If I had to be earnest, I think Andor is the best Star Wars media probably ever produced? It’s perfect. So I will always be grateful for that.
Andor definitely rivals Empire Strikes Back in terms of quality and tone. Comparing the two is probably futile – they’re such radically different productions. Andor has some flaws - I particularly didn’t really appreciate the flashback sequences showing Andor as a child living among some lost tribe of children like Peter Pan or whatever. But that’s such a minor complaint in retrospect - the show is like a 9.999 out of 10. It lacks the “dark fantasy” vibe of Empire Strikes Back, but it has its own unique dystopian vibe going for it that was really lacking in the OT.
I only came to this realization after not really feeling the subsequent releases (Mando, Ahsoka, Acolyte), but also not really feeling any kind of desire to “fix” them like I would. I wasn’t even disappointed. They just weren’t for me.
Yeah, me too. I often find myself wanting to mentally fix movies that captivate me, including the Original Star Wars Trilogy. But yeah, this latest stuff from Disney+ is not even captivating enough to inspire me to want to fix it, it’s just all mostly ephemeral trash designed to maintain subscriptions. Andor was just uniquely special, and I’m kind of shocked it even exists.
Vladius said:
That is a good idea but episodic stories like that are much less popular than serialized stuff now. It’s very close to the Jedi Apprentice series of books, which are about Qui Gon and Obi Wan having episodic Jedi adventures on different planets with different dilemmas. They’re kids’ books and I read them as a kid, but it could easily be done with an adult show, or just more adult books.
Arguably, Mando Season 1 was sort of episodic. There was a through-line with baby Yoda weaved through the entire season, but it was a “soft” through-line, unlike more heavily serialized shows. Many episodes were more or less self-contained. Ironically, people at the time complained about this, labeling it “side quest of the week” or something. But in retrospect, Mando Season 1 is widely regarded as one of the better Disney+ productions, or at least one of the few productions that isn’t bafflingly terrible.
There’s a fine line to be drawn between a series where the through-line is so captivating that “side quest” episodes register as “filler” content designed to pad out the series to meet some production quota, and a series that has a very “soft” through-line that doesn’t completely dominate expectations about each episode. I usually become impatient with “filler” episodes with series that have a prominent through-line, often based around some compelling mystery established in the first episode. But I’m also a big fan of classic shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, where every episode is mostly self-contained, but there are also “soft” through-lines woven through the series, showing up from time to time, usually in Season finales. But these “soft” through-lines were never prominent enough to make the individual episodes come across as “filler”. It also doesn’t hurt that many of those classic individual episodes were high quality masterpieces written by veteran sci-fi writers.