Andor is already one of the best of Star Wars

It’s not hard to take a new Star Wars show with a little apprehension. Like Marvel movies and shows, they’re announced at press conferences as a collection of titles and dates, perhaps with a few cast members and a logline if executives are generous onstage. Art can come from that, but that’s not how it’s made.

This is the source of my initial apprehension Andor, and frankly, every new Star Wars project. Even with the things that sound exciting with the limited information we get (The Acolyte sure sounds neat!), none of that matters until it’s here, in front of us. The show has to come out, and each episode has to convince the viewer to watch another. In the middle of the first season Andor has, with amazing ease.

With “The Eye” this week Andor makes it clear: Andor is quite possibly the best live-action Star Wars show yet, and is well on its way to establishing itself as one of the best Star Wars stories on this site The Last Jedi. And it does that largely by being just damn good television and immersing itself in the world of Star Wars in a way only a TV show with a specific focus and mission can.

“The Eye” is what happens when careful plotting is accompanied by careful character work. It’s a robbery episode that the series has built on, but its success isn’t just about anticipation, it’s also about reluctance. A lot has been done Andor‘s careful defiance of traditional fanservice – thankfully no one feels bad about the droids they’re looking for while trusting the Force, and hey, that’s no moon – but the show also excelled at simple drama. People talk: to their bitter, domineering mothers; to her comrades about radical politics; to their colleagues in boring government offices. It’s not flashy, but it’s television, and that’s why we watch it – to make the spectacle of episodes like “The Eye” hit all the harder.

And what a damn beautiful spectacle. The eponymous “eye” – a celestial phenomenon that resembles both a meteor shower and the Northern Lights – lends any scene viewed from the outside a soft emerald glow that is both bewitching and menacing. It’s the kind of effect that recreates perfectly normal Star Wars scenes, like pilots boarding their TIE fighters, with mesmerizing grace, an effective contrast to the tense scenes deep in an Imperial vault Andor‘s heroes risk their lives.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for Andor episode 6, “The Eye,” follow.]

Although it is the longest episode of Andor It’s also the easiest so far: Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and the small band of rebels (not yet rebels) he’s hired to finally pull off their grand raid on an Imperial vault. It succeeds but goes awry, building the tension into a thrilling escape that not everyone survives.

Image: Lucasfilm

It probably would have been enough to end the episode on that note, but The Eye goes a little further and chooses to abandon the easy ending for a more difficult story dedicated to the complicated characters Andor has spent half the season working out. At the end of the raid, the rebel team is not brought closer together; there is no consensus. In fact, they just barely make it: Taramyn Barcona (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) dies before they escape, and Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), the young radical, suffers a fatal injury in their dramatic exit.

Only Cassian, Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and leader Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) make it to safety, and even then, ultimately there is no greater cause that binds them beyond the job they just got done. Skeen softly suggests to Andor that they take all the money and run away, and Andor responds by killing him. He then tells Vel about Skeen’s plan and his personal decision to take his cut and run like he’s always said he would. A lesser story would bask in the success of these characters; Andor instead only offers bare nerves.

To do otherwise, however, would be a disservice. At the time Cassian Andor is introduced Villain One, he is a man who would die for the cause. It is no small thing to learn what one would die for. So far, Andor succeeds because it takes this journey seriously and doesn’t shy away from a fundamental truth about organizing: It’s hard for someone to look beyond their self-interest and commit to a cause. They need to find their own reason, and they need to be reached in a way they understand. Maybe for Cassian, that’s in Nemik’s last act, leaving Cassian his political manifesto, what he wanted to die for. Maybe it’s a variety of things. No Star Wars series has ever made me this excited about what might happen next.