Oh, just what the internet ordered: some more commentary on Star Wars.

To be honest, my relationship with this franchise is certifiably bipolar. Up, down, deep, shallow, love it, hate it, roll my eyes at the wonderful blur of a galaxy far, far away. I mean, if there was some kind of independent adjudication of fan-ness in the Star Wars media landscape I wouldn’t be anywhere near the top, but I’d probably have a ranking.

I am told in a tale perhaps apocryphal, that I attended a screening of the original in 1977 at a drive in movie theatre, asleep as an infant in the back of the car.

I have watched the films, read the books, played the games, absorbed the lore, studied the history, run the themed race, ridden the rides, toured the studio, bought the merch, and drank the star wars kool-aid in big gulps.

But ever since Disney bought the whole thing… I get it. You’ve heard this story before. Everyone complains: Disney borked it, right? Yeah… no… maybe… kinda… sorta… what does that even mean?

I remember walking through the queue to Star Tours in Disneyland last summer and feeling this sense of vague disconcert. There was this sense that as fun as the ride was, as immersive as the queue was built, that there was a vibe that whoever had built this thing, well, they just didn’t get it.

Here’s my point and I’ll move onto the review: you’re in the queue to Star Tours, boarding a fictional vacation trip, and one of the destinations advertised is Tatooine. This is the case because you’re supposed to be excited about visiting something from the universe of Star Wars, but if you were in the world of Star Wars, as a character with agency and thought and free will, you would avoid Tatooine at all costs. It is a truck stop in a backwater in the middle of lawless nowhere. You would never in a million years book a vacation there. That’s the whole point. It’s like seeing an advertisement for the industrial area behind the airport suggesting you could go visit the shitty bar by the gas station and bet on the dog fights in the back alley. Why the hell, in universe, would there be a tourist cruise headed there?

Because. Simply. Tatooine is intellectual property and most people legitimately don’t look beyond the “gee whiz I saw that on thuh teevee…” so it sells just fine in Disneyland.

And that vibe is where my frustration with modern Disney-owned Star Wars has tended to exist for the last few years: it’s all just intellectual property being shuffled into disconcerting new recipes that make no real sense and have no real sense of the stakes of this universe. It’s all pretty much been a low-thought, gee whiz theme park ride, particularly a lot of the new limited run series on Disney Plus.

In other words, it took a great deal of contrary information suggesting that Andor was something that rose above this dreck, or at least aspired to lift itself out of the gee whiz-ness of the intellectual property churn factory built by Disney over the last decade to make me want to actually commit about ten hours to watch it.

But we did.

We finished watching the first season this past weekend… and I will suggest that if nothing else it has tried and almost certainly done a reasonably good job of building something fresh from the universe, adding to the story rather than blithely churning intellectual property and recycling the old pulp of the films. Sure, it leverages and contributes to the structure of the broader story, but it risked something bigger, created stakes, incited emotion and felt more real than the manufactured backstories that have populated my overpriced streaming subscription lately. It wasn’t perfect. There was some inconsistencies and a few tourist glances towards Star Wars Land TM. Yet, it was compelling and we wanted to keep watching, to see what happened, and you started to care about all the characters, even some of the terrible evil ones. No, not perfect, but pretty good.

And if nothing else, it hardly ever felt like a sightseeing tourist vacation to a truck stop by the airport.