Andor Season One on Disney Plus

Even if this place is full of tumbleweeds, I've been watching Andor and thinking how great it would've been to have this show around 2018-2019 and discuss with the regulars here. Especially because it lives up to the best parts/ideas that were in the ST.

Yes I agree it’s wonderful. I’m watching it too .

Apparently it's doing better than LF thought it might, if not as well as Obi-Wan, which was also great in its own way. Also it isn't sparking stupid discourse or making whatever group of people upset, which is maybe a first for SW, like, ever. Also, just saw this tidbit.

I have to admit that I wasn't much of a Rogue One fan and I didn't even like Cassian as a character in that movie. I only started watching Andor because my husband wanted to watch it. I was actually playing Sudoku on my phone through part of the first episode, which for me started off slow.
All of this being said, I am so glad that I kept watching because I think this is the best Star Wars we've had in a long time. By episode three I was hooked, and some of the middle and latter episodes are some of the best TV I have seen since Mad Men and House of Cards in its heyday.

TROS killed my desire to see any new Disney SW content and Andor revived it. It's sooo nice to be excited about Start Wars again. I still don't trust Disney and we shall see where it goes from here, but I highly recommend season 1 to anyone on the fence about checking it out.

The main thing that I love about this show is that it made the absolute evil of the empire real for me in Star Wars, as opposed to just keeping it an abstract concept like in all of Star Wars until now. I mean, yes the Empire is bad and must be destroyed, but WHY? Here we get to see it and live it through the experiences of the characters. Here we understand how the Empire consolidates power, and how people are fed, figuratively and literally, straight into the machine that keeps it going.

In my home country we have experienced the crushing grip of political dictatorship. Though this ended by the time I was born, it affected generations of my own family and every family in our nation; that kind of history leaves a collective and individual imprint. And in Andor you get to actually SEE the oppression of the Empire affecting individuals in a real way. This is more profound storytelling than just seeing planets we'd never visited getting blown up by iterations of Death Stars, like in the various Star Wars trilogies. It really adds a depth to the lore and makes explicit the absolute need for good to defeat evil in the end, beyond a moral imperative disconnected from daily life.

The storytelling is awesome: beats and character arcs are set up with intention and make sense--small things that we notice as we along gain traction and come to mean something in the end. There are no "somehow Palpatine returned" or "It was Snoke! He did this to our son!" so-called storytelling shortcuts to be had in this show, thank the maker.

The characterizations are just right: we get to know the players over time, no one important is one-dimensional, everyone is flawed and complex, everyone acts in accordance to clear motivations, even if we don't exactly know what they are. Actions make sense or could make sense. The female characters in particular are handled quite well, imo. No one is signaled out to be always virtuous or always right, etc.

We get to see a new side to Star Wars, where something new is being done but it is being built into the story we know without needing to retcon lore, like in Kenobi, and without needing to "deconstruct" what was there before in a way that feels insulting like TLJ did in my opinion.

In summary: watch this show. It's amazing, A+, gold star, *chef's kiss*