The Sole Failing of 'Andor'

Tonight, the second and final season of the Disney+ Star Wars spin-off Andor comes to an end. This episodic prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (created by Tony Gilroy, that film's co-writer and director of reshoots), threaded a nearly impossible needle: it told bracing, compelling, mature stories about war and rebellion that never sacrificed the storytelling values that makes George Lucas' galaxy far, far away so engaging.

But before we see if Andor's final trio of episodes can stick the landing, we have to consider the show's major flaw. It involves an actor's dream, a space system's criminal scourge, and maybe, a layer of slime. That's right: I'm talking about the near certainty that the series will end without Luna getting his wish to touch Jabba The Hutt.

Since series star Diego Luna began the promotional cycle for Rogue One in 2016, he amusingly told any reporter who would listen that he wanted to touch Jabba, the slug-like Tatooine crime lord who first appeared as Han Solo's captor in Return of the Jedi. "The texture is something I need to discover," he declared. It seemed like just a lark, until Disney+ ordered a series showing how Cassian Andor evolved into a true believer who made the ultimate sacrifice for the Rebellion. Surely his path could cross with the saga's well-documented criminal underworld?

When the show finally premiered in 2022, we did not get that. What we got instead was a Star Wars series like no other. The stiff British evil of the Empire was displayed on a much more interesting canvas, where a galactic mall cop (Kyle Sollner) fails upward and discovers the limitations of company man ambitions, and an icy Imperial security supervisor (Denise Gough) fails to realize her status as space fascist until it's impossible to ignore. While The Mandalorian entertained with weekly adventures to distant planets, Andor marinated in a plot set in a prison fortress that showed the power of organizing against one's captors—culminating in a powerful monologue from guest star Andy Serkis. The grit, determination and sacrifice of freedom fighters pushing against the walls closing in around them was depicted with conviction, from Stellan Skarsgård's cunning rebel planner, who got a breathtaking monologue in the same episode Serkis did, to Genevieve Reilly's senator-turned-Alliance leader Mon Mothma. (It's a particularly incredible turn from an actress all but cut in her first appearance as the character in a Star Wars prequel, who aged into the role with grace and steel.)

And it only got better, even in a second season that crunched four years of chronology into a quartet of three-episode blocks. Andor's ongoing allusions and parallels to humanity's fraught history (and current struggle) with freedom, democracy, genocide and other murky topics usually too hot for The Walt Disney Company are voluminous. After the mixed returns and overambitious promises of Disney's Star Wars brand stewardship, the finale of Andor arrives at a time when fans yearned to feel good about dreaming of the Jedi. Memes, thrills, chills and tears were copious. At least two three-word lines that would make no sense outside of the program—"I can't swim" and "Who are you?"—have knocked the wind out of me.

Sure, Star Wars is largely for kids, but Andor got me thinking idly about the series in a way that nothing since 2017's divisive main-story sequel The Last Jedi could. And this show rarely trafficked in cheap nostalgia, or post-credit scenes featuring an evil Yoda that was red. You probably have a lot of thoughts about Star Wars' (or the decades-old cultural totem of your choice) iron grip on the culture today, and you're probably right about at least one of them. But this show was magic.

And yet.

Had budgets and logic prevailed, Gilroy could have achieved his original vision for Andor: a five-season arc that would have delved even deeper into the knotty subtext of Lucas' endless sandbox. It's not hard to imagine, in that longer arrangement, Cassian's journey of leadership taking him to the bowels of a cavernous castle just beyond the Dune Sea, where a ruthless crime lord controls the Outer Rim Territories with a fist full of Klatooine paddy frogs. Cassian Andor could have confronted the mighty Jabba onscreen, and Luna could have grinned as he placed a hand on a new Hutt puppet in a behind-the-scenes, viral-ready YouTube clip.

Instead, Star Wars took an unexpected and rewarding path either way. After all, the texture is something you need to discover.