I have been very displeased with Disney's Star Wars content. Rogue One was pretty good. Solo was okay, if completely unnecessary. I really liked The Force Awakens at release, but as time goes by, I like it less and less. The Last Jedi was garbage. The Rise of Skywalker was slightly less garbage, but garbage nonetheless. As for the TV shows, The Mandalorian is okay. It's not great. It's not terrible. But it's watchable and generally inoffensive. Clone Wars season 7 had 8 really great episodes, and 4 completely terrible episodes. The Bad Batch was good enough for what it is. Rebels had glimmers of greatness buried in a large pile of crap. Boba Fett was complete trash. And then Obi-Wan Kenobi came out. That one REALLY pissed me off. It was lore-breakingly terrible character assassination. I used to collect Star Wars novels. I have almost 100 of them on my bookshelf. I don't collect them anymore. They're all terrible written, lore-breaking dumpster fires these days, not worth the paper that they're printed on.
So, after all of that, far, FAR more bad than good, I watched Obi-Wan, and I said to myself. "That's it. I'm done. No more." I promptly cancelled my Disney+ subscription, and gave them a scathing tongue lashing in the "tell us why you're leaving" comment section. I'd sworn off Disney Star Wars. I wasn't going back. I was definitely never going to be lured back by anything. Ever.
And then Andor came out and no one would stop talking about how good it is. So I borrowed my parents' Disney+ password to watch it, because hell if I'm paying for more of this garbage myself.
I liked Rogue One. I thought it was the only Disney Star Wars movie that was actually good. Solo was okay, but, again, it was a movie that really did not justify its own existence, so it never really reached higher than being merely okay. I thought Cassian Andor was a pretty boring character, woodenly acted by a man with all the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal. Of all the characters in that movie, I think I cared about him and his story the least. So, a show entirely about him was not exactly something I was ever going to get excited over.
Anyway, I was not impressed with this show. It was really, really long, and really, really boring. Don't get me wrong, there were parts of it that were great. The heist was pretty good. So was the prison break. But the good parts were just buried under so much irrelevant filler. And Gabriel Luna is one of the least charismatic actors I have ever seen. The guy has zero capacity for emoting. And he's got one facial expression, mildly pissed off. Casting him as the lead of a TV series was a SERIOUS misstep. He doesn't have the screen presence and acting ability to carry his own show.
So, okay, I understand that a LOT of this season is setup for season 2. But the problem with that is that Season 1 is a boring mess of a bunch of storylines that lead nowhere. You can set up for season 2. That's fine. But everything in this season still has to be relevant to THIS SEASON. It is possible for things to both be relevant in season 1 and set up for season 2. It's not a one or the other sort of deal here. But that's what happens when you hire untalented writers, I guess. So, we've got the whole Mon Mothma storyline that leads nowhere. We've got the young cop that we keep following for the entire season after he's fired for getting so many of his men killed, which leads nowhere. We've got Stellan Skarsgard meeting with Forrest Whittaker for reasons, which leads nowhere. We've got girl in charge of the heist hanging around for the rest of the season after the heist, because reasons, which also goes nowhere. We've got her little lover girl being an absolute champ at taking up space, and leading nowhere. There's just so much superfluous crap in this series that doesn't do anything for the story. It just takes up space. And it doesn't help that the show is so poorly paced that every single episode just draaaaaaaags oooooooooon foreeeeeeeever.
The first three episodes are abysmally dull. The last three episodes are also pretty dull. The heist was pretty good. The prison stuff was pretty good. But, I mean, it was also pretty pointless to the overall story as well. Andor just randomly goes to prison because the writers needed him out of the way for a few episodes to set up the climax. He couldn't have gone in to get information from someone, or to break a rebel spy out? Yes, I understand. I am not stupid. I get that the point was to show how corrupt and evil the Empire is, but if you're going to spend three freaking episodes on it, there needs to be more of a purpose within the story. As much as I liked that storyline, it was just utterly pointless to the overall story.
And so, the climax everything comes together in an Imperial auditor trying to catch Andor when he attends his mother's funeral, and this sets off what is supposed to be the first battle of the rebellion. I have a very hard time buying the idea that all of this tension springs up over whether or not Andor is going to show up. Like, who cares? He's a petty criminal. And just the mere possibility of him showing up causes a rebellion? That's bad writing. I'm sorry, but it is. You can see the hands of the writers heavily at work forcing the outcome that they want without building to it organically. This whole season is rife with bad writing, terrible pacing, bad editing, awful acting, and sooooooo muuuuuuuuch fiiiiiiiller.
I will admit that it is probably on par with The Mandalorian. They're both okay, but not great. Andor has a lot more problems than The Mandalorian, which brings it down a bit in my opinion. It's definitely better than Boba Fett or Obi-Wan, but that is not hard. I think that if it had been edited down to 8 episodes rather than 12, Andor had an actual reason to go to prison, rather than just randomly being arrested and being sent there, and if all of the superfluous plotlines that set up for season 2, but lead exactly nowhere in season 1 had been rewritten to have ANY relevance to the plot of season 1, this show would have been amazing. But the way it is now, it's too long, too slow, too boring, has too much irrelevant filler, and just goes nowhere. There's a good series in here somewhere, but it's buried under a whole lot of pointless crap.
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