I gave up on STAR WARS years ago, but ANDOR accomplished something remarkable–it elevated the franchise and gave it a much-needed boost of gravitas. The second season tied off the story beautifully.

I was 12 when the first STAR WARS came out. My mind exploded. I went to see it nine times. When the franchise returned with the second trilogy, I slogged through them until eventually I gave up, just as I did with every other beloved franchise from ALIEN to INDIANA JONES to James Bond as they just got, well, dumber.

So, I had little interest when ANDOR appeared. I did catch ROGUE ONE, which everyone seemed to like, and I personally found it overbaked with an unlikable protagonist, so hearing Cassian Andor’s backstory carried little appeal. But everyone kept talking up how different and deep ANDOR was, so I checked it out and, benefited by low expectations, quite enjoyed it for its intelligent writing and fairly realistic depiction of how dissent becomes active resistance against tyranny. STAR WAS as gritty political thriller–I liked it.

The show is really about empire and rebellion, fascism and the the desire to resist it, and how resistance requires sacrifice and often resorting to tactics that mirror the evils of the oppressive regime. (Strangely, there are some people who watched the show and rooted for the fascists, go figure.) In the first season, we primarily follow Cassian Andor (Diega Luna), an orphan looking for a shortcut to a comfortable life who through circumstance winds up pushed to radicalism, one man’s journey to become a revolutionary. While he simply wants to be left alone, the police state will not allow it, pushing him and others until they put their lives on the line to resist. For them, there’s little inspirational talk about democracy and way more base resistance to being dominated, used, and destroyed. Simple justice, often taking the form of an eye for an eye.

In Season 2, Andor is now an agent working for Luthen Rael (the excellent Stellan Skarsgård). From what I understand, ANDOR was originally conceived as five seasons but cut off at two, and instead of phoning it in like the last season of GAME OF THRONES and THE EXPANSE, the writers went all out to condense the story into something powerful. Each episode takes place a year apart, providing a countdown to the commissioning and use of the planet-killing Death Star. This results in an episodic evolution of the Rebellion itself from an underground terrorist organization to an openly operating military force that rejects the ignoble tactics of its origin. We see a senator forced to accept a lethal decision to protect the Rebellion during a wedding scene (with a banger techno song) and then make a brave, high-risk stand against the Emperor, the provocation of a planet to rebel so it can be crushed, the portrayal of those who serve the Empire for personal gain as competent bureaucrats instead of cartoon villains, and more.

It all culminates in Andor accepting one more assignment, which results in him joining the adventure of ROGUE ONE, which I rewatched and liked so much more as a series finale of sorts.

My only criticism of this season and the show as a whole is despite a huge effort to make the worlds look lived in, they never really do. Sometimes, it’s like a weird space Middle Ages where a single city represents a whole planet, and again despite some good efforts, often a lot of willing suspension of disbelief is needed to go with the locations being real places. Contrast it with GAME OF THRONES, for example, which shows how to do world-building right (at least until characters started teleporting). This was largely a function of budget, of course.

Overall, ANDOR is a real standout show, so different from the rest of the STAR WARS franchise, challenging in its ideas of what real rebellion looks like, and the true cost of freedom.

Netflix’s adaptation of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is a wondrous and gorgeous work of art. This terrific adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s groundbreaking 1967 novel received plenty of accolades but not as much attention as it deserved, and I’m hoping this post will do its tiny part in rectifying that.

This novel of magical realism influenced generations of Latin American writers. I read it many years ago and remember being mesmerized by its episodic multi-generation plot, strangeness, and often melancholy tone fitting its themes of solitude, fate, and how history repeats itself. Magical realism can be challenging to do right in a screen adaptation, however, and the sprawling nature of the novel seemed to outright defy the possibility, with Márquez apparently stating he wrote it to prove a written work can be so much bigger than any cinematic production.

Nonetheless, this adaptation captures all of the beauty, melancholy, and wonder of the source work. In this story, the Buendía family travels deep into the wilderness to found a new town and a simple, naive society based on harmony, which is constantly challenged internally by love and betrayal and externally by government and eventually civil war. Spanning several family generations, these primal and cycling events are given an almost mythical flavor by the story’s magical realism, which includes ghosts, a plague of insomnia, a trail of blood announcing a death, and the stars turning into yellow flowers that rain on the town. The acting is solid, and the world is beautiful and visually lush and fun to explore. I found myself completely charmed by this show and was sorry to see it conclude.

The eight episodes comprising the first season cover the first third of the novel, with a second season already in the works that will cover the rest of the story. I’m looking forward to catching the rest of this extraordinary adaptation.