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One. Way. Out.

“The Thousand Faces of Cassian Andor” [1:51:44] by ArTorr
“Almost three years after the massive success of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016, and several failed iterations of a Rogue One spinoff series about the characters of Cassian Andor and K-2SO, Hollywood script doctor Tony Gilroy had finally decided to write his friend Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm, a long-overdue letter; one that took the experiment that he, Gareth Edwards, and the cast and crew of Rogue One had started years ago to the next level. A radical pitch that framed the Star Wars Galaxy as the backdrop for a story about a revolutionary in-the-making, set upon a collision-course with history, destiny, and the unrelenting forces of Imperal oppression. “If you haven't watched it yet, I recommend watching my Rogue One video before this video”—ArTorr

posted by ob1quixote on Jan 23, 2026 at 6:32 AM

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oooooo thanks! Andor is an amazing and timely series. Something to watch when we are getting 2' of snow!

Deedra Meero and Pam Bondi are twins.
posted by tarantula at 7:06 AM

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Very timely link as my partner and I are belatedly catching up on Andor show. We have two episodes to finish. What an impressive work it is.

I'm sick to death of superhero and sci-fi movies where, in 2 hours, they cram a laundry list superstars onto a green screen to go save the multiverse... again. This is no joke: the upcoming Avengers movie has 27 (!!) actors listed in "starring" roles. They must have had to double their notecard budget when in order to give each actor their lines to memorize. It's an abomination.

And Andor is the exact opposite. Sure, it's got a budget that beggars belief and loads of glitzy effects, but they're putting it to exquisite use. It has heart. It has a story that peels back the characters' layers (with all of their nuances and strange proclivities) but shows how those layers tie together to part of something much larger than themselves. It's beautiful, it's relatable, and it's shockingly timely by focusing on a theme that is timeless. Humans banding together (in messy and fitful ways) to fight authoritarian overreach.

I look forward to watching through this long piece on a snowy weekend here in Pennsylvania.
posted by robot_jesus at 8:17 AM

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I rewatched Rogue One last week after finishing Andor, which is one of the very best series I've seen in a long-ass time. And, aside from the initial shock of seeing all the characters looking 10 years younger, I really appreciated it in a way that I hadn't the first time I saw it, in a theater on first release, when I enjoyed it well enough, but that was it.

The idea of wrapping a two-season series around as a prequel to show exactly how all the pieces fell into place is a brilliant one, especially executed as well as it was, in great part because I was now so much more invested in the characters, so much more knowledgeable about them, their struggle, their goals and ambitions.

I've watched pretty much all of the SW movies and shows (except for Ahsoka, which didn't grab me the first time around) and I would recommend Andor to anyone who watched the OG first Star Wars and would like more.

Thanks for this link, ob1quixote. I'll settle in with it later today.
posted by the sobsister at 8:49 AM

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Andor on Mefi's fanfare
posted by lalochezia at 9:05 AM

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I'm still just astounded that Andor got made at all.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:12 AM

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Was it one of those things like Emperor's New Groove and the OG Lilo and Stitch where basically no one with any C-suite power was really looking at what the producers were doing because of business shenanigans, and so despite "Corporate" the team actually made some art?
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:20 AM

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Tony Gilroy interviews past his "media training" phase (after the promo tour when he was still working for Disney) got really interesting.

It's uncanny how it dropped this year, and even though it was written/shot long before it just felt like that bizarro mirror of what was going on.

I wished they'd ran it over 5 seasons as was planned, there's more to tell, but at least we got that, and it was excellent.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 9:21 AM

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The linked Google doc is very enlightening, particularly regarding the Russian Revolution and Palestine.
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:29 AM

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For all the talk of new Star Wars movies, Skywalker trilogies, and trying to market to demographics; I come away from Andor season 2 (and with hindsight, S1) with a clear thought. By doing four 3-episode blocks that come away at just over two hours each, Tony Gilroy made "the 21st Century Star Wars Quadrilogy" in plain sight. Whatever you call them, Gilroy pulled it off. Bravo.
posted by ewan at 10:37 AM

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I still say Andor S1 was the greatest piece of modern antifascist art of the 21st century so far.

The culmination of this season was Marva's posthumous "Fight the bastards!" speech, Luthen's "I share my dreams with ghosts." speech, and this excerpt of Nemik's manifesto.

S2 was great, but S1 was impeccable. Its entire goal was to get you, the viewer, to those three speeches, and decide if you were a Marva, a Luthen, or a Nemik.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:18 PM

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I saw this post just after seeing a dude I share a slack channel with say Andor sucked. He said "The reviews loved it so much I wondered if I was watching the same show." Yeah dude, me too.

I think if you're only interested in Star Wars shows that building out the universe more, you might not find Andor as compelling as everyone else did, but in that case I feel bad for you for missing the point and the value of the show so tremendously.

I thought The Eye was maybe the greatest episode of television I'd ever seen. And then they topped it twice by the end of the season.

Sadly no one at Disney or Lucasfilm seems to want reckon with why it was so much more acclaimed than all their other series. So it's Glup Shittos from here on out.
posted by dry white toast at 3:27 PM

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It really doesn't feel like Star Wars to me either. It felt like an entirely different thing, or like a Star Wars Coffeeshop AU or something, where someone has taken some characters and gone somewhere wholly new with it, to the point that they could have removed the Star Wars of it all and it would have been almost the same show.

This is not to take anything at all away from it, to fit something like that within an existing IP is probably harder than just starting from scratch.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:13 PM

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It felt like a Star War to me. Just more on the Han Solo/Lando end of things than all the boring space wizard stuff, which is where the best Star Wars has always lived as far as I'm concerned. There were only two Jedi in the original trilogy, and they were both killed by Skywalkers.
posted by surlyben at 4:31 PM

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There is seemingly nothing more indicative of a robust genre franchise than to argue about whether or not a particular iteration of Franchise X is "really" Franchise X. (Is Tristan and Isolde really part of the Arthurian mythos? For that matter, is it "Isolde" or "Iseult"?) One thing that I find curious is that Skeleton Crew rarely if ever gets mentioned in these discussions, even though I thought that it was much fun (and not because it was somewhat derivative of The Goonies, which I never liked). Maybe because it's quote-endquote a kids' show?
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:24 PM

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I used to be the kind of young white man who would sneer at a sci-fi franchise downplaying its weeb laser-wizards in favour of telling good stories.

Used to be.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:51 AM

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seanmpuckett: it one of those things like Emperor's New Groove and the OG Lilo and Stitch where basically no one with any C-suite power was really looking at what the producers were doing because of business shenanigans, and so despite "Corporate" the team actually made some art?

As far as I can tell, it was almost the opposite. Kathleen Kennedy, the recently retired president of Lucasfilm, backed Tony Gilroy to the hilt. Partly it's because she bought into his vision for the series, and partly because she credited him with saving a troubled production, namely Rogue One. It might be that people at Disney weren't paying attention, but at least within Lucasfilm, this was a project that had full support.
posted by Kattullus at 6:25 AM

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Maybe because it's quote-endquote a kids' show?
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:24 PM on January 23

on fanfare it was discussed that many did not watch, because it was marketed as akin to the LEGO star wars shows.
posted by eustatic at 3:15 PM

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this might be one of the greatest scenes about working and getting worked over by the oil business/ war machine i can think of,..,.,did they steal it from Nigerians?

Where are you, boy?!
posted by eustatic at 3:24 PM

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