Hey look! I had a chance to actually write another blog post!
It’s been a really busy couple of weeks. Usually I try and get my blog written during my lunch breaks, but I’ve had three solid days of work where I was out of the office at all day meetings that weren’t conducive to just stepping aside and churning out a blog post. However, today I’ve got a bit of time, and I definitely wanted to post about the second season of Andor.
I wasn’t immediately in love with Andor for the first part of the first season. It took some time for it to really click with me, but once it did, I really enjoyed it, and I was looking forward to the new season coming out. (For those of you who don’t know, the original plan was to do multiple additional seasons, but that got nixed when the creators decided that was just too big of a commitment. Instead, they took an approach of a series of four trilogies of sorts, with each three episodes telling its own story.)
Really, the biggest reason it took me so long to finish it was that we were watching it with Denisa, Tomas, and Daniela, and finding time for all of us to sit down and watch something together is a challenge. Other than that, the whole show was superb. It’s easily the best Star Wars thing that’s been made in a while. Possibly the best to have been made since the original trilogy. It’s that good, and it does it all without a single Skywalker or light saber.
Instead, we get a ton of political intrigue and spy craft. We get fantastic characters and plots, with real stakes and emotions involved. It’s not a show I want to say too much about, just because a lot of the fun is discovering what happens and how it unfolds. But it says a lot that the first thing I wanted to do when I finished was watch Rogue One again. It says even more that it made the experience of watching Rogue One even better.
I really hope we see more of this type of show from Disney. For years, everything seemed to be built around the Marvel/franchise formula, where shows and films were increasingly interconnected, to the point where you had to watch dozens of hours of material to feel like you properly understood everything. I’ve decided that while it’s fun to have Easter Eggs that fans recognize, shows should ultimately stand on their own. If a character shows up, you shouldn’t have to have seen all 30 episodes of a different show for that character to have weight. It all needs to be self-contained.
And Andor 2 really is. 10/10, and worth a Disney+ subscription all on its own.