Andor

I surprised myself and watched both seasons of Andor the latest Star Wars offering from Disney.

I was able to enjoy it because they removed so much Star Wars from it. It still had a fair amount of the infantilizing ray-gun battles, baby-talking robots, and evolutionarily improbable aliens, but not so much that it overwhelmed the anti-fascist message.

Stellan Skarsgård was brilliant among an excellent cast and great performances.

Despite accepting that Star Wars has always been presented as a campy, pulpy, sci-fi adventure, I could never get around the rampant nonsense science to the point of suspending my disbelief. It was different watching Andor and it turned out others noticed it too.
As in, “Oh. This is actually good.”

Right at the top of my YouTube feed this morning from a Sci-Fi channel, “Andor is a massive problem for Disney.” The you-tuber put it like this. Imagine you are the CEO of McDonald’s and suddenly you hear that one of your franchises has hired a gourmet chef. This chef has figured out how to make good meals from terrible ingredients so successfully that people are flocking to this franchise.

The problem for the CEO of course is that now the expectations for the quality of all your other restaurants has been raised to the point where no one wants that shitty old menu.

Well Disney has cancelled Andor after two seasons. Problem solved.

It’s fine really. It was still Star Wars after all. I just hope enough people got the message that the time to fight the fascist is, RIGHT NOW, WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT.