If you’ve spent the last year or so thinking to yourself, boy Andor was great but a lot of things are great and maybe we blew that whole thing way out of proportion, I have bad news for you: Andor is better than you remember.
Sure, the unholy world in which we live has continued to underline, with an even sharper red pen, the many cyclical historical atrocities that Andor situated itself within, making its narrative only seem more integral, more intelligent, more true.
Also, we’re in a year where The Mandalorian & Grogu is happening, so [pfffffttttttttt].
But I returned to Andor last month for a quick hop through its second season — my third (?) time, all-around — and level of craft from all players continues to escape, frankly, my ability to cogently describe. The short version would be: Andor good, Andor very very very good.
If I can’t write coherently about the whole, I’d like to drill down microscopically on a fragment. It’s one of my favourite fragments, in and alongside all the other obvious contenders for “favourite fragments.” It’s not one of the action scenes and it’s not particularly load-bearing from a plot perspective; but it might be the only sequence of moments in which Andor lifts itself out of its own stylistic and creative brief and pauses to contemplate something larger than the (inestimably large) work of building a revolution.
It’s the stuff about the Force in episode 2×7, “Messenger.”
For the time-coders, this passage runs from approximately [19:00] to [27:30] in that episode, skipping the Syril scene in the middle (another slap for poor Syril!); or roughly from here:
To here:
To catch you up: Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier) has arrived at the newly-minted Rebel base at Yavin IV to tell Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) that Imperial agent Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is now stationed on the planet Ghorman, which gives the trio a chance to settle old scores (by shooting Dedra dead in the head). Dedra tortured Bix nearly to death and is generally a fascist asshole, but Cass and Bix are with the Rebellion now — a rapidly-organizing revolutionary army — and flying off on personal assassination missions isn’t exactly up to code. Oh: and Cassian’s arm hurts, because he took a blaster bolt to the shoulder at some point in the preceding year. We find this out because Bix tries to help him with some ointment and they end up making out in their adorable jungle treehouse, before Wilmon arrives to interrupt them. Cassian and Bix, childhood sweethearts who have recently reconnected, are very much in love.
One more bit of backstory: I’ll be taking Austin Walker’s position from a recent episode of A More Civilized Age seriously here, which holds that the Force isn’t just a mystical energy field that binds the galaxy together; it’s also the force of narrative agency in Star Wars stories. These 7½ minutes of Andor suggest that the Force is with Cassian Andor. What does that mean, though: for Cassian, and for the Force?
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