Finally binge-watched this.

This felt like some old EU story written in 1993, with concepts like the “Imperial Security Bureau”, etc. It was awesome. I hate saying cliché crap like “It’s the best thing since Empire Strikes Back!™”, but it actually might literally be the case this time around.

The sci-fi prison scenario was probably the centerpiece, and the best sequence. Although, I originally thought that Andor would be freed from the prison by the ISB in order to interrogate him, and he would escape during the transfer or something. I didn’t expect a full prison-break scenario. That whole sequence was awesome, and Andy Sirkis was incredible, but I felt it was a bit unrealistic after two episodes setting up this impossibly hopeless dystopian sci-fi nightmare prison. In real life, prisoner uprisings in concentration camps almost never succeeded.

I felt this show was particularly political as well, in the modern sense of the word. The season finale was NOT your typical Rebel assault on Imperial Base #55423 featuring Gold Leader Standing By™, occurring concurrently with a ground battle to Disable the Shield Generator™. Instead, it was like a street battle in Portland with the cops. I’m actually surprised the Imperials were initially just beating people with space-batons instead of immediately shooting everyone. (Side note: did everyone in the Galaxy collectively forget that blasters have a stun setting? Seems like stun beams would be the Star Wars equivalent of tear gas or other forms of crowd control.)

Anyway, this show was really well done. This is the kind of material I was hoping for in a live-action Star Wars series. It finally provided a horrifying depiction of the Empire as the truly oppressive dystopia we imagined. My only complaint was that the series was probably a bit too long, with some sequences dragging on a bit (like the heist sequence to steal the payroll), but that’s the case nowadays with almost every streaming series.