Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of April 21, 2025
Andor: Season 2
Rated TV-14
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 99%
Streaming on Disney+
Since Disney+ launched in 2019, their goal was to produce a huge amount of content for their Star Wars franchise, filling in the gaps of the massive universe with new stories and characters for us to adventure with. In 2022, they released the first season of Andor, created by Rogue One writer Tony Gilroy (also of Bourne Identity and Michael Clayton fame), which tells the story of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in the events that lead up to 2016’s Rogue One. It was an adult-themed Star Wars show that struck big with fans hungry for a series that was worthy of the Star Wars label. Season One left us with huge chasm of time to fill before the impending doom of its hero, which we are quickly made aware of in season 2 when we see the time stamp at the beginning of the first episode: BBY 4, or 4 years Before the Battle of Yavin, the war that would take down the empire in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope. I have to admit that I’m not as negative on the multitude of new movies and series as some other fans have been. I like nearly all of them okay and enjoy learning more about the Universe surrounding the stories that filled and deeply influenced my childhood. But while I like (sometimes really like) the content seen so far, I LOVE what Disney has done with Andor. In this new season, you not only see the adventures of renegade rebel hitman Cassian Andor, but we also get to become more aware of the rise of the rebellion through the actions of antiquities dealer/resistance leader Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) and the politician who would take over the rebellion in Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly). We also get more interplay from the evil forces of the galactic empire, including super baddie and Death Star mastermind Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) and Deedra Meero (Denise Gough), the ambitious officer who is desperately trying to prove herself while trying not to think about the evil she is committing. It all results in a strong group of characters and a complex web of plots with writing that is undeniably powerful and effective. What also works here is the ticking of the clock with a countdown that will effect the entire galaxy, although unbeknownst to them in the moment. By the end we get an impressive and entirely bingeable series that will undoubtedly leave fans satisfied. While most of Disney’s shows are released weekly for the course of the run, this series will be dropping three per week, starting this week, and will finish its series of 12 episodes in a month’s time, without forcing you to wait until July to complete the watch, or start the binge. A