Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away....

Or, How the franchise model failed Andor season 2

[Note: The initial version of this post got some plot points wrong. Thank you to commenters for setting me straight.]

I never thought it would happen to me. Watching the first season of Andor when it was briefly released on Hulu this year, the impossible finally happened: something fully lived up to the hype. Everything people said about the show was true. I enjoyed it unreservedly in its crystalline perfection. And for that very reason, I was almost disappointed when they announced that it would be returning for a second and final season. Many serialized shows—even classics like Mad Men and The Wire—experience the proverbial “sophomore slump,” and that combined with the perceived need to tie the connection to Rogue One in a tidy little bow seemed to me to make it very unlikely the second season would even approach the success of the first.

Judging from the ratings, though, my worries were unfounded. Rotten Tomatoes rates the second season at 97% positive (a point higher even than season 1!) and IMDb ratings are broadly comparable to the ratings for season 1, with a greater number of episodes in the high 9’s (clustered toward the end of the season). And to that, I can only say: you people are nuts. It is of course far from the total failure of Section 31, and there are great moments and setpieces, but I don’t understand how anyone can see the season as anything but a major disappointment.

When I started complaining about this disconnect between public opinion and the actual quality of the show on social media, several correspondents pointed out that the root problem was their decision to compress a planned five-season arc into two, necessarily very lopsided, seasons. (In what follows, I draw on the Wikipedia page as a point of reference for producer intentions and verified gossip.) The release schedule of the season reflects that structure, as they dropped the episodes three at a time, with each block corresponding to one year of in-universe time. Hence where the first season traced one decisive year in the life of Cassian Andor, the second covers four times as much ground, counting down from season 1’s BBY 5 (five years before the Battle of Yavin, i.e., the destruction of the Death Star in the original film) until we conclude mere hours before the events of Rogue One.

The result—and here we could draw a comparison with Section 31—reads more like a summary of the producers’ original idea than a cohesive story of its own. It does indeed bring us up to the cusp of Rogue One and gives us a little more detail on the tensions within the various rebel factions that are only hinted at in the film. But as an exploration of Andor’s character, or indeed almost any other character, it fails completely.

All the most important developments happen off-screen. The most egregious example of this is in the second arc, when romantic interest Bix is stuck in the safe house and addicted to drugs. We spend a seeming eternity watching her suffering, only to cut to a scene where she gets to torture her torturer from season 1 and then another where she and Andor badassedly walk away from an explosion. Vengeance as therapy is an interesting idea, I suppose, but no groundwork was laid for any of this. If anything, it feels contradictory, because on the bureaucracy side we learned that the highly efficient torturer was getting a major promotion, presumably making him more important and thus more difficult to get at.

That next chunk of the season has Andor defying the rebel leadership to travel to Ghorman in order to assassinate fan-favorite hypercompetent fascist apparatchik Dedra. Andor has always been willing to kill, but previously only out of necessity—when did he acquire the bloodlust required to insert himself into a warzone in order to take out a bureaucrat he’s never met? And does it even make any tactical sense to kill her and thereby draw greater attention to himself where he had previously been Dedra’s personal obsession? It’s hard to escape the suspicion that they just wanted some reason for Andor to be on the planet so that the thwarted bureaucrat (and Dedra’s lover) Syril could confront him before he dies. Similarly, the viewer has no idea what inspires Andor to try to salvage and reprogram the droid K-2SO, nor how he gained the technical know-how to realize such a thing would be possible—it simply has to happen at some point because K-2SO is his partner in Rogue One. Again, the development of their relationship into one of mutual trust takes place entirely off-screen. The same is true for characters who need to be removed from the scene. After spending so much time establishing Bix and Andor as a couple, she just up and leaves for no real reason other than plot necessity—her extended voiceover, explaining herself in a departing note, only highlights how inorganic this move is.

Characters are constantly being moved around the board like chess pieces so that the plot can hit certain beats—above all Andor himself. In fact, as a Star Trek fan, I wondered if this season made him into the Michael Burnham of Star Wars, the omnicompetent character who is always at the center of events and always vindicated. He singlehandedly saves the day in the first major arc, just as he virtually singlehandedly saves the rebel senator Mon Mothma toward the end of the season. He becomes a plot function rather than a real character.

Why insist on hitting all the plot points from their original plan rather than focus on doing one of two of them well? I suspect that the realities of franchise storytelling may have played a role. Here my clue relates to the absolute worst part of the season, the flashbacks about the origin of the relationship between rebel spymaster Luthen and his partner Kleya. Through successive vignettes, we see that she becomes a virtual daughter to him. The problem with these flashbacks is that they feel very shoehorned in, grinding the momentum of one of the final episodes to a halt. Their cumulative effect is the same as if the characters had simply stated, in the present, that Kleya is Luthen’s adopted daughter. So why bother with the flashbacks? According to the Wikipedia page, creator Tony Gilroy explained that “he did not want to leave the relationship between Kleya and Luthen ambiguous or explained by other creators.”

In other words, Gilroy wanted his version to be canon, so he squeezed it onscreen. If he was thinking like that with this particular (minor) plot point, it stands to reason that similar concerns might have been on his mind when developing the whole season—he (rightly) felt possessive of the Andor concept and didn’t want to leave room for others to tell a different story than he intended. Ironically, of course, there is still plenty of room between the sketchy “slices of life” we see in BBY 4 through 1, so Gilroy may well live to see another creator intrude upon his territory.

This headlong rush to establish canonical plot points not only does a disservice to the characters, it also cuts out much of what made season 1 so satisfying—the organic slow burn and, above all, the heist element. Andor season 1, despite its reputation, is not primarily a political show or a spy thriller. It is a heist show. It is structured around two major heists (the robbery of the treasury and the prison break), and everything else grows out of that. The most satisfying moments of season 2—Kleya’s removal of the listening device that is about to be discovered and (despite my misgivings stated above) Andor’s rescue of Mon Mothma—are those that recapture the heist feel. But they are not given room to breathe and there seems to be no necessary connection among them, so that they seem to add up to less than the sum of their parts.

This is not to say that the two major heists of season 1 are connected. Indeed, the fact that they are not directly related—that Andor had cleanly escaped the consequences of the first heist, but is then randomly rounded up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—is itself a stroke of genius, showing Andor that he will never truly be safe. The one-two punch transforms him from an opportunist just trying to get by to an implacable foe of the Empire. And that’s the tragedy of season 2—it wasn’t necessary! Season 1 had already done all the work on Andor’s character that needed to be done. You could fast forward to Rogue One with no problem. Nothing about his behavior would be strange or unaccountable. Sure, there would be plot questions like “what happened to Luthen” or “where did the robot come from,” but the answers are already implicit in the situation itself (i.e., “he must have stopped working with Luthen at some point” and “I guess he got a robot along the way”). The same would go for things like “whatever happened to his long-simmering affection for Bix”—one might observe that she’s nowhere to be found and conclude “I guess it didn’t work out.”

That is to say, in good storytelling, not everything needs to be shown. But the logic of a franchise pushes in the opposite direction. The promise of continuity within a shared story world creates the temptation to treat every story as a kind of explanation: here’s how Andor broke with Luthen and joined the main rebel camp, here’s where he got his droid, here’s how Mon Mothma left the Senate to take refuge among the rebels, etc., etc. The freedom that the writers created for themselves in season 1 stemmed from the fact that they were answering a question no one had asked. No one, on watching Rogue One, asks how Andor became part of the Rebellion, because that’s simply part of the setup of the movie. Hence they had a blank slate, since no one had begun to imagine what led up to his participation in the events of the film.

But once Andor becomes “a thing,” once he becomes connected to all these other plot points (some unexpected based on prior canon, some drawn from it), the logic of a franchise—especially a franchise that is as “small universe” as Star Wars has always been—tends inexorably toward making those connections explicit, whether in canonical productions or in tie-in literature. And once he is no longer just “some guy” playing a bit part in one movie, the temptation is to continually escalate his importance and centrality, until we get to the absolutely absurd scene in which a Force-based fortune teller assures Andor and Bix that Andor is a man of destiny.

The franchise logic wasn’t the only thing that thwarted Andor season 2. The streaming model that demands tight unified plots but without giving the writers any assurance of the ultimate run of the show is surely a major culprit here—almost certainly the more important one. In any case, I still can’t view the season as anything less than a major disappointment and even a cheapening of the first season, which remains one of the greatest triumphs of franchise story telling, possibly even (and this hurts a little for a die-hard Star Trek fan) the very greatest. And the fact that the ratings are so high is a sign of how much franchise culture—with its in-group dynamics and its fascination with “explanation” and referentiality—has distorted the average viewer’s aesthetic judgment.

But what do you think?