![]() ![]() The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has arguably waited six episodes to actually kickstart its story, with pretty visuals and worldbuilding often standing in for plot. 2 containing all the important moments of the season. 1 is seven episodes of setup and filler, followed by two massive episodes in Vol. The Star Wars series is just the latest in a growing trend of streaming shows that strive to feel more like “multi-part movies” where all the big plot beats happen in the back half of the story instead of throughout the season. In all fairness to Andor, this is hardly an isolated incident. “That’s it, see you next week.” (In the case of “ The Axe Forgets,” Luthen literally shuts the lights of his showroom and walks off stage to mark the completely arbitrary end of the episode.) In both cases, it’s an odd way to close an hour of television, never ending on an exciting point in the story, but feeling more like you’ve stuck the bookmark back in your book because it’s late and you’ve grown too sleepy to keep on reading. Both episodes conclude on conversations that just kind of end as the credits roll, like someone walked into the theater midway through the play and turned off the lights. Take episodes 4 and 5, for example, which don’t feel like they resolve in any real way you couldn’t even call these abrupt stopping points cliffhangers meant to bring the narrative tension to a peak. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the three-act structure of a movie or novel, but if Andor‘s arcs are meant to emulate films, why was this story released as a weekly episodic TV series at all? If two of three episodes per arc are just meant to set up the thing that actually happens in the third, wouldn’t it have made more narrative sense to release each arc as a whole to be watched as a more cohesive TV movie? The way Andor episodes are paced and cut certainly suggests this. Andor‘s need to feel like a movie or novel while still following the release schedule of an episodic television show has simply done it no favors. But, at least for this writer, it does these things while also sacrificing one of the basic tenets of episodic television: that it should have to entertain its audience from one installment to the next. ![]() It takes its time to set a scene and raise the tension, is delightfully obsessive about details and worldbuilding, and values its characters and themes over shallow easter eggs and fan service every step of the way, which is incredibly refreshing for the nostalgia-obsessed franchise. The idea is to start extremely small, and we are going to get huge.” And to Total Film, he described the upcoming Andor season 2 as “the second half of the novel.”Īs our own critic has already pointed out, Andor has from the very beginning taken a more literary approach than what we’ve usually come to expect from Star Wars fare on Disney+ or on the big screen. Multiple characters, multiple plots, multiple intrigues everybody’s adventure stories colliding with one another. He told Mashable that the show “endeavors to be a 1,500-page novel by the time it’s done…It really is Dickensian. He’s also said the slower-paced series is meant to feel a bit like a novel. “Directors work in blocks of three episodes, so we did four blocks of three episodes each,” Gilroy told Empire, while elaborating on the structure in an interview with Mashable, saying, “We essentially made four new Star Wars films. Watch the rebels on Aldhani wake up, go back to bed, and wake up again to go on a hike - all while Syril eats cereal at his mom’s house and Deedra pops aspirin - because remember that heist we mentioned two weeks ago? It’s finally happening next week. Sit through this episode where nothing happens except Cassian rents a transport, Syril rides a ship, and Luthen takes a bus because you know the next one’s going to be the banger. The problem is that this means two-thirds of Andor‘s episodes so far just feel like a waiting game. The third part is presumably the one where things actually happen - it’s the one you’ve been waiting for all along. The first episode of each arc introduces the setting, characters, and Cassian Andor‘s new objective, while the second slows things down to a crawl to heighten the drama and flesh out each character. The first season is broken up into four arcs of three episodes each. ![]() This Star Wars: Andor article contains spoilers.įive episodes in, it’s clear that Andor is following a very specific pattern to tell its story.
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