Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

(Spoilers ahead for people who haven’t watched the Andor episodes “Harvest” and “Welcome to the Rebellion.”)

Andor’s second and final season was, since 2005, the first season of a Star Wars show I watched as it was being released. The last time I watched a new Star Wars show as it was being released was the third and final season of Genndy Tartakovsky’s taut and nearly wordless Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series (there was no “The” in the title of this earlier project about the Clone Wars) on Cartoon Network.

The long gap between 2005 and 2025 was because I’m more of a Star Trek guy than a Star Wars guy these days. (I don’t care for space wizards. Also, Star Trek’s fanbase doesn’t have too many Nazis.) The entirety of Clone Wars’s final season was as long as a third-season episode of Ted Lasso. (Each third-season Clone Wars installment was only about 13 minutes long.) Meanwhile, Andor’s final season had the same amount of episodes as Ted Lasso’s third season did, but unlike Lasso Season 3, not once did it suffer from streaming service bloat.

Tony Gilroy attempted to compress four seasons’ worth of dramatic material into one season, and though a couple of first-season storylines I was interested in ended up being abandoned or mostly erased (it reminded me of Timeless compressing its unproduced third season into its two-hour final episode), I was still riveted by what Gilroy and his all-star writing staff did in the final season. In fact, I wish the season had more episodes. Andor’s exploration of institutional rot, infighting within an anti-fascist revolution, and the emotional toll of oppression was that good.

Several of the memes, shitposts, and Bluesky jokes that emerged in response to the final season of this largely serious and morally complex show were also good. Speaking of one of the memes…

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Brandon Roberts’s “Niamos! (Chandrilian Club Mix)”—the drunk Mon Mothma dance scene instrumental from Andor’s “Harvest” episode.

Knee-ah-mos! Mos! Mos! Mos! Mos!

Social media went bonkers over Genevieve O’Reilly’s drunken dance scene, so the official Star Wars YouTube channel posted an hour-long loop of Senator Mothma’s emotional breakdown on the dance floor for Andor fans who can’t get enough of the scene or the instrumental. For the party after the wedding of Leida, Mon’s teenage daughter, and the son of a Chandrilan gangster, Roberts took first-season Andor composer Nicholas Britell’s diegetic “Niamos!” instrumental from the “Kassa” and “Announcement” episodes (Britell was unavailable for almost the entire second season due to a personal family matter) and created a dance floor bop that’s as catchy as “Lapti Nek” (its title is Huttese for “Fancy Man”) from the original cut of Return of the Jedi.

If “Lapti Nek” was basically Space Tom Tom Club, then “Niamos! (Chandrilian Club Mix)” is, as Gilroy describes it in interviews, “a really hardcore Tarzana, California EDM mix [of the Niamos theme].”

I’ve already seen people rushing to call “Niamos! (Chandrilian Club Mix)” the song of the summer. Really? We’re still doing that shit? In a great piece for Time last month, columnist Taylor Crumpton wrote, “Maybe that’s why the Song of the Summer feels like such a dinosaur. We’ve simply grown out of it… Americans are shifting towards personalized music experiences and playlists, rather than being homogeneous music consumers… There has never been a universal summertime experience in America. So how can one song feel right to all of us?” I agree with Crumpton.

Divorced from the context of “Harvest,” Roberts’s EDM remix of “Niamos!” kind of makes me want to do the exact same dance moves Terry Crews did at the club in White Chicks. But it’s not exactly a tune that makes me happy like “Lapti Nek” or “The Man with the 4-Way Hips” (the Tom Tom Club joint that sounds the most like “Lapti Nek”) do whenever I hear those tunes again because of its ties to one of Andor’s most harrowing sequences: Coruscant and Chandrila’s rich and wealthy residents don’t have a care in the world at the wedding party while on another planet, Bix Caleen, an illegal immigrant, is fighting for her life against a space Nazi who attempts to sexually assault her. (Andor wisely did not add any music to Bix’s brutal scuffle with her assailant.) In addition to that, another space Nazi kills Brasso, Cassian and Bix’s longtime friend, in a wheat field off-screen right when Cassian arrives in a TIE Avenger he stole and attempts to rescue Bix, Wilmon, B2EMO, and Brasso.

The cross-cutting between the wedding party and the undocumented migrant workers’ ordeals on planet Mina-Rau was the work of Gilroy’s brother, Andor editor John Gilroy. According to IndieWire’s recent piece on “Harvest,” Gilroy’s brother viewed Roberts’s EDM instrumental as the perfect connective tissue between the despair the migrant workers are going through on Mina-Rau and the despair both Mon and Vel Sartha, the senator’s cousin and a member of spymaster Luthen Rael’s rebel network, are experiencing at the wedding party.

“She’s dancing to keep from screaming,” said Tony Gilroy about Mon—who is both saddened about Leida’s hatred of her (as well as her preference to become a tradwife) and shocked from the realization that Luthen ordered the execution of Tay Kolma, her troubled colleague and childhood friend—in a StarWars.com interview.

Remember lawyer Arthur Edens’s wild off-screen monologue about his mental breakdown (“I’m drenched in afterbirth, I’ve breached the chrysalis, I’ve been reborn”) at the start of Gilroy’s Michael Clayton? Mon’s drunken dance is a similar breakdown—but without any words and beautifully acted by O’Reilly. (It was the last scene O’Reilly acted in for the show. Andor was shot out of sequence.) However, she’s still not comfortable with the actions of the resistance she has been bankrolling, and she’s still too attached to her patrician lifestyle. She’s not yet the Mon who bravely speaks out against Emperor Palpatine in “Welcome to the Rebellion,” the season’s ninth episode, or the Mon who, in the animated Star Wars Rebels, Rogue One, and Return of the Jedi, has given herself completely to the cause.

Andor smartly understands that radicalization doesn’t happen overnight. It’s one of many examples of why, as a Star Wars project, Andor surpasses the original trilogy, which spawned one of the most beloved action figure lines of all time. The line has now grown to include even characters from Andor, the least kid-friendly—or chud-friendly—Star Wars show.

Though I don’t collect action figures anymore, I still have with me the Kenner Star Wars action figures my older brother played with in the early ’80s, as well as an unopened Candyman action figure I found at an outlet toy store in the early ’00s and a couple of unopened Snake Plissken action figures I picked up at Barnes & Noble in 2015 because I’m fascinated by R-rated movies that spawned action figures. Like me, illustrator Adam Perocchi, a.k.a. Readful Things, is fascinated by grown-up movies nobody expected to pop up on the shelves of Toys “R” Us. He builds and sells action figures of characters from movies and TV shows that are the least likely to spawn toy lines, like Martin Scorsese movies, Shane Black action comedies, Severance, and The Pitt. (However, if you’re anti-AI, you might not like how often Perocchi relies on generative AI to create his artwork and action figures.) Today’s prompt is: Name a show whose characters you think should be made into a line of action figures you would collect even though you stopped buying toys eons ago. For example, I would be totally into a line of The Wire action figures.

“New from Hasbro: It’s Clay Davis, armed with his briefcase full of drug money! Press the button under this slimy senator’s tie to hear him say his favorite word: ‘Sheeeeeeeeeit.’ ”