Here’s 25 minutes of nerdy background references in Andor, most of which were blink-and-miss-it or so obscure they’re only for obsessives.
Not handy. But it was either something that came with one of the playsets or it was in a pack of accessories that you got for free by sending in proofs of purchase. It was blue or maybe white. I will have to look for a photo.
Start by looking a few posts up.
I had one. The waiting six to eight weeks for delivery was torture for a 9 year old kid.
You knew it existed:
Here’s a timeline that has the construction of the Death Star starting sometime around 22 years before its destruction above Yavin.
Nice stopping point.
I’m gutted that it wasn’t quite the whizz-bang finish that ties all ends up neatly but I know for sure that if it tried to it would’ve felt contrived.
“poised nicely” sums it up. I’m eager to find out what happens next and it is a shame that it’ll be quite a while but I’d prefer them to take as much care with season 2.
The big question on everyone’s lips is…what happened in the broom cupboard with Syril and Dedra? He seemed very still. Disconcertingly so. Like a man who’s come to a realisation and firm conviction.
I think it fair to say that this series is a good bit broader than Andor himself. He is the common thread but he isn’t the whole thing. I feel the bigger story is the rise of the rebellion and fleshing out the workings of the empire. You’ll probably find as it progresses that other characters become almost as important as Andor himself.
The structure of the season is one of mini-stories of 3 episodes, each block of which may feel like separate entities but in my opinion they do all hang together in the end.
(I was thinking that each 3 episode arc is almost like the 90 minute run of a single “Sherlock” episode. Each on a different theme, some new characters and new situations but each part of the greater whole. Then I realised that Toby Haynes is one of the directors, He did indeed work on Sherlock, and Black Mirror for that matter)
Oops missed that one. That’s what I get for posting while stuffed with turkey. Yeah that was what I had in mind but I am also sure I had a version that was blue as well. As soon as I saw it in screen I did the finger pointing meme for real and said, “I had that!”
But part of my criticism is that Andor doesn’t seem like a common thread. I could handle just the supporting cast changing, but Andor himself seems to be characterized so differently in the two arcs (and then the supporting cast changing heightens the impact of that change).
well, personal experience and all that but I found Andor himself to be pretty consistent in character throughout, though the situations may change.
That is a helpful timeline, thank you! I have one quibble with it, unless there’s a contradiction in canon I don’t know about which absolutely may be the case.
It tells us “Palpatine and Vader visit the construction site” in 19BBY and then one year later in 18 BBY, “Vader learns of the Death Star project” 
Andor wasn’t consistent as a character because he changed as a person over the course of the story. That was the entire point.
But at what point did he change from being a small-timer in over his head to an expert on squad tactics and small-team psychology? There’s no progression there. He never had a chance to learn those things. And is no longer looking for his sister “character growth”?
At the beginning of the show rebel leader Luthen flies to Ferrix to recruit Cassian. Cassian was in it for himself but was always capable and competent. The character progression was him finding something larger than himself, which I thought the show did well.
I think he was always that good, lessons learned from his childhood and from Marva and others no doubt. We don’t see all of that in the first season but we may do in the next.
It also explains why Luthen went to so much trouble to find and recruit Andor in the first place. Why, in a Galaxy of trillions of people, put that much effort into recruiting this one guy?
It’s because he’s the perfect secret agent. He’s got the skills you need, plus he’s great at thinking on his feet, and adapting to a new situation he’s tossed into with no warning. Every story arc shows that. He’s dropped into a whole new situation and is expected to sink or swim. He always manages to swim.
But we do see that. The very first episode, we see him take down two cops without breaking a sweat, and evade capture all by himself. He’s already an accomplished fighter, we know he’s a pilot, he’s a thief who just walks into Imperial facilities and walks out with their stuff, because he understands the psychology of the Imps (the can’t imagine anyone beating them), and he knows how to track people across the galaxy, since he’s spent years running down clues about his sister.
I do agree, maybe I wasn’t clear. We see his capability in the first episode certainly but I mean that we don’t see how he got to be that way (with regards to his childhood and Marva’s influences and lessons) and that we may see more of that (flashbacks etc.) in the next season.
There was mention of his experience as one of the few survivors of some war somewhere? That’s when he had become so cynical I thought. It was after that that his new identity was created? And his preference for getting things done without being the one standing up front being noticed, confident of being underestimated and ignored as he stole. Bringing that up was was part of Luthen’s sales pitch to him.
We know that he was raised scavenging and stealing under the noses of authorities, that he escaped from a war zone that few other managed to escape from, and that he’s been existing living an assumed identity stealing major Imperial kit for years. Frankly filling in the spaces beyond that would detract from the rest.
He has not had much chance to be concerned about finding his sister since the first episode. My WAG though is that there will be a point in S2 in which he gets a potential clue about her being alive somewhere and that he has to chose between following up on that or the needs of a mission. His accepting that she is gone, even if not dead, gone for him, is part of his becoming all in as a Rebel operative.