Review: ‘Andor’ Episodes 1-3

In their marketing campaign for the latest Star Wars live-action series, Andor, Lucasfilm and the cast and crew behind the project tried to stress a handful of things to the public. Perhaps the most important one is that this is no regular Star Wars series — it is as close to an HBO drama as Star Wars can get, with no Jedi or lightsabers around. Tony Gilroy, the showrunner, head writer, and executive producer on the series, is famously not a Star Wars fanatic (something that was definitely interesting in some aspects, as I’ll discuss later), and was drawn to the project because of the character drama that he found behind it, as well as the scope that he would be able to achieve with the backing of a huge machine like Disney and Lucasfilm’s.

Diego Luna, who plays 21-year-old, future Rebel spy Cassian Andor, was immediately sold on Gilroy’s pitch, as the writer wanted to test the limits of what Lucasfilm would be willing to do with Star Wars. Right off the bat, he announces to the audience that he wasn’t kidding with all of his talk, when Cassian Andor walks into a brothel in the very first scene of the show. While it certainly isn’t the first time sex is alluded to in Star Wars, Andor got quite explicit in the first two episodes, both in this scene and when Adria Arjona’s Bix visits his booty call late at night in the second episode.

It’s clear from the very beginning that Gilroy doesn’t care about pleasing a fanbase or checking the classic Star Wars boxes that creators like Dave Filoni or Jon Favreau would. And that is not a burn on them either, it’s just a different piece of content, and something Star Wars should be grateful for. Gilroy also doesn’t care about keeping awake those who set their alarms at 3am to watch the new Star Wars episode by throwing flashy action sequences in their faces. He builds his story through dialogue and character conflict, and through careful setup in the first two episodes, he finally delivers a grand spectacle in the third. But we’ll get to that….