In the Flesh: Andor S1E01: Kassa

Andor isn’t afraid to start slow and without context, a decision that won’t really pay off until its subsequent episodes. With its moody lighting, cast of beaten-down nobodies, and lo-fi synth score the show is one part Blade Runner and one part Battlestar Galactica, the story of a man who has played his string out as far as it’s going to go and hasn’t quite realized it yet. The decompressed form Andor’s story takes goes a little far in its inaugural outing, stretching an entanglement at a tavern and the beginning of the subsequent investigation into forty minutes of anemic wandering and talking. We learn that Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is on the outs or headed there with more or less everyone he knows thanks to long-standing debts and broken promises. We meet the people he’s closest to, such as they are, and learn a little bit about his life as a child on the pre-spaceflight world of Kenari. It’s largely directionless stuff.

A little more compelling than Cassian’s meandering plot is that of his nemesis, uptight and slightly hysterical deputy inspector Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) of the Pre-Mor Authority, a corporate power bloc subject to the Galactic Empire. Karn plays a bit like Goreman, the untried battlefield commander from James Cameron’s Aliens, wide-eyed and jumpy in his tailored uniform, overzealous in his duties without really understanding them or their context. He’s a well-observed antagonist, but even Soller’s natural flair for projecting both anxiety and fanaticism can’t make his handful of scenes feel like anything more than a prelude to his actual role in the story. When the credits roll you’re left looking around for the rest of the episode. Surely someone must have forgotten it somewhere.

In comparison to the vast majority of Disney’s other Star Wars films and television shows, Andor looks good, sounds good, and has a solid cast, crew, and staff. If it doesn’t manage to do much more than set a tone with its premiere, that’s still more than any of the aforementioned outings have under their belts. Seeing something under that thus far creatively smothering umbrella start to push outside the mediocrity of its surroundings is of course a mixed pleasure at best, tangled inextricably with the anxiety that if Disney can generate actual quality television its grasp on the medium will tighten even further, but for the moment that kind of thing is beyond the scope of a review of Andor. If it can overcome the problems with its pacing and structure to conjure up more of a sense of forward momentum, Tony Gilroy’s show might prove to be something like an actual television program.