Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Nicholas Britell’s “Pilgrim” from the Andor episode “That Would Be Me.”

I refuse to get Disney+. I have enough streaming services already, and Disney+ alienated me when it censored Daryl Hannah’s uncovered tush in its print of Splash (an act of censorship Disney+ later undid, but still, I don’t trust them fools—Disney+ did the kind of shit TCM never does to the movies it shows).

Disney+ has been trying to lure grown-ups like me who prefer its sister platform Hulu by posting some of its original shows on Hulu. That still hasn’t convinced me to add Disney+, even when recently, Hulu temporarily posted the entire first season of Andor, whose second and final season began on Disney+ earlier this week with the first three episodes.

Hulu previously posted Andor’s first two episodes during Thanksgiving in 2022. I watched both, and I was so intrigued that I planned to buy Andor’s first season on physical media and watch the rest of it that way. I almost did, but then Hulu posted the entire first season from March 10 to two days ago, so I picked up from where I left off in November 2022. As someone who has an on-and-off relationship with Star Wars (currently off) and considered The Empire Strikes Back to be the high point of the franchise, I’ve come to the conclusion that Andor makes even Irvin Kershner’s classic 1980 movie look like child’s play.

Star Wars was a big part of being a Bay Area kid in the ’80s. (George Lucas created Star Wars in San Anselmo. Lucasfilm is based in the Bay.) My mom bought some of Kenner’s Star Wars action figures for my older brother. I frequently played with Kenner’s Twin-Pod Cloud Car from The Empire Strikes Back and the Presto Magix Return of the Jedi “Super Transfer Set.” I watched the first three movies and The Ewok Adventure repeatedly on VHS.

My brother had up on our bedroom wall for many years a Star Tours poster of the forest on Endor. Laura from one of my favorite film-related YouTube channels, Why the Book Wins, said on her channel last week that the cardinal character names in the original novel version of Conclave are hard to tell apart and memorize. I feel the same way about Star Wars character and planet names. I wish Cassian and Maarva’s last name wasn’t Andor because the Ewoks live on Endor, and that sometimes causes my brain to call Cassian “Endor” before I type out his name.

I even got to interview on the phone Mark Hamill, the late Kenny Baker, and the late Jeremy Bulloch (the first actor who physically portrayed Boba Fett) for my college radio program as anticipation built towards Lucas’s prequel trilogy. But I outgrew Star Wars when the sluggish prequel trilogy came and went with a thud. The Phantom Menace (the first film Lucas directed since the first Star Wars flick, so that meant he hadn’t directed a film in 21 years) alienated me right when evil aliens began speaking in a stereotypical Asian accent that was performed by white actors. That shit was so racist that I kept waiting for their dialogue to end with someone striking a gong.

During each prequel, I couldn’t tell if Lucas was trying to faithfully recreate the flat acting and risible dialogue in Republic Pictures serials like he often tried to do when he directed the first Star Wars flick (I’ve never called it A New Hope and still refuse to do so) or if the acting was flat because Lucas, a self-described amateur architect, paid way more attention to the designs of the pod racers and spaceships. Revenge of the Sith still isn’t a good movie, but at least it was trying to be about something—the end of democracy—whereas J.J. Abrams’s two Star Wars movies are strictly style over substance.

When it was released, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was my favorite Star Wars flick in the era after Lucas’s 2012 sale of Lucasfilm to Disney. But over time, I’ve come to prefer Rogue One, which Andor is a prequel to, over The Last Jedi.

Abrams’s series of decisions in The Rise of Skywalker to give the Nazis everything they want tarnished everything in the sequel trilogy that came before it, including The Last Jedi. Star Wars is a typical example of a franchise I’ve distanced myself from because it has too many Nazis in the fanbase.

I’m a bit frustrated with Lucasfilm for not doing enough to protect Asian American and Black Star Wars actors from being cyberbullied by Nazis. Star Trek, which I prefer over Star Wars, also has conservative fans, but at least they don’t have as much power as the Nazis do in the Star Wars side of things.

After the Abrams fiasco, I gave The Mandalorian a try. I watched via my brother’s laptop the first two seasons of the adventures of Sim Salabim and Go-Gurt. But when this previously enjoyable cross between Six-String Samurai (a swordsman dislikes the mute orphan he keeps having to rescue in a futuristic desert landscape) and the Lone Wolf and Cub movies (a widowed rōnin, his three-year-old son, and the kid’s heavily armed baby carriage slaughter half of Edo-era Japan), added the Skywalkers, a tiresome part of Disney-era Star Wars projects, I said, “That’s a wrap. I’m not watching any more of the Filoniverse.” The Skywalkers’ presence in almost everything makes the world of Star Wars smaller and less appealing.

I’m relieved that there are no space wizards in Andor. They’re now the least interesting part of Star Wars. In Andor’s third episode, “Reckoning,” spymaster Luthen Rael’s recruitment of Cassian to the Rebel cause (“Don’t you want to fight these bastards for real?”) echoed the scenes in the first Star Wars flick where Obi-Wan ushered Luke to his first steps into a larger world. That was when I thought Andor was going to be a show about Luthen’s mentorship of Cassian. But Stellan Skarsgård’s screen time with Diego Luna in the first season ended up being very minimal, and Andor instead became something even better.

Like Rogue One, Andor is about the costs and sacrifices of war, but creator/showrunner Tony Gilroy’s show goes a step further than Rogue One, which he co-wrote (and handled reshoots for), and explores how ordinary people are badly compromised by a fascist and racist regime. There’s an adorable droid that was like a son to Maarva and speaks in the voice of a British man trying and failing to do an American accent—it’s not a Star Wars project without an adorable droid—but as a character Disney+’s kid viewers would want as a plush or a toy, the broken-down droid doesn’t dominate Andor like Go-Gurt does on The Mandalorian. And there’s plenty of explosive action on Andor.

But most of the time, Andor isn’t, each week, a sci-fi action blockbuster like Rogue One or all the other Star Wars movies. It’s more like Gilroy’s Michael Clayton meets The Spook Who Sat by the Door’s depiction of a resistance in its infancy. Michael Clayton, Door, and Andor are all preoccupied with the hard decisions that come with, in the case of Michael Clayton, facing off against an inhumane corporation (or being complicit in its corruption) or, in the cases of Door and Andor, taking part in an armed revolution against oppression.

The writing on Andor surpasses the writing in all the other Star Wars projects I saw. That’s thanks to a writers’ room that consisted of Gilroy, Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy (Gilroy’s brother), House of Cards showrunner Beau Willimon, journalist Tom Bissell (he joined the show in its second season and wrote the three episodes that will wrap up Andor’s run), and Andor’s original showrunner (before he was replaced by Gilroy), The Americans writer Stephen Schiff, whom I remember from his ’90s stint as a film critic for NPR’s Fresh Air.

In the prequel trilogy, Ian McDiarmid, who gave the only entertaining performance in Revenge of the Sith, and Christopher Lee were playing kids’ movie villains who don’t have much dimension. (McDiarmid was delighted with playing that style of villainy and said in 2005 to the Guardian, “I like the notion that [Palpatine] didn’t have any psychological subtlety or depth, that he was just solidly evil.”) Meanwhile, Denise Gough and Kyle Soller are more like Tilda Swinton’s neurotic and constantly sweaty lawyer character in Michael Clayton: They’re playing complicated human beings who happen to be space Nazis.

Cassian, the Gough and Soller characters’ primary target, wasn’t the most compelling character in Rogue One. He was outshined by both the blind swordsman who was dazzlingly played by Donnie Yen and a droid that looked like the Iron Giant’s British baby brother if he hung out with Vyvyan from The Young Ones instead of a pacifistic American kid.

But thanks to the writing on Andor, Cassian—who was revealed to be an orphan from the ecologically devastated planet of Kenari—is now a more fascinating Star Wars hero than Luke or Han. He’s neither Force-sensitive like Luke nor a swaggering badass in the mold of Han and Sim Salabim.

Cassian is an ordinary person of color who sometimes gets harassed by racist cops (this isn’t space racism like in pre-“Past Tense, Part I” Star Trek; it’s police harassment of a human who is described by the cops on the show as having “dark features,” just like police harassment in the real world) and isn’t yet the more cautious and confident Rebel Alliance captain who will later lead the crew of thieves in Rogue One. Again, Andor is a rare Star Wars project that centers on ordinary people—all without any superpowers and either rich or poor—who get entangled in the struggles against fascism.

In the first season, Luna did amazing work as Cassian. My favorite string of Luna scenes on Andor is the series of moments in the first-season episode “Narkina 5” where Luna says nothing during his tenacious character’s first few days in a soul-crushing Imperial prison facility while he pays close attention to the facility’s weak spots.

What Luna does with his silence is just as effective as the monologues that were written for Alex Lawther and several of the older actors on the show. So is his body language when he does speak, like in the scene where his eyes well up as his character says to Luthen, “Kill me or take me in,” a powerful conclusion to the season. Luna’s work in the first season reminds me of David Janssen’s understated work as Dr. Richard Kimble on The Fugitive.

“As Kimble, he spoke in a staccato grumble, keeping his body taut and ready to bolt, his gaze on the ground or aimed at the nearest exit,” wrote TV historian Stephen Bowie in his 2013 A.V. Club piece on the original Fugitive. “If the scripts foregrounded Kimble’s nobility, Janssen’s expressive face filled in all the rest: the fear, the weariness, the exasperation of a life on the lam.”

The Y tu mamá también star was surrounded in the first season by a cast that had no weak links. However, viewers ranging from Avocado regular Simon DelMonte, a Jew, to one of the RWNJs at Bounding Into Comics, who might be a Jew, are no fans of Kathryn Hunter’s scenes as the overbearing mom to Soller’s character. That’s because his mom reinforces stereotypes about Jewish moms. Her yapping causes him at one point to loudly slurp his cereal milk from his bowl—the slurping, a rare moment of humor on Andor, made me laugh, and it’s the funniest food-related moment in a Tony Gilroy project since Tom Wilkinson’s baguettes in Michael Clayton—just to drown out her voice.

While Hunter’s scenes were, as HobbesMk2 pointed out here on The Avocado in 2023, jarring because “it’s suddenly like we’ve transferred the action to ’70s New York,” the show’s other depiction of a mother/son relationship—the complex one between Cassian and Maarva, who wished for Cassian to stop searching for his missing sister and begin moving on from his guilt about leaving her behind on Kenari—was perfect.

There wasn’t enough of Fiona Shaw as Cassian’s adoptive mom—a role that was originally supposed to be played by CCH Pounder, who turned it down, and I can’t stop wondering what Captain Claudette Wyms would have been like as Maarva—but Shaw did so much with her limited screen time. Half of me would have liked a flashback to younger Maarva explaining to preteen Cassian her devotion to the Rebellion in the manner of the flashback in “Rix Road,” the season finale, to Clem, her husband, cleaning in acid an engine component in front of Cassian and teaching him the value of observing things most people ignore.

But then the other half is satisfied with the show’s stirring final statement on Maarva’s parenting of Cassian: the cross-cut sequence where Maarva’s posthumous speech at her funeral sparks the citizens of Ferrix to riot against their occupiers while her absent son carries on her fighting spirit by attempting to rescue his ex, the imprisoned and repeatedly tortured Bix Caleen.

While most people first watched Andor’s first season in 2022, I first watched it in a year when my bloodlust for watching fascists getting killed or humiliated has risen to an all-time high. The “Reckoning” sequence where the Ferrix working class lets the space Nazis know that they’re not welcome in their community and a fleeing Cassian (with the help of Luthen) and Brasso, a scrap yard worker and Cassian’s friend, separately kill most of them is something I needed in 2025.

Someone over on FanFare came up with the best two-sentence breakdown of Andor’s first season I’ve seen:

I’ll catch the second season of this show where fascists get shot in the face with a blaster when it comes out on physical media. I never expected a Star Wars project to be reminiscent of the brilliant writing from both Michael Clayton and Wiseguy, but here we are. Part of my enjoyment of Luthen’s terrific, Willimon-penned monologue about the costs of being a revolutionary in “One Way Out,” Andor’s riveting prison break episode, is due to the memories it brings back of two different monologues William Russ beautifully delivered as Roger Lococco, a man of mystery who doesn’t have a conscience and gradually develops one, in the same 1988 Wiseguy episode, the David J. Burke-penned “Dirty Little Wars.” (Disappointingly, there are no YouTube clips of Lococco’s monologues.)

“I live in a thicket infested by zealots bent on the bloodletting of this nation,” said Lococco to Vinnie Terranova—the undercover OCB agent who was assigned to investigate Lococco’s work as a freelance assassin while assisting him in working security for drug smuggler Mel Profitt—after Terranova found out Lococco is an undercover CIA agent who was ordered by his handler to trick Profitt into destroying his own empire. “They raise a glass of saké to the rising sun and plummet zeros filled with dynamite into our fathers. They beat themselves with chains until they arrive at a narcotized state. Then they shout ‘Allah!’ and drive truckloads of explosives into our brothers. They thump Marxist manifestos like some backwater evangelist and carve away half of Europe, enslaving our cousins. Now they want what we have, but they don’t want to arrive at it by initiative. They want it by insurrection. These are the residents of Mister Lococco’s neighborhood.”

Later on in “Dirty Little Wars,” Lococco finally distances himself from Herb Ketcher—his handler, as well as the evil Special Forces soldier who trained him to torture and kill in the Vietnam War—because one of Ketcher’s other agents recently killed his mute Chinese housekeeper (and first love) while trying to eliminate Lococco under Ketcher’s orders. But before Lococco attempts to kill Ketcher in retaliation, he tells him he has had enough of working for him and risking his neck for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of soda pop.”

When Ketcher argues that the CIA’s dirty work is meant to protect America’s children, Lococco fires back with a line that gave me chills when I rewatched Russ’s perfect delivery of it via Shout! Studios last year: “I don’t have any children! I don’t have any family! I don’t think of you as a father anymore, Herb. Our relationship has been sort of, uh, inadequate. I have nothing!”

Lococco, who protected imperialists and fascists and their business interests before his change of heart in the climax of “Dirty Little Wars,” and Luthen would have been bitter enemies if they worked in the same universe, but they also probably would have bonded (briefly) over what they’ve lost due to the causes they joined.

Star Wars, you’ve come a long way from the era of “Meesa day starten pitty okey day witda brisky morning munchen. Den boom! Getten berry scared and grabben dat Jedi, and pow! Meesa here. Huh. Meesa getten berry, berry scared,” baby.