Why would someone choose to put Cassian Andor in a Star Trek uniform? That’s clearly based on a Deep Space Nine captain’s uniform, right? And what’s with the American country music? Even if the lyrics echo the show’s theme, Star Wars is space fantasy–pop music pulls viewers out of the fantasy.
The first season of Lucasfilm/Disney’s Star Wars spin-off, Rogue One prequel series Andor was rough. Writer/creator Tony Gilroy squandered Disney+’s trademark too-short episodes, swapping the tight writing and big action of Rogue One for dragged-out, truly boring drama. The dead hero Cassian Andor from Rogue One was back to sneer and grumble with a group of uninteresting rebels in a mission featuring too much waiting, too much anticipation without a strong payoff worthy of Star Wars. How do you make Star Wars rebels uninteresting? By telling viewers upfront that Andor is not a good guy–in his first scene of Rogue One he basically killed off Daniel Mays’ scared and flustered rebel.
Devoid of any thrills or suspense, the first season of the series picked up the story years before, with Diego Luna’s character scrabbling to discover who he was and where he fit in. It all went downhill from there–the worst hours spent far too long on a daft entry-level Imperial at odds with a nagging mother that bordered on cultural stereotype cringe. What would have made the series better? Picking some other character as the centerpiece. Like the spirited team of Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus, or Bodhi Rook, or do what everyone would have loved and put Mon Mothma at the center of the story or Saw Gerrera, Forest Whitaker’s rebel hero made famous in the animated series The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels–instead of relegating them to support roles. Do you agree? You may be in luck, as the first trailer for the second and final season of Andor appears to feature more of Mothma and Gerrera.
Check it out for yourself. Here’s the trailer for Andor season two:
Missing in the first season was the tight direction and breathless scene-by-scene build of its source material, director Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the movie that re-ignited the possibilities for Star Wars after George Lucas sold it all to Disney and laid the groundwork for the Lucasfilm tentpole series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Tony Gilroy, one of the writers on Rogue One, made some odd choices for the series. Will he get it right this time?
There wasn’t much new. The first episodes echoed many of the beats in the first hour of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which saw a young Han Solo escape his planet and leave the only family he knew behind. Andor’s crime world roots were a mere repeat of Han’s story. The slow pacing, the theme music, and storytelling style, made Andor feel like a B-level crime drama, complete with swaggering Scots in stereotypes–the series inexplicably redefined the Imperial accent as Scottish as it laid the groundwork for the bumbling stormtroopers of the future.
For Season 2 Genevieve O’Reilly, who took on the role of Mon Mothma in Revenge of the Sith, Rogue One, Star Wars Rebels, and Ahsoka, is back with Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera. Even better, the always intriguing Ben Mendelsohn returns from Rogue One as the Imperial officer Krennic, who will eventually suffer a similar fate as Andor by clashing with Grand Moff Tarkin.
Can Andor lift itself as something better than the first season, out of the lesser Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Acolyte? Find out with new episodes of Andor every Tuesday beginning April 22, 2025, streaming on Disney+.
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
