It’s nearly June, and time marches on.
I had an excellent time at Eastercon, which was also my first time in Belfast. It was great to see the regular con-goers, catch up with some people I’d not seen in several years for one reason or another, and meet new ones. The highlight for me was probably DJing the disco on Friday night, where I discovered that geeks apparently don’t like Pendulum(??) but will dance to the theme tune from Mysterious Cities of Gold(!!), and I also got to play and dance to Warriors by Aaliyah Rose. In addition, it was the first time I’ve DJ’d and had someone (technically two people) tangoing to my playlist, so thanks to Jeannette and Dom for that particular experience.
The panels were good fun too, although as a deaf audience member it was very frustrating when panellists turned their heads to address their fellow panellists instead of speaking into the microphone. I may have been a little argumentative on Queer Punks Save The Day! Again! (mainly by pointing out that I couldn’t think of a time when queer punks specifically had saved the day before, and that I disagreed with the implication that queer people and punks are automatically Good People, which… is very definitely not always the case), but the panel on writing villains was excellent fun, and I also enjoyed the panel about looking forward to season 2 of Andor, which I will come back to in a moment.
My next novel for Games Workshop has also been announced since my last update: VOIDSCARRED is a novel about Aeldari Corsairs, so expect pointy-eared piratical derring-do in space. It also has an absolutely beautiful cover:
That will be out at some point later this year (I don’t know exactly when, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you before GW do), so stay tuned for updates.
So, let’s talk about Andor.
Season 1 of Andor is amongst my favourite TV shows ever. It had a slow-burn plot that didn’t rush into things and let the tension mount and mount, it had some superb performances (honestly any list of actors would feel like I was short-changing those I left out, it was top-to-bottom brilliant), and it gave us our first proper glimpse of the dirty side of the Rebellion, and the galaxy as a whole. Luthen making the calculations of which of his allies he can sacrifice to protect his informants; the contrast between Saw’s extremism and Mon Mothma’s idealistic, detached money laundering; the impersonal, brutal prison regime: it really rounded out and complemented the flashier, heroic movies. Fiona Shaw’s impassioned anti-fascist speech at her own character’s funeral in ‘Rix Road’ felt like a bullet fired at the state of the world, a rallying call from the series creators that was as much real as it was fictional. But Andor was only ever going to be two seasons, so – given that slow, deliberate, albeit brilliant pace – how was it going to cover the rest of the ground from Cassian Andor becoming a full-time Rebellion member to the events of Rogue One, the 2016 movie where he first appeared?
I want to state at this point that this is not going to be me slating Season 2 of Andor. I don’t think it worked anywhere near as well as S1, but I’m not intending to point fingers, because what authority do I have to do that? This is more a musing on why I think it didn’t work, and my thoughts on the standard story structures that it – deliberately or otherwise, I don’t know – ignored.
To begin with, and indeed mainly, whereas S1 was a tight narrative with clear start and end points, and progression between them, S2 felt much more like a very long “previously on” sequence with a somewhat random choice of scenes. Three episodes for each year, but the foci seemed strange: for example, Mon Mothma’s entire arc for the first three was at her daughter’s wedding. And yes, things happened there – Tay Kolma tries to shake her down for more money, Luthen decides Tay is now a problem, and sends Cinta to kill him off-screen – but it felt strange to linger there for so long, for reasons that I’ll come back to later. Similarly, Bix and Brasso spending three episodes on Mina-Rau.
I liked the slow, deliberate story-telling in S1, but I think that only works if you have the time and space to play with it properly. I feel that Andor “should” have been a Game of Thrones-style programme, with multiple seasons of political intrigue and revolutionary action leading up to the inevitable war that we as an audience know is coming. It was only ever going to be two seasons – amongst other things I suppose they had to finish it while the overlapping cast were still young enough for you to then go on to watch Rogue One and not be struck by the massive age difference – but those restrictions don’t make this work any better. S1 was easily intelligible to people who know nothing about Star Wars (I know this as I’m married to one) because the general themes of a fascist regime expanding its reach and being resisted in different ways is easy to parse, and there was very little in the way of background knowledge needed: there weren’t even any Jedi wandering around to confuse matters.
S2 threw that out of the window, and plunged on leaving massive background questions unaddressed. Why did Luthen fall out with the rest of the Rebellion? Yes, he’s paranoid and overbearing, but what specifically caused it with the various other parties? Who took over the co-ordination of the different elements, and how did they do that since Luthen had recruited them and acted as go-between? Saw Gerrera certainly couldn’t communicate with Anto Kreegyr himself, when he decided he wanted in on the Spellhaus attack in S1. When did Bix and Cassian go from being long-term friends, and possibly exes(?), to being in an actual relationship? Especially since Bix was now traumatised by torture inflicted on her due to her association with Cassian, which seems to me like it might be grounds for bitterness.
Where did the money come from, and go? Mon Mothma was funding Luthen, and S1 did a whole focus on the difficulties of that (resulting in Mon essentially marrying off her own daughter in trade for secret banking services), so it seems weird to just ignore the cashflow issue now. When did Bail Organa get overtly involved, and how did he and Mon Mothma find out about each other’s secret? Who found Yavin, and set it up as the Rebellion’s de facto base of operations? Having seen Rogue One and A New Hope, I knew what Yavin was, but for anyone without that knowledge it’s just… oh, they have a planet now, apparently. Three episodes of weddings and cornfields with nothing about any of those points feels like a curious choice of priorities.
Then there are the standard storytelling structures, the beats that I would expect stories from Western media to hit. I’m not saying that Andor’s lack of addressing them is bad, per se, just confusing. To start with: Cassian’s sister. The instigating incident of S1 is him killing two security officers when searching for his missing sister, in a place where he shouldn’t have been, asking dangerous questions. If we’re using a Chekov’s Gun approach, the missing sister mentioned in Act 1 should be fired (well, found) in Act 3. Cassian doesn’t even think about her in S2 until he has a dream about her at the end of it, which has no relation to anything else. I thought for a while they were going to pull a reveal of Dedra Meero as Cassian’s sister (regardless of the lack of resemblance between the actors) simply because she mentioned that she’d been brought up in an orphanage, and I thought that someone had to be the focus of it, but apparently not. Again, Cassian’s search always having been doomed and futile – his sister presumably having actually died on Kenari, just like Maarva said she would – isn’t necessarily bad storytelling, but it’s certainly unusual storytelling given he never got a definitive answer one way or another.
Then we have Leida Mothma. Her strained relationship with her mother in S1 screamed one of two things to me: she was either going to shop Mon to the authorities upon finding out her allegiance to the Rebellion, therefore being the catalyst for Mon Mothma leaving the Senate; or she was going to turn out to be a teenage firebrand rebel herself, using her apparent interest in Chandrilian traditionalism as a cover, thinking that her mother was a useless wet politician who wouldn’t do anything material. Instead, she was… neither. She got married over the course of the first three episodes of S2, and then disappeared from the story. Not every character has to tie in to the greater narrative, but it felt strange that Leida’s ultimate purpose in the story was simply to show how much Mon Mothma would sacrifice for the Rebellion (especially given that although Mon hated Chandrilian traditionalism, her daughter was into it and seemed actively interested in the introduction to Stekan Sculdun, at least until she decided he was a child).
Finally something that I actively didn’t like, as opposed to just finding odd: Mon Mothma’s role. It was always my understanding (granted from now-outdated EU novels) that Mon Mothma had been instrumental in tying the different strands of the Rebellion together and forming them into an actual alliance worthy of the name. I was hoping that S2 would see her move on from her role as a voice in the Senate and quiet bankroller of Luthen’s activities, and into a more active leadership position. Instead she remained a strong, principled, but ultimately sheltered character who had to be pulled out of the Senate and rescued by people she didn’t know, to be taken to a place where she was put in charge of more people she didn’t know, for no reason that I can ascertain. Why was a Senator with no knowledge of anyone in the Rebellion’s military placed in a position of authority in a guerrilla outfit? What was she to those people, other than someone who maybe spoke passionately and forcefully in a forum they all knew was corrupt?
That, then, is – broadly – my take on Andor S2. There were fantastic performance, fantastic lines, fantastic moments. The overwhelming and underlying message of it, that we should resist fascism by any means necessary, is unquestionably powerful and relevant. But it felt scattershot, a bit unfocused, like they wanted to take the slow-burn approach of S1 and apply it in a format where they didn’t have the time for it, so we ended up with some very interesting character work at the expense of gaping holes in our understanding of how things were progressing on a galactic scale, which was the very stuff that was informing the character work in the first place.
Still, I said before that it felt like it should have been a GoT-like series, and we know how GoT ended, with Starbucks cups visible onscreen and the cast unable to even pretend enthusiasm about it in interviews (Emilia Clarke’s wonderfully sarcastic “Best season ever!” and gurning double thumbs-up lives in my memory). Maybe we should be grateful for what we did get of Andor: one season of the best television ever made, and one enjoyable season which feels like fragments of a greater whole.
Finally, speaking of “enjoyable” (your mileage may vary), my band Interplanetary Trash Talk is playing a gig this coming Saturday (May 31st) at the Queen of Spades in Boston, Lincolnshire! Here’s a poster I made myself:
If you’re in the area and you fancy seeing me playing guitar and singing in a punk band, you’ll be very welcome.
Until next time!