I won’t mention that Jyn kills a KX Droid with a single blaster shot just for a sight gag.
But it was only the critical mass that got them to okay Andor going. They never would have found out there was a pilot.
I just watched Rogue One. Yes elevated. In particular his near panic that she doesn’t have the hologram message, that it will be just her word that’s what it says, is much more in a context.
Overall I thought it flowed well. But Andor was better than Rogue One and to me that has been the best of the movies.
Just finished Rogue One as well, seems to have been a popular activity tonight for posters in this thread.
Tivik providing similar information as Luthen did is vital, because it confirms it and makes it’s far less likely that it was just misinformation fed to Luthen. And no one can get safely contact Saw now, that’s why they had the scene in Episode 12 where Mothma and Organa are begging Saw to stop his attacks on Jedha, to show he’s broken from the rest of the Alliance. That’s why they had to find Jyn as the only person who Saw might still trust. I think that all flowed very well. Honestly, the thing that took me most out of the movie was that Diego Luna and Ben Mendelsohn look a lot younger tonight in Rogue One than they did last night in Andor.
Will there be an Andor Season 3? It seems like they left themselves enough wiggle room before the events of Rogue One, no?
Nope, this is it.
He is literally on his way to the station/planet where we first see him in Rogue One so not much wiggle room.
No they really didn’t. At the end of Ep 12 Cassian is on his way to the Ring of Kafrene to meet Tivik, the first scene he’s in in Rogue One, he arrives in the Ring of Kafrene and finds Tivik.
Now what takes an undetermined amount of time in Rogue One is what goes on between Cassian getting the info from Tivik, and them rescuing Jyn on Wobani. Did he go back to Yavin to debrief? Did he go on multiple missions to find out what name Jyn was using, and where she was being held? Or did he just have a holo-call with Draven and go straight there?
Even simpler. Cassian wasn’t part of the team that rescued Jyn.
K2 was there, so Cassian must have been.
ETA: From Rogue One only, that’s not definite. “Congratulations, you are being rescued” is the first time we see K2, and they then formally introduce Cassian to Jyn in the meeting with Mothma/Draven/etc. But from what we now know from Andor, it’s extremely unlikely that K2 would be separated from Cassian for another mission, especially since K2 was on the Kafrene mission.
Yeah, it’s pretty clear that in the Rogue One script, K2 and Cassian are on separate missions since neither show up in each others’ scenes, and as you mention, Cassian meets Jyn back on Yavin IV. I can see why they retconned that to put K2 on the ship with Cassian, but it’s a bit of a kludge. Really not a big deal but it does highlight they challenge the writers had building out a backstory for a movie setup.
Like, in universe it makes perfect sense that they would want to verify Luthen’s information and that verification may be equally important to them as the information itself. But as a viewer, it’s a bit jarring to see them reacting like this is new information and seemingly forgetting Luthen’s contribution very quickly. If they “special editioned” Rogue One, I can see them adding all kinds of throwaway lines to tie everything together a bit more.
Anywho, I went on to watch Star Wars (1977) right after Rogue One, and the magic of Andor continues through that movie. Obviously there’s a big tonal shift and the relative competencies of both the empire and the alliance are all over the place, but I felt that knowing the backstory behind those plans elevated the original film as well. We see Tarkin and Vader get involved as the situation continues to devolve for the empire, which makes perfect sense. We see R2 take a central role in safeguarding the plans that no longer feel like a mere MacGuffin. And we see Luke, a previously unknown character but one who we ultimate know is somewhat “fated” to play his role. And that makes sense now because we also saw Cassian in a “fated” role. (I’ve never had a problem with the woo woo aspects of Star Wars, so even though it suffers as a franchise from the Law of Conservation of Characters, having The Force guide this entire chain of events is fine with me).
The weird stuff is how the sleek, efficient, and ruthlessly intelligent ISB agents are replaced by rather mediocre Imperial Navy officers that Vader is surrounded by. Tarkin being the exception, of course. And more jarring, how the Alliance stops being so paranoid.
Like, can you imagine what Mon Mothma and Bail Organa are going through as R2 carries the plans around willy nilly while they have no idea if their Scarif mission was ultimately a success? They sacrificed so much for that mission, and all they (maybe) know is that the plans ended up on Leia’s ship and she’s been captured. A Specialer Edition of Star Wars might have some shots of the Alliance freaking the hell out, only to be flabbergasted when the plans show up a few days later on a hunk of junk like the Millenium Falcon. Which they have no business letting land on Yavin IV but they do anyway.
Andor, the series, does a great job of explaining the urgency, though, and in a way actually helps plug the “plot hole” of why everyone allowed a ship that was reasonably assumed to be tracked to land at the rebel base. They know that the empire knows what they know, and it’s going to be a race to destroy the Death Star before the vulnerability is patched. So risks are justifiable. It would be nice if they talked through some of this in Andor; for that matter, episode 12 could have laid out the Jyn rescue mission as well as the Tivik meeting, since evidently that was already in the works.
I’m just rambling now, but the tl;dr is – hats off to everyone involved with Andor for not only creating a great show, and for not ruining one of my childhood obsessions, but also for rekindling my childhood obsession and making me love it even more.
But it’s not weird, and it is kind of what Andor was trying to show. All the competent ISB officers end up in bad spots, either dead or imprisoned. That is how fascism works, it is not competency that is rewarded.
The new information is that Galen Erso built a flaw into the system and where to get the plans to tell them how to exploit that.
Yes a few modified lines would tie things better.
The part in R1 that strikes me as what a waste is the effort to get the message to the fleet to take down the gate … of course that was what they were already trying their best to do!
I think the “flaw in the system” news doesn’t come out until Jyn watches the recording from Galen.
But that is another great thing about the setup in Andor, where they acknowledge doubts about whether this information is being fed to them from the ISB as a trap. Cassian is frustrated that he only has Jyn’s say-so to go on because the recording is lost, and has to make a decision on whether or not to kill Galen. When he drops the barrel of his rifle in Rogue One, that action has real weight now, because we know he’s fighting every instinct he has in furtherance of a hail mary.
And also the nature of the weapon, which justifies the urgency.
Tivix’s mention of the weapon being a “planet killer” is new information. Up to the last moments of Andor, no one knew the scale of the weapon that Erso was working on. The fact that the Empire had put so much effort into it was suggestive, but without that piece of data, it was still easy to deny and downplay… which is what happened in the sub-quorum Alliance council meeting where Andor brought forth Kleya’s information.
Krennics interrogation of Dedra was a standout scene, when he jabs his finger on her head and we see the realization of how badly she effed up cross her face, and the line “If you are not a rebel spy then you missed your calling” was quite cutting.
Partagaz needling Krennic then realizing maybe that wasn’t the best idea also showed how precarious life can be in a dictatorship. Partagaz was a big deal, he seems to be have been having very high level conversation, maybe not on first name terms with Palpy, but close to that circle , but it’s clear Krennic and Tarkin are another level (probably first time I noticed Partagaz have 4 blue squares on his uniform, Krennic had 6 plus all the red ones ) and were having their own fiefdom battles. Partagaz realized that siding with Tarkin or making a snarky comment wasn’t going to help much now.
I probably could have watched an entire series of the Empire being malicious, devious, and clever but just eating itself in delightful ways and Andor and Axis were just names and plot devices they were chasing.
The fact that the death star lasted about a week or so after being completed is just delightful.
Maybe a spin off show ISB : Coruscant
Every week they set up cunning plans that almost succeed in catching a Rebel or foiling something, yet it ends in failure due to internal rivalries, withheld data , or they put another Imperial in jail either mistakenly or to cover up a screwup. The show closes with Partagaz putting on his sunglasses and walking out the office saying ‘Mark it up as a success Lonnie, and close the file…… quietly’
The spin off spin off ISB: Outer Rim , the same just with scruffier uniforms and less clean offices.
Episode 10 was the standout and perhaps 12 was a little slow in parts but overall a very strong finish to one of the best TV shows ever made.
While it made for a dramatic confrontation and aftermath, both Dedra and Luthen behaved rather stupidly in their meeting. Dedra should just have gone in with her full team and Luthen, when she came in alone, should have just killed her and either killed himself or gone down fighting against the ISB team.
Crazy to think that the events of the last three Andor episodes, Rogue One and ANH happen in the space of 1-2 weeks.
Luthen was trying to stall as long as possible so the acid did it’s job. Not giving away their contacts was more important than taking out Dedra.
He could have killed her as soon as she sees the equipment burning. It would have taken time for the ISB team to have come in compared to what happened.