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Mon: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Stereo Geeks. Today, we return to Star Wars and review Andor season 2. I’m Mon. 

Ron: And I’m Ron. While we won’t spoil any details from the second season, we will discuss spoilers from season one. So if you haven’t watched that yet, check it out and return here. 

Mon: Before we start our episode, we would like to acknowledge that the land we are recording on is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. It is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.

Ron: While we are making this land acknowledgement, we understand that this is not enough and that positive action is required by the people of Canada to make substantive change for the Indigenous nations and communities whose lands we now reside on.

[Music]

Mon: Where did we leave off in Season 1?

Ron: The major plot points were:

Mon: That’s a lot. We kick off Season 2 a year later. Like the first season, this one is also broken up into four chapters. Each chapter has three episodes that are around an hour-long. And there are time jumps between each chapter. 

Mon: This time, however, Disney is releasing each chapter weekly, instead of each episode weekly. 

Ron: In a way, that makes sense. It’s like watching four mini movies. And that’s presumably to help maintain the continuity. 

Ron: But the problem is, are the chapters good enough for you to trudge through nearly three hours of them per week? Unfortunately, this season does a time-jump with every story arc which not only makes it hard to get invested in the stories, but there is also no continuity. Stories are just thrown at the audience. 

Mon: Look, you and I had issues with season 1. And even on the rewatch, we still had problems with it. 

Ron: By problems do you mean that the show is called Andor, and yet, Andor himself is hardly in it?

Mon: Your sarcasm isn’t lost on me. And yes, you and I have really struggled with this issue. We have a hero, a character so beloved, fans manifested a show for him, and he…sits in the backseat doing nothing. A lot. 

Ron: I felt that even more in Season 2. There is so much screen time given to swathes of new characters and Cassian is literally in the background somewhere. But why are we spending time with these characters? Are they aiding the narrative? Because to me, they felt like empty fillers and distractions.

Mon: Cassian doesn’t feel like a protagonist. He’s more like a thread stitching together the stories. He’s like War Horse, tying all these disparate people and places together. But that means we’re not getting to know him. Which was the primary reason for watching the show.

Ron: Not even that. As the season wears on, Cassian feels more like an NPC, a non-playable character. 

Mon: Even the characters who do get long arcs, like Mon Mothma. Why is her arc about her domestic life? Would they have done this if it was for Luther Rael? He gets to be the secret sauce of the Alliance and that’s completely undermined Mothma. 

Ron: Luthen’s storyline belonged to Mon Mothma and I will die mad about it. The whole Mon Mothma storyline has been regressive. In fact, everything to do with the women characters is regressive and reductive. Mothma is defined by her nonsensical family life and her world’s traditions. Bix is a damsel in distress throughout. Dedra literally becomes involved with an incel. And Eedy is the world’s most overbearing mum. 

Mon: This show, especially the second season, feels like it never understood the established characters. I felt this way during the first 12 episodes, and this time around, I feel like I entered the Upside Down, no one makes sense and all we knew about these people is turned on its head. Did no one care about continuity when making this show?

Ron: Yes, the canon has well and truly been forgotten. Are the fanboys going to complain about that—or does it not matter because it’s a woman and a Latino hero being ruined?

Mon: I know right? Mon Mothma is not the boss behind the Rebellion—suddenly it’s some white dude named Luthen. And Cassian, he’s a hypocrite. The show posits that everything he told Jyn in Rogue One was a lie. Why? Why did they write him this way? It’s so unfair. 

Ron: They took everything that made Cassian so exciting and interesting away from him. Even one of his lines of dialogue that so many of us love. Watching this season was an insult. 

Mon: I don’t mean to belabour the point but how did they turn the apparent protagonist of the show into a nothing character? Cassian is not a person, he’s just a piece on a board being moved from one square to the next. 

Ron: How did the creative team watch Rogue One and decide this was the angle they’d take with Andor? Just how?

Mon: As if the character assassinations aren’t bad enough, the precision of season 1 is torpedoed in season 2. Every scene drags on so much longer than it needs to. And we’re stuck in place the entire time. Nothing moves. It was exhausting watching season 2. 

Ron: Season 1 might as well not have happened. Aside from establishing a few characters, none of the plot points from the first season are picked up in this season. In fact, throughout the show, there are so many plots, sub-plots, and characters that appear and then promptly disappear without resolution. It is frankly ridiculous. And with the time jumps this season, the most interesting stories end up happening between episodes, off-screen. 

Ron: What’s really upset me is that I actively don’t want to watch Star Wars right now. I know it’s ridiculous to be angry about this, but the world is on fire and we deserve to have something to escape into. Star Wars has always been that for us. Aside from when we saw The Last Jedi, which seemed to hate every character that wasn’t Kylo Ren, this season is the only time that I’ve felt I need a break from this franchise. Especially coming off the back of The Acolyte’s unceremonious cancellation, I’m wondering how to love Star Wars again. 

Mon: The studio has to believe in engaging an audience that isn’t the loud bigoted kind, right? But that’s not happening, and it’s going to get worse under the new regime. So, really, I…have my doubts whether we’ll ever be able to love Star Wars the same way again.

Ron: I mean, this season needs content warnings for rape and intimate partner violence. That’s lazy writing. And it sign posts that this franchise isn’t for certain demographics. Star Wars has never only belonged to cis white straight men. But boy do they keep getting to own it. 

Mon: For a franchise that was made possible by women in front of and behind the camera, who were then systematically erased from its history, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we can now add attempted sexual assault to things that happen to women in Star Wars. 

Ron: Some might say it’s not different than what happened to Leia in Return of the Jedi. Trust me, femme and women viewers didn’t like it back then, either.

Mon: You and I are not strangers to shedding a few tears when watching films and television. But this is the first time in our lives that we’ve wept because something is so atrocious. 

Ron: The greatest problem with Andor Season 2 is that every time the writing team had to make a decision, they made the wrong one. The directing and the editing could only do so much when the core story was too thin, over-bloated, and poorly executed. It might actually be the worst writing I’ve ever seen on TV. 

Mon: We hate ending an episode on such a downer, but wow, Andor, especially season 2, was a disaster, with not a single redeeming quality. Ok the costumes were nice. But that’s literally set dressing. Which is what our favourite Rebel hero turned out to be. This is…upsetting. There’s no hope left for our favourite galaxy. But you know what, if this show can pretend the rest of Star Wars isn’t canon, we can pretend it isn’t canon.