AG Monday!
This week: Andor, Part 1.
A quick bleg: If you listen to the podcast, please consider leaving a quick review on your podcast app of choice. It really will help us find new listeners. Thanks!!
What’s it like to watch Andor, from the perspective of two lifelong geeks who were there for the premiere of the original Star Wars film? That’s the topic of the next episodes of Ancient Geeks. In this episode, we talk about the first season of Andor.
How much did we like this show? (Answer: A lot.) How does it change our perception of Star Wars, including the first movie? How well does it stand on its own, without all the connections to the Star Wars universe? And how well does it work as a political allegory? All this, and more, in this episode!
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
For feedback, contact so**************@***il.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, reviews on your podcast platform of choice are always appreciated.
Here’s a direct link:
https://ancientgeeks.podbean.com/e/ancient-geeks-episode-22-andor-season-one/
I’ll listen to it later, but my take is that Andor needed to happen at least decade or so ago. Star Wars suffers from very thin world-building.* The entire galaxy was reduced to the story of a single family. Good strategy at the start but they needed to widen SW out, they needed detail and specificity in stories beyond the overexposed Skywalkers. But Disney did the gutless thing and just kept pumping out the same Skywalker-Stormtrooper-Lightsaber-Fan Service crap, with the only new character being a Muppet.
*Before the fanboys howl, yes it is thin, your head cannon is not world-building they can use. Having been the publishing equivalent of a show runner on several on-going book series, you need to do two things: 1) Preserve what’s vital about what you’ve got – for example, no your central hero should not become a bitter old man sucking green alien milk out of a giant slug. And, 2) You need to add to your fictional world, widen it, deepen it, grow new story organically. You don’t just keep rehashing Book/Movie #1 forever.
Steven, you might like the book I’m reding now, The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Chris Kempshall.
It’s a history of the Empire, written by an actual historian as though it were real. There’s a lot of analysis, too, about how the Imperial government and military functioned. A lot sounds eerily close to what’s going on in the US. Largely this is a function of the similarity between all fascist/authoritarian regimes, the rest I’m sure is intentional (though no less valid for that).
Oh, and I thought I may as well post some of my SciFi jokes here:
DS9/B5 Crossover scene 2:
Capt. Sisko: Welcome to Deep Space Nine.
Capt. Sheridan: Deep Space Nine? Nine? You people are freaking persistent!
@Michael Reynolds: I think you will appreciate some of our takes, especially as it pertains to the Skywalkers.
@Kathy: Thanks for the book recommendation and the chuckle from the crossover joke!
@Michael Reynolds:
Come now. Of all 9 main story movies, they’ve only have had to take out the Ultimate Weapon to Retore Freedom to the Galaxy Forever in only 4 of them.
BTW, the Mythbusters did a couple of Star Wars Myths episodes. In the second , they proved one can rather easily dodge blaster shots. That’s one peculiarity of just about all space opera shows and movies. The plasma bolts in B5, the Goa’uld weapons in SG1, etc.
In other movies, when people fire guns we don’t need to see the bullets fly. The assumption, borne out by reality, is they are too small and too fast to see in flight. The super advanced energy weapons are more like arrows than bullets.
So, in order to defeat a Sith or a Jedi, use a primitive bullet gun, not a blaster.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’ve a few more I’ll post now and then.
The book I got in hardcover. I’m proceeding slowly, as I read it only a few minutes at a time before going to bed. It’s possible the ebook version might have been a better choice, given the many citations of names of minor characters.
Even if there’s no in-book reference to whom a person is, it’s easier to look up from one’s phone or tablet than from a hardcover. Turns out long-pressing printed words on paper does nothing.
@Kathy:
Blasters are like Uzis in action movies. Uzis make loud noises, they shatter glass, but I don’t believe they’ve ever actually killed anyone, not even with the benefit of their bottomless magazines. Not sure why bad guys insist on using them.
@Michael Reynolds:
Oh, there’s plenty of style over reality with regular guns, too. One is the bullet that packs more mass than an artillery shell, and thence lifts and throws the target several meters. The Mythbusters did tons of bullet and gun myths, too.
Another is that all machineguns have to sound like Tommy guns. In Terminator 2*, Arnold fires a minigun. This is a Gatling gun with several rotating barrels that has an incredible rate of fire of thousands of round per minute**. The shots come so fast, you can’t hear individual ones. In reality they sound like, to borrow Tom Clancy’s description, a gigantic zipper opening, or a canvas sail being torn. In the movies they sound like Tommy guns.
*BTW, that should have been the last Terminator movie.
**It’s the preferred gun for combat aircraft. Both for air to air combat, and for ground attack. The A-10 Warthog has en effing big gun like that, which fired high caliber depleted uranium slugs designed to pierce tank armor.
I’m not much for podcasts (really listening takes time I don’t seem to have), so I haven’t listened to a full episode of Ancient Geeks. Before this morning that is, because Andor pulled me in. I really enjoyed listening to Tom and you talk about this amazing show this morning.
You talked about how it was great TV and storytelling in the le Carré mode, but I was surprised you didn’t make even more of how important it is for our current political times. When I went to the San Diego No Kings rally, someone there had printed out all of Nemik’s Manifesto on their signs and it was strikingly pertinent. What I wouldn’t give to hear a call to action as clarion-clear as the speech Maarva gives at her funeral or an indictment of Trump as full-throated as Mon Mothma’s address to the senate after Ghorman come from the mouths of anyone with a big megaphone today.
Banality of Evil, indeed.
@Scott F.: I am pleased you listend and enjoyed it.
We ended up doing three eps on Andor, and there is more discussion of contemporary (and historical) politics to come. We kept the big themes discussion for part 3.
Part 2 is season two. We originally thought we would only do 2 eps, but there was just so much to discuss!!
More back on topic, I like to joke that Andor proves Star Wars can do science fiction.
@Michael Reynolds: Doctor Who has had amazingly thin world-building for the vast majority of its run — and when there is world building, in a few years the writers and showrunners just back away from it.
And no one seriously mentions that the humans of present day London have experienced countless invasions and are still surprised when it happens.
Works fine for some types of stories. Just ignore what doesn’t fit, and tell stories that work thematically.
I’d say that Andor is doing this, rather than building out the shared world. It’s all character work, pulling in an assortment of lore and ignoring even more (but aware enough to seldom directly conflict with it).
A lot of other Star Wars stories do a poor job, trying to tell stories that bridge the gap between A and B and stitch this world together.
I pity the person who decides to write the story that explains why the Empire relies upon work prisons to construct widgets for their super weapon rather than relying on droids who could do it better and faster, and which can be scaled out to produce as many as the Death Star would require. Droids are cheap in Star Wars. Even moisture farmers can afford droids.
The entire economy makes no sense, and Andor walks right past that while a large part of the show depends on class differences.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I look forward to Part 2 then. To my mind, season 2 Andor, across all 12 episodes, is peak visual story telling regardless of genre and medium.
@Gustopher:
There is a line in the show wherein Cassian (or one of the prisoners) notes that slave labor is actually cheaper than droids–and I was convinced of the chilling logic of it.
@Scott F.: Agreed!
@Michael Reynolds:
I agree with that, but would add that another problem was bad characters and character development. And this really started, IMO, with Lucas and the prequels, although Disney undeniably made it worse.
The great thing about Andor, IMO, is the characters and the various arcs they go through. There are no Mary Sues/Gary Stus, they act realistically given their circumstances, and the villains and heroes are not cartoonish. The casting was overall really good, even for the minor roles. For me, the world-building was excellent, but also not that important – the story, characters, and basic plot would work just as well outside of the Star Wars universe.
@Ancient Geeks:
I’m looking forward to listening to these three episodes!
@Gustopher:
Do you know for a fact MIB doesn’t neuralyze all of London after each incident? I seem to be in a crossover mood or something…
I haven’t come across that on the book I liked to above. If I do, I’ll let you know.
For that matter, why didn’t the Empire replace all their Stormtroopers with K2SO units? They’d have won the war while ordered to wait in the ship.
Much as was the case for Scott F., your first Andor conversation is what finally got me to check out the podcast (I’ve been meaning to for a while). I too am very glad I did. Great conversation and I’m looking forward to checking out the additional 2 episodes.
I’m really glad you decided to do 3 episodes — there’s so much to discuss not just about the level of craftsmanship for the writing, directing, casting, acting, design, etc. (that I obviously believe was superb) but also the real world parallels we are unfortunately seeing play out yet again near and far.
As my contribution to the Andor discussion, here’s an interesting piece from the BBC on the real world heist that apparently inspired the Aldhani arc.
Based on the path Cass’s real-life inspiration (at least for this arc) eventually took, it’s probably a good thing for everyone else in the rebellion that he didn’t make it off that beach.
Really enjoyed this episode, and it may finally inspire me to subscribe to re-subscribe commercial free Disney for a month and seriously binge watch Season 2
@MarkedMan: It’s totally worth it!