WHAT HAPPENED ON TWO? SPOILERS!
Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian are all rated TV-14… but what exactly does TV-14 mean in a world with Baby Yoda? Are you really going to keep your 10 year old from watching Grogu? Good luck with that, parents. We all know that children under 14 routinely watch all of these shows and that they are designed for them to enjoy. Because, at its core, Star Wars is for everyone.
If your youngling has somehow made it through the very adult, very non-kid friendly Andor because they love Star Wars? I mean, kudos. You have a raised a child with a stellar attention span. But with “Nobody’s Listening!” Andor parts pretty profoundly from it’s TV-14 brethren. This is the closest Star Wars has ever come to TV-MA, and I’m including all the times that Cassian Andor shoots first.
I think the interrogation of Bix is the most genuinely disturbing scene I’ve ever seen in Star Wars. Watching one of our heroes scream in anguish as she’s tortured by the sound of alien children crying? I wouldn’t watch that scene twice, and I’m forty-six years old.
Mature content is often measured by the amount of sexuality or violence. Violence is a big part of a rating, it seems, number of things shot, for example, number limbs removed. It’s a sort of silly way to measure what is appropriate for a child because it’s context-free. Bix’s torture is the most violent act that has been shown on Andor. It’s the kind of thing that would give a kid nightmares.
This is why I experience so much cognitive dissonance about Andor. I see and experience what is unique and brilliant about it, but it also just leaves me, as a fan, uneasy.
Andor is Star Wars: The Wire, a sprawling look at how systems work on people and how people navigate systems. In The Wire, David Simon wanted to show how political and profit incentives, how the American Dream itself, seems to trap us in a self-defeating loop. In Andor, oppression itself is being explored: how it creates compliance, how it has genuine adherents, how fighting oppression is risky and can force terrible choices, how individuals are made to feel helpless, how oppression seeps into families and hearts. How oppression uses false hope, laziness, as its tools. How the oppressors themselves can be zealots for order, how they can find successful oppression ‘beautiful,’ how they can take pleasure in their own methods, how the forces of oppression spend more time in meetings than shooting lightning out of their hands. How oppression looks like senators turning off their own lights, how it looks like prisoners working hard at the arbitrary goals while incarcerated, just because they have no other way to occupy themselves.
The Wire, for its part, also had a crime drama heart and some characters that rose to the level of legendary on their own: Omar. Marlow. Bunk. In my view, Andor more relies on Star Wars to be what’s iconic, and allows its characters to whispery and single-minded. It refuses to be operatic. (The Karn family and Maarva Andor being exceptions.)
It’s this that makes so many people I love and respect talk about Andor like it’s the ‘best’ Star Wars series that’s ever been produced. (There’s a whole essay to write about what we mean when we say best.) Like The Wire, Andor’s ambitions go beyond its characters. It’s exploring the context in which the characters live and how it acts on them as people.
I think what I keep bumping up against, though, as a Star Wars fan, is for however smart and intentional it is, however ‘prestige drama’ it feels compared to other Star Wars shows, I feel distanced from it in a way that I never do watching Star Wars. I identify that it is well-made, but it’s offering pleasures that have very little to do with what I love about Star Wars.
Star Wars, for me, is a feeling. It’s independent of assessments of quality. The Phantom Menace was full of idiosyncratic moments and stoic performances, but it was a puzzle piece in a story had been invested in since I was a child, and it's heart remained in the serialized, Kurosawa-inspried, race-car loving, young adult spirit of the project. I have seen it literally hundreds of times. Even The Last Jedi, which is pretty adult-toned compared to some of the other stories in the main Saga, takes its time to explain the Force in a way that children are meant to understand. It is warm and inspiring and sweet, even in its toughest moments.
Andor’s mission statement is: we’re not for kids. You shouldn’t let your kids watch Andor any more than you should let them watch House of Cards or The Patient. Torture is scary? Sure it is. It’s a part of life under authoritarian rule.
One might fairly say, Matt, Star Wars is full of scary material. Children are killed. It has heads and hands sliced off. It has scenes of torture. Sure, sometimes it cuts away from the worst moments, but what about Anakin being burned alive?
Fairy tales and children’s stories are, in fact, full of violence. (What’s Little Red Riding Hood without the axe?) But those acts of violence tend to be allegorical. For example, I would argue that the death of the younglings is meant to represent Anakin’s point of no return. It’s a moment where he parts ways from himself in a way his friends can no longer justify or overlook.
Andor doesn’t seem particularly interested in the allegorical. It’s a very literal show. It isn’t about the battle between light and darkness or moving from childhood to adulthood; it’s about human frailty and the human face of dictatorships. It’s only hopeful message appears to be that with enough pressure and struggle, people eventually stand up. Even if it warps them and makes them do terrible things. Even if, by the time we meet Andor in Rogue One, he’s haunted by who he has become in the fight against tyranny.
There’s also something powerful about Cassian Andor as a migrant, displaced by colonialism and barbarism, separated from his tribe and past. The sequels essentially deal with representation by replacing a homogenous cast with a more inclusive one. Andor doesn’t replace the cast in the hero’s journey, it chooses a completely different kind of journey. Maybe there’s wisdom in that. Maybe this migrant’s life under the Empire is devoid of magic; he is not the Chosen One, but he’s special for surviving all the same.
There’s something beautiful in the telling of that story. There are so many amazing scenes, so much gorgeous cinematography, such wicked and artful writing. Andor has something to say, and a lot of incredible talent in front of and behind the camera.
But it is the first Star Wars series that feels like it’s not for everyone.