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S01E31: Aerating with Andor, Act I
34 Plays5 months ago
Today we dive back into "Andor," one of the most critically acclaimed Star Wars projects ever. Will Phil agree on his first watch? What will Ben think his second time through? Tune in and find out!
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview of Andor
00:00:00
Speaker
We are tuning back into the first act of Andor. Grab your joints and brooms as the Star Wars cleaning crew. Welcome back to the Star Wars cleaning crew. And this one is going to go just a little bit long so you can give your kitchen that extra scrub. But here is Ben, Phil, and me talking about Andor, the first act, episodes one through three.
00:00:19
Speaker
You know, you told me, Phil, you're really gonna like this. I really i really think you're gonna like this, is what you said to me. And I was like, okay, I mean, i you know I trust your opinion of my taste and your knowledge of my taste. And man, you weren't wrong. right i I was a big fan of this. A few things that come to mind immediately.
Andor's Genre and Style
00:00:38
Speaker
yeah The pacing, the editing, the atmosphere, the grittiness, and the genre bending.
00:00:44
Speaker
that that last one in particular for me, you know, there really is kind of a, there's a lot of elements that that really were just so I mean, so clear, and I think also just so um I don't know, just so enjoyable to have it sort of integrated into the Star Wars universe. So I mean, for me, it felt very noir ish, especially that first episode.
00:01:04
Speaker
with Cassian. A lot of I felt like Indiana Jones action adventure. Also, there's crime thriller elements. I just I love when established media kind of breaks the mold and tries something new or incorporates other genres and I really feel like Andor did that also and I think I've mentioned this I've seen Rogue One I'm a big fan of it.
00:01:22
Speaker
probably for similar reasons that it kind of breaks the mold of like the Star Wars movie and I felt it really I feel like it was really much cap very much capturing the spirit of Rogue One when I saw it for the first time so a big fan of these first three episodes and I'm very excited to see where we go from here That's great because it just gets better. Great. I will say that's all that's all we'll say. It just gets better. And actually, no, I'm going to say this is I really liked the first three episodes when the second three episodes came out and basically taking those all as one film. I said, this was the best Star Wars film that has been released since Empire Strikes Back. Wow. But then if you take the third act, it's even better.
00:02:04
Speaker
wow Okay. But now I'm a little afraid. I don't want to raise expectations. Cause I was afraid the way you were starting. You're going like, you said I was going to love it. It was okay. No, I really, I really did like it. And you did raise the, and you just again did raise the stage. So I'll see where we go from there. Okay, cool. So we'll come back to all of those themes, but Ben, what was your reaction?
Character and World Building in Andor
00:02:24
Speaker
How many times through have you seen Andor? Do you think is this your, so I think this is actually going to be my second watch. I went back and watched it again after the first one. This was really fun to me. I'll say this about the series overall, for a lot of the same reasons Phil picks out. But especially because you really do get a sense of this kind of working class science fiction situation. These people who are very, you know, they don't have a lot of extra margin in their lives. These are not wealthy people. The protagonist here is somebody who's literally clawed his way up from primitive life on some other world. And it's really just fascinating to see
00:03:02
Speaker
how they're living under this kind of oppressive regime. And you don't even get a view of the empire. You just realize that whoever these corporate security guys are, they're in some sense like clients of the empire. you know like You've got to graduate a little. You've got to actually kick up some dust before you're going to get the attention of the Palpatine's empire. And so you just get the sense that these protagonists are just really low down on totem pole. And what you're looking at is people fighting over scraps and that little gritty, desperate, poor, what a great setting for a protagonist to start to build his way into some other story. And if you keep in the back of your mind that like, fill to your point, this all ends at Rogue One. And we go and we see all that stuff happening later in this big momentous thing. What a cool arc to trace. It is interesting to think about Cassian's arc, because again, we know how it ends. We see here how it begins. And so we know there's gonna be
00:03:58
Speaker
great, great amounts of character change in him. Now we just get to see the journey, right? and And we start seeing that through the year, which was great. I do want to come back to the genre bending because Phil, one other thing that you and I have been talking about a lot lately is the mini series on Max the Penguin. Yes. And I see a lot of parallels between the Penguin to kind of the classic Batman movies and especially like Batman 1966 TV show, right? yeah you know And and or to Star Wars in that it's kind of taking a little bit more action adventure targeted at a young audience and then kind of reimagining, okay, what if this was a more realistic, real grown up scenario? How would these characters act? What would it be like? How would that go? And I just love that about it. It's just ah such a fun exploration.
00:04:51
Speaker
it's It's great. I know this isn't a Batman podcast. I will say one of the reasons I love The Penguin is it's not really at all a superhero series in no really any way other than the fact that it takes place in Gotham. It is very much a gritty crime thriller and that ah and it just happened to be set in Gotham. I think sort of similarly similarly here for Andor, it's a crime thriller. It's a cat and mouse game.
00:05:14
Speaker
I think yeah with Cassian trying to get out of trouble, um but in the context of the larger Star Wars universe.
Comparisons to Other Works
00:05:20
Speaker
I'll call it a couple of things about the episode specifically as well, which I think for me, the first episode is great. I, you know, I mentioned, you know, dystopian science fiction, war, it was really giving me Blade Runner energy. And I really love that it just brought us within the first 10 minutes, we have the inciting incident of the first arc of the series, which is great. I love it just sort of brings us into it.
00:05:41
Speaker
Second episode was good, sort of the in between, but still I think keeping the pacing. I loved the third episode. so much. I thought it was amazing, the pacing, the performances, the editing, going back to sort of the end of his initial origin story on his home planet, the storyline, the intensity, part of the sort of atmosphere and editing. Again, kind of I mentioned Indiana Jones, it really reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the desert scenes in a lot of ways. And for whatever reason, that was kind of in the back of my mind, thinking about the pacing and the editing. But I just loved, I love that episode, especially
00:06:14
Speaker
I think the performances are great too. Diego Luna is great as always. I've been a big fan of his. I mean, ever since his sort of early stuff like Ita Mama Tambien, which if anybody hasn't seen, you definitely should. It's not safe for work. um So I hear I have not yet seen it, but I need to. It's it's great. He's great. in it I mean, he's great on Narcos. You know, he's he's a really great actor. And I think he really he is great in this. and I think he expands upon the role that he had in Rogue One in a lot of interesting ways.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm just, I'm really excited to see where it goes from here. Cause I think the third episode really left us on a, on a very high note. And I'm curious to see where he goes with Stellan Skarsgard. Stellan Skarsgard's character, Luthyn Rael, you really start seeing him emerge as who he is in that third episode.
00:07:00
Speaker
and And he's an amazing character. He is such an amazing character that when I was done with this, I was like, I need to get an action figure of him to put on my desk because I find him to be very inspiring, very inspiring character. But again, we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. I had, I think that this was probably my third watch through through the whole thing and yeah i just loved it i i really think that i liked these first three episodes more knowing where things were headed i i thought that that was really really interesting some of the little details that they put in here even though tony gillroy is the showrunner and the creator and
00:07:45
Speaker
famously has said he doesn't really like Star Wars all that much. you know He's not really a Star Wars fan. They basically brought him in to save Rogue One when Rogue One was in trouble. And they brought him in to do that. But just the influence, I'm guessing, of ah Pablo Hidalgo to make sure that this show fits into the Star Wars canon is really, really admirable. It's really, really interesting.
Unique Narrative Choices in Andor
00:08:12
Speaker
i ah ah Speaking of his home planet, ah I really loved, once I realized what they were doing, I really loved that they didn't subtitle. Agreed. Yeah. They subtitle any of the dialogue on the home planet. Initially, I was like,
00:08:26
Speaker
Is my TV not working? Is Disney Plus like crashing? What's going on? um But then I realized you know there's a real it really forces you as the viewer to be so perceptive towards the the character movements and the emotions on their face and what they're saying to each other. and then you can it's Once you do that, it's relatively easy to figure out kind of the basic plot.
00:08:47
Speaker
of what's going on and what they're doing. But I think it adds a level of, I mean, there's a level of mystery, but I also think there's a level of kind of intimacy to it as well, because I feel like you really need to pay attention to what they're saying and what they're doing, because you're not being sort of spoon fed the dialogue. You know, I, I'm fascinated by how all that stuff came together with these Disney Plus shows in general, I'm always kind of looking at them as something that maybe somebody once pitched as a movie that then They said, oh, no no, let's do that on Disney Plus. And so some of the stuff Phil was saying about pacing and like in the first episode, I felt like it took a little longer to get going than I would have liked. ah But I think if you take genre considerations of mine, you stop thinking of it like an action movie and you start thinking of it more like a.
00:09:27
Speaker
a crime drama or something that's going to be a little bit of a slow burn at first before it picks up. I think what you come into it with probably sets those expectations a little bit more. ah For me, I'm always thinking about Star Wars as like a retro pulp fairy tale. Right. So I'm expecting things to happen faster. And I'm also kind of looking for padding. So when I initially saw those backstory elements with that other planet, I was like, oh, well, did we need this? And I i think you could talk me into it. I think he's got clearly some affection for his adoptive mother.
00:09:58
Speaker
i clearly think we've set up he's got this relationship with his sister that he's she's out there somewhere and doesn't know and so I don't know, we'll see where the seeds pay off. As I say, I'm i'm probably going to appreciate a lot more of the details as we get further into this. But one of the things I love about this series is that the more he does, the more he figures out how to get out of this problem or innovates his way out of something. The more problems he solves, the more problems he gets into. And it just gets worse and worse and worse as he goes. So Ben, I remember when we were talking about Last Jedi, you know, the absolute best of the sequel trilogy that you're not that fond of.
Departures from Star Wars Norms
00:10:34
Speaker
That part of your issue with it was that it was kind of violating your expectations of what a Star Wars movie is. So how how is it that you're good with this, but you're not good with that? Oh, man.
00:10:45
Speaker
Well, your honor. Putting him on the spot. and I am. Yeah, no, that's fair. Here's the thing. I think in the case of The Last Jedi, part of what's going on is that we have determined already because it's a Skywalker saga movie, what kind of story we should be expecting to see. Okay.
00:11:04
Speaker
and my my they're not all criticisms are wearing the same size t-shirt, right? Like the big criticism, I think, of that one is that as a sequel, it was a really rough pivot from The Force Awakens. So while I like the fact in that movie that it's upsetting certain kinds of conventions where you kind of go, oh, maybe it doesn't matter if you're part of the Skywalker bloodline, if you're going to have power in the force, which we all kind of know and get because of the prequels. But having that kind of affirmed and that, hey, you know what, there's other stories to tell here.
00:11:35
Speaker
I think that was really cool. On the other hand, Ryan Johnson basically took the entire playbook, they handed him from episode seven and went, did the same thing with it that Luke Skywalker did with the lightsaber. So um I think when we come to Andor. And then JJ Abrams in nine just kind of force pulled it back. That's right. He's like, don't throw this away. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and so, you know, in Andor, it's a new property in a certain sense. And so they get a chance to kind of set that pace and tell us what it's going to be.
00:12:04
Speaker
but and they're not coming in with any expectations. do you think To your point, do you think it's you can be more forgiving of it because it is a bit of a smaller scale, quote unquote, project in the larger Star Wars saga because it's not part of the Skywalker saga? Do you think there's more room for them to try new things and maybe take more risks and break more of the mold of what a Star Wars media can be? I think so. um Partly because think about what every one of those episodes, one through nine does.
00:12:33
Speaker
When it starts up, you get the 20th Century Fox logo, you get the big fanfare and the crawl and the whole thing. And we are all in some sense at the beginning of each one of those set up for what's going to happen next by what happened to us when we saw that very first episode for viewing. And you go, we're going to go see a space fairy tale, a romance.
00:12:56
Speaker
And here with this, I think, you know, they open it differently. They set a different tone. But what's interesting about it is that if you watched Empire Strikes Back, or if you've been paying attention to the kind of the grimier parts of the galaxy that are in the OG trilogy.
00:13:09
Speaker
You feel right at home on pharix. You're like, oh, yeah, I believe a dozen of these exist all over the dozens of these exist all over the galaxy. And let's dive into this and see what it's like living in these horrible places. And in a certain sense, it really kind of amplifies why it is that we care about the conflict between the rebellion and the empire. I think that's a good argument, sir. That's very, very well done. Exonerated. I was talking while you were talking about like variations in music. When you go to an opera, you go in and you don't expect it to be rock music. You expect it to be opera. But Andor kind of bills itself as this is a variation. This is like a musical variety. And so you do go in and you're like, OK, I'm ready for something different. So when, you know, a Star Wars series opens and the most of the opening sequence is set in a brothel, you can buy that. And that's also helping to set up that tone. I do think it's interesting. And I found it jarring at the time.
00:14:04
Speaker
that the show did have these very distinctive chapters. And that was a very different thing for a Star Wars show to do. I was used to seeing in ah an eight or 10 or 12 episode Netflix or Disney Plus or streaming series that, you know, you'd tell a story that didn't really finish until you'd seen that last episode. And you may have some twisting turns, but it's never quite as punctuated as Andor is. And so I think that was a really interesting choice to make. Do you know anything about why that choice was made?
Future of Andor and Star Wars Content
00:14:32
Speaker
I don't. Where I was going to come in with this, though, is I know that for season two, when they originally pitched the show, they were planning on it being a five season show, each one being a year before the original Star Wars movie. Because you know, this one starts as five BBY Battle of Yavin before the Battle of Yavin. So it's five years before.
00:14:56
Speaker
Then they decided they could tell the whole story in two seasons. And so season two coming up this spring is going to have an arc, I think a three episode arc for each of those years. I think it's 12 episodes and it will have, you know, it'll be three episodes and then it'll jump a year. So that's going to conclude us then up to the point of Rogue One. Yeah, it's going to take you right up to Rogue One. Okay. go I'm very excited. I know that it's releasing right after Star Wars Celebration Japan, so I imagine that we'll be able to watch the first couple of episodes in Tokyo, which I'm super jazzed about because I've done that before. We got to see the first couple of episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi the night before the release at Star Wars Celebration last time, so that was really
00:15:41
Speaker
Wow. Super great. So I'm excited about, excited about that. Excited to dive into that. Excited to keep watching this with you guys. All right. We'll be back with more Andor rewatch in a couple of weeks, but next week we have the second part of our conversation with Dan Zier, where we are going to talk about our hope in the franchise of Star Wars.
00:15:59
Speaker
And also, the day that this episode releases, it is not lost on me, is the day after the surprise early release of the first couple episodes of Star Wars Skeleton Crew. Unfortunately, I have to get this posted and published early, so we will talk about that a little bit next week as well. And then we'll come back and do a full-on treatment for Skeleton Crew. So thanks for being here.
00:16:22
Speaker
Hope you have a great holiday season coming up here. Keep your kitchens clean. May the force be with you. We'll see you soon.