-realistic meditations on how much humanity sucks dominated theatres. Star Wars took us away from that, literally: People got to spend two hours in a whole other galaxy where even the oppressive dictatorship is kind of rad. I’m not sure that any movie deserves to self-replicate more than Nick Cannon and spawn several galaxies of merchandise along the way, but if any movie does, it’s Star Wars, whose ambition and scope are measurable in light years.

CGI allowed the galaxy far, far away³ to be put on screen in ways that surely could not have been imagined by the groovy ‘70s nerds who built the original Star Wars universe out of model airplane kits and Play Doh. When CGI advances are added to the trend in movies towards summer blockbusters that cost a jillion dollars to make but recoup a kajillion dollars at the box office, then the directive for the Star Wars franchise became obvious: Bigger is better. And the special effects have gotten more elaborate, the set pieces have gotten more involved, you now have martial arts experts performing lightsaber duels a million times more acrobatic than the ones in the original Star Wars, in which you can practically see Sir Alec Guinness dislocating a hip every time he swings his little glow-in-the-dark sword.

In most recent Star Wars movies, the world is the whole thing. The characters are really only there because you need to have actors to do press junkets to promote the movie. And the plot is one of the most famously bungled in the history of movies — it’s hilarious that the phase “trade embargo” ever appeared in a fantastical movie for kids. The makers of Star Wars movies knew that their world was special, but the world became the whole thing.

Andor is attracting fans who are excited to see characters and plot back in the Star Wars universe. And I agree that the characters and story are good; I just wonder if this particular universe is the right setting for this story. If Season 2 opened with a member of the Pre-Mor Authority saying “we’ve tracked Cassian to 21st-century Detroit,” I’d be content to see the show continue on the mean streets of the Motor City. In fact, I’d be more than content; that might be the optimal location for this particular show. Andor is delivering reality in a universe built for fantasy, so it might be better off somewhere else.

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1. Yes, I know: Covid may have come from the Wuhan lab, but we don’t know for sure. I’ll ask you to just roll with the joke, please.

2. And I’d argue that in comedy writing, there’s a fourth one: jokes.

3. People often think that the galaxy is unnamed, but true Star Wars fans know that the galaxy’s name is “Dave Q. Galaxy”.