This past weekend, instead of playing a ton of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I decided to bank some more episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, got wrecked by the end of the fifth season, realized the podcast I’m listening to as I watch along (as separate activities) pivots immediately after those episodes to watching Andor, and then wound up binging all of Andor until 1 in the morning on a work night. This was not a great choice, to be honest, but my “a couple episodes” turned into “I NEED to watch another episode” and that was pretty much it for me. My initial plan for an uninterrupted Sunday (since two players of my usual Sunday TTRPG were out, I cancelled our session) was to spend most of it making some advancements in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth so I’d have more to write about this week, but I got carried away by how amazing Andor is. This shouldn’t be news to most people, given how much everyone raved about it back in the fall of 2022 when it came out, but even I was surprised by how good it was and I had a front seat to everyone raving about it. I had high expectations going in, expectations that had been raised when I saw that A More Civilized Age (a podcast about Star Wars media that I’ve grown to love dearly) pivoted away from their plans to focus entirely on Andor, and they were exceeded in almost every single way.

I say “almost” because all my expectations where incredibly nebulous and largely undefined things and those are categorically difficult to exceed. How can you pass something that doesn’t have clear boundaries? Turns out, all you have to do is be incredibly outstanding in every possible regard save one and then it becomes obvious. Just to knock it out right away, my only gripe about the show is the weird pig-dog things that show up on the planet Ferrix, the central hub for the story. The entirety of my complaint is that they just look like horrible, unbelievable, and somehow rubbery CGI. The way they move is weird and seems to differ a bit from one instance to another. Sometimes they have the rubbery look of the Gamorrean guards from Return of the Jedi (the big rubbery bipedal pig-like aliens from Jabba’s Palace) and sometimes they look like what if a mastiff had a head and shoulders like an incredibly flat-faced pug. It’s uncanny at times and just not a pleasant thing to look at. One of the best parts of Star Wars has always been the weird little alien guys and while every other alien you see feels largely believable (though there were an awful lot of “human but with a skin tone you don’t see on Earth” type aliens, which felt like a bit of a cop-out), these ones just feel incredibly out of place in a show that worked so hard to incorporate more practical effects than CGI.

For a show focused on character development and depictions, the growing resentment of the people underneath the boot of the empire, and the difficult work of rebellion politics, minor gripes about the visuals of a particular type of dog-creature don’t really carry a lot of weight. This one instance stands out compared to the rest of the show, though, which is what makes it worthy of remark. The choice to rely heavily on practical effects really shines compared to so many other Star Wars shows that just don’t really work with the amount of CGI being used (I’m looking at you, Book of Boba Fett–though my problems with that show are larger than just the visuals, enough so that I’ve chosen to just not write about it since I’m not sure I’d actually have useful analysis to contribute). Every episode Andor has a visual scope to it that just don’t ever feel present in most of the CGI stuff I’ve seen outside of a few cases where it’s a solitary character moving through a large and empty environment like first season of The Mandalorian. Andor feels firmly set in place and present in time in a way almost nothing since the original trilogy did.

In terms of themes, writing, and characterization, though, I think Andor might be the best Star Wars media I’ve ever watched. My tolerance for binging shows or even hour-length episodes of shows is at an all-time low these days and I still didn’t hesitate to watch all of Andor in a single sitting. I didn’t even mind when it took the first three episodes combined to really set up what was going on. The strange pacing of introducing characters, jumping between time periods, and establishing our moment in the Star Wars galaxy’s history worked really well, even if I was surprised by the end of each of those first three episodes (since these ends seemed to just appear out of nowhere). Cleary, they were meant to be watched as a set, or at least in quick succession, but each one still felt self-contained enough that it didn’t feel strange to take breaks between episodes (my only breaks during that entire binge were between episodes two and three for a mid-afternoon lunch and then between eight and nine for dinner). Each character beat hits home, every bit of writing lands, and there is absolutely nothing in any episode that had me thinking “they could have cut this to trim the total episode length.” Even when the episodes started landing solidly in the fifty-minute zone, I felt like each of them was concise and had exactly the amount of detail it needed as the show worked its way through the full radicalization of Cassian Andor, the compromises of Senator Mon Mothma, and the conniving machinations of Luthen as he sacrifices what he feels he must in order to protect the fledgling rebellion. There wasn’t a second of the show that I’d cut if I was given magic scissors and told to remove anything that I felt was extraneous.

It was a refreshing change of pace, honestly. I’m so used to needing to get past the bad episodes or needing to put up with subpar writing or character work as I watch a TV series that I’ve forgotten what it was like to really enjoy something enough to actually WANT to watch it all at once. There’s plenty of great shows out there, sure, but the current theme of longer and longer episodes, with less and less left on the cutting room floor just gets grating as every interesting idea gets turned into a bloated, flavorless mess just so it can appeal to the widest possible audience. That’s why I stopped trying to watch all of the Marvel stuff. That’s why I don’t even bother keeping up with the latest movie releases. Its why I don’t watch streamed TV shows much anymore. Hell, that’s even why I didn’t even bother trying to keep up with the latest Star Wars stuff since the disastrous The Rise of Skywalker, despite how much I’ve enjoyed Star Wars as a whole. Bad writing, design by committee, and executive flavoring for the widest possible appeal have turned me off of most modern media and this show, Andor, blasted past all my reservations to place it at the top of my most-loved TV shows. I mean, I don’t know that I’ll watch it again anytime soon since that’s still a significant time investment, but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed the experience of watching a Star Wars anything this much in the last decade. Possibly ever.

I thought I’d have more to say about the show, but I’ve already run a bit longer than I meant to, so I think I’m going to save that for another day when I’ve gotten a bit more sleep and had the time to properly digest what I’ve seen. I started writing this post less than 12 hours after I finished the series, so I think I need to let it sit a bit more before I write one of my classic “Critical Analysis” posts about it, where I plan to write my usual one to two thousand words of blog post and then wind up doubling or tripling that as I work through my thoughts on the matter. For now, know that Andor was Great and that, if you’re a Star Wars fan of any kind and didn’t watch Andor, you ABSOLUTELY should change that. Clear your schedule and give it a watch. You will not be disappointed.