A Redemption on Chandrila

Andor, Season Two has saved the Star Wars franchise from ignominy

The moment that we see Mon Mothma dancing her ass off to a state-of-the-art hyperpop track at her daughter’s wedding in the third episode of Andor, Season Two is the moment when a discursive innovation begun in 1977 at the hands of George Lucas at long last comes full circle.

That previous moment, almost fifty years ago now, was the opening shot of the infamous cantina scene on the planet Tatooine, when science fiction audiences were greeted with a sudden close-up image of a rather large-eyed, scruffy alien traipsing around inside a saloon full of renegades and rogues, an old Western brought to life in the garb of an interplanetary future. A jazz combo of squid-humanoids holding oddly constructed oboes and bassoons blare out a now iconic bit of diegetic music, an instrumental whose sound is made “alien,” not by weird technological imagination, but the slightest tweak in its delivery, bringing forth the magic trick of an othered music using the spare parts of modern Western culture.

The same thing happens today in 2025 as a wedding party of aristocrats donned in fancy robes and sashes twirl around under a robotized disco ball, Mon Mothma, the Senator from the planet Chandrila, queen of the ceremony, at the center of the action. The track they dance to is also only a mere sidestep away from a perfectly recognizable genre of the day, as close to Charlie XCX the Star Wars galaxy can credibly get.

By now, the story of the failure of the Star Wars franchise in supplying longstanding fans with stories and adventures that meet the standards of the original sequel is a familiar tale of masochism and disappointment: we’ve all been there, waiting on line for yet another entry into the storyworld, only to come out of the theater two hours later feeling once again betrayed by the mediocrity of it all. This goes as well for most of the television that the Disney machine churns out in the name of this once glorious saga.

We also may have heard how Andor, both in season one and now in season two, is one of the grand exceptions, a pearl in the midst of a dumpster full of turds. That a critical and mysterious part of the Star Wars chronology—between episodes III and IV, those long 19 years of woe that start with the evil Empire supplanting the noble Republic—is now getting the prestige TV treatment by Tony Gilroy is a thankfully familiar moment of relief in an otherwise torturous slog through franchise dreck.

And it is in this context that we find that circle, begun a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, closed at long last. For it is only now that another creator within this franchise has risen to the level of postmodern brilliance which Lucas was able to accomplish with that freaky jazz combo on Tatooine.

What makes this dance scene in Andor so extraordinary is very different than what made the original cantina scene so mind-blowing. In that older work, the audience experiences a level of intrigue as it is led into an uncanny valley: we peer into a strange world we can’t turn away from that unfolds before us with nonetheless quotidian elements thrown in—a tiny alien orders a drink from the bar, some dude with black horns is sipping a misty cocktail, a pair of femme fatales in black headdresses smoke exotic tobacco (or maybe cloves?) with cigarette holders. We can not keep track of all of the echoes of our naturalized world within this othered landscape, but we can’t stop trying to keep track of it either.

By contrast, the wedding dance scene in Chandrila offers its psychedelic, brain-breaking postmodernism not through a train wreck of familiarity and otherness, but through a mixture of emotional layering and good, old-fashioned suspense. As the wedding progresses, Mon Mothma—she of the infamous “many Bothans died” line from Return of the Jedi way back when—finds herself increasingly agitated by a double-bind into which she falls through no fault of her own: she is being blackmailed by a fellow conspirator against the Empire and is thrust into making a ruthless decision about it while she watches her daughter tie the knot. We see the anguish on her face as she drinks too much and dances to the sound of a track practically etched out of the Brown-Cameron era bowels of a London nightclub.

This subtle juxtaposition of postmodern dissociation with emotional depth is itself juxtaposed with the edge-of-your-seat climaxing of action involving rebel heroes on a far off planet, cutting back and forth with a Nicholas Roeg level of scene-splicing ingenuity. The suspense and the payoff from the rebel escape we witness on the other planet—Mina-Rau, for all my fellow dorks out there—are peppered with the sadness of the death of a beloved character whose body must be unceremoniously left behind on the planet. As the stolen TIE fighter piloted by the series namesake flies off into hyperspace, it cuts to the Chandrilan dance party crescendoing to a frenetic peak, as the episode ends in a weighted silence.

For quite some time, it has been a rather painful affair to be a Star Wars fan. After the groaning disappointment of the aughts-era prequels, we were given a second chance at glory with the Disney buyout that promised a modernized sequel trilogy that would cleanse the franchise of its earlier shame. Instead, a new shame, one of a much more focus-grouped, corporatized character, was heaped upon us as we watched each subsequent episode of this beloved saga curdle like five day old milk in the sun. Many of us now understandably return to each new offering with a wizened cynicism and a palpable fatalism: “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice . . .” as they say.

As most people know by now, Andor has been the ray of light in the darkness of all of the dreck. And what a light it has been. Andor stands as a stark reminder to all of the mediocre hands responsible for manufacturing the fluff and garbage over the past twenty-five years that, in their poor showings, they have critically underestimated the depth and capacity of the universe George Lucas created fifty years. Andor’s ability to extract sophisticated political ideas, intricate plotting, and emotional depth from a sci-fi story world inspired by the no less campy likes of Flash Gordon is a testament to the unforgivable laziness and tragedy of almost all of the other movies and shows.

I went to see the twentieth anniversary of the release of Revenge of the Sith in the theaters the other day and the juxtaposition of that unfortunate pile of insensible litter with the first episode of the high quality drama of Andor was a significant jolt. Andor tells a story that follows cleanly from Revenge of the Sith, yet it is totally alienating in terms of the difference in quality from the horrible movie that serves as the TV show’s context. Watching the two so close together was like eating KFC and then going to a Michelin restaurant for Chicken Paillard: same bird, totally different preparation.

(I still hold to my ongoing belief that the storyline of Revenge of the Sith must be rescued from the unfortunate circumstances of its original making through a complete reboot for prestige TV—Tony Gilroy, I’m talking to you! The story of a noble samurai seduced by the machinations of an evil politico-sorcerer while feckless mandarins uphold a sclerotic bureaucracy and geriatric priests look the other way is a story that is ripe for our age, no matter how much that wonderful idea was slaughtered like an innocent lamb by the megalomaniacal narcissism of one George Lucas back in 2005).

Andor, Season Two is still in the middle of its rollout. Yet, with the dance scene at Mon Mothma, Star Wars fans, and, in fact, the culture at large, has been redeemed. One of the innovations of the original Star Wars saga—specifically in that cantina in the outpost of Mos Eisley on the planet Tatooine, what Ben Kenobi famously called a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” as though he were describing a saloon in an inner city neighborhood controlled by mobsters—was its postmodern effect of credibly importing the affective infrastructure of the industrialized West and its military-industrial complex into an othered world full of laser beams and hyperspace engines. Nothing accomplished this better than the sight of aliens playing oboes. It was a joke and not a joke at the same time. It raised the level of the possible and the plausible in the world of cinema and in the realm of storytelling in general. It was brilliantly postmodern.

With its similarly weird juxtaposition of aristocrats jamming to the sound of something the late DJ Sophie might have herself composed for one of her albums, all while the poignancy of a powerful Senator/co-conspirator wrestling with her mandate (beautifully portrayed by the wonderful actress Genevieve O’Reilly playing Mon Mothma), the wedding dance on Chandrila similarly raises Star Wars to the level of cultural commentary which Lucas’s original masterpiece did. We are now at peak cultural cross-cutting in Star Wars, where the sounds of techno beats and quirky synths blend with a fantasy world with complete plausibility, when camp and sincerity coexist seamlessly, in the same way that the sound of a vibraphone and a saxophone made a similarly postmodern leap way back in 1977.

Rummaging through a pile of trash has brought forth a beloved gem. If only there were more Gilroys.