I could make a list as long as my arm of all the things the show Andor does right. Gosh, it does so, so many things right. It simply oozes with thought and care and precision. But as I settled contentedly (or, often as not, with tension) into each next episode, one word kept coming to mind.
Patience.
This show–these writers–have so much patience. And the result is gorgeous. Just as three hours on the simmer gives you meat that falls off the bone, and three years on the vine gives you grapes that you can actually use, the good stuff requires a wait.
The writers must be allowed to take their time.
The characters must be allowed to develop naturally.
The plot must be allowed to unfold one bit at a time.
The viewers–and this is crucial–must be willing to sit with the story in the same way you sit with a view, or a rainstorm, or a painting. Don’t rush it. Don’t chase the high. The thrill, the rise, the crack-and-rumble–it will come in its own good time. And it will be so much more satisfying than if you were zipping through inattentively looking for the big moments, ignoring the little things that make the big moments matter.
The little moments in this show ARE the big moments, often as not.
Patience Leads to Intimate Detail
Syril Karn eating the candy from the spider souvenir. How very like him.
Dedre Meero shivering with nerves before the Gorman rebels rush into her trap. How unlike her.
Chandrilan wedding customs, examined at length, laced with a perfunctory attitude, building to a breaking point.
A tourist advertisement for Gorman cloth and Gorman spiders, strange at first, but slowly reminding you of some mundane thing you’ve seen in real life.
Bix loving to go into a Coruscant shop where someone recognizes her. Cassian hating it. Literally just a shopping trip with no other purpose than to speak volumes of different experience and approach in life.
The show lingers on little things. And it rarely feels like a distraction, or filler, or waste. Instead it feels intimate. Being let in on the ‘small things’ draws us in close, makes everything feel real and alive. Makes the big things more true.
So many shows (and books, and movies) either throw the small details together in a slapdash manner which adds nothing to the story–you can almost hear the editorial voice behind the ear: “add something here to flesh that out”–and which doesn’t feel naturally integrated, or they don’t bother with the small details at all. Everything is broad and “accessible” and hollow.
Because they think we’re just here for the explosions? That we won’t notice?
But even when we don’t notice with our eyes, our intuition does notice. We say “it was decent, but didn’t make much of an impact. I don’t really remember the details.”
Because the details weren’t worth remembering.
Or they were never even there.
Andor slows you down, adds the ingredients one by thoughtful one, and the combination is deeply savory to the taste.
Patience Brings the Characters to Life
If a book or a show is in a rush to get to the “cool parts,” one of the first things to suffer is characterization. True, we can learn about a character in a moment of intense action, but we actually learn so much more about someone in everyday moments. When they have to do something normal, like eat, or talk, or read, or wait, or listen.
Andor chooses to give our characters everyday moments often. In fact, I would argue that the reason Cassian Andor himself doesn’t usually top the list of favorite characters for the show–that is usually Dedre, Karn, Luthen, or Kleya–is because he is given fewer moments of stillness and normalcy. He is usually headed toward action, one way or the other. He is a great character, and a perfect throughline for the story…but we don’t know who he is to the same depths as we do some of our fantastic villains.
We see Karn in the in-between all the time. The expressions on his face as he thinks, worries, wonders, or waits.
A whole episode is dedicated to watching Kleya take action and then…wait. And in the waiting, there is the grief and the pain and the strength of who she is, mixed with the empty space of what she has lost. She is a hammer driving into a nail, and she hasn’t the faintest idea of how to be anything else. She is bereft in more ways than one.
And why do we spend so much time amidst wedding customs, family conflict, and gentle politicking with Mon Mothma?
Because they show us what she is used to. The milieu in which she is accustomed to swim. But also the things she knows she may lose. And the conflict over whether she is willing to lose them. They show her devotion but also her distance from the grittier elements of the work she is part of. They show someone who is deeply committed to a cause, but hasn’t yet experienced the full scope of the consequences.
Conflict. Confusion. Courage Conviction. Commitment. She has all of these. And we get to see them consistently across quiet moments, and everyday conversations.
Patience Makes the Culmination Count
How many times have you read a book or watched a movie where the BIG FINALE happens, and you found yourself indifferent, or only half invested?
Or how many times have you said “They got into this scrape only to get out of it right away. What was the point of that?”
Andor rarely falls into these traps, because the writers of this show had true patience. You can’t get the view if you don’t climb the mountain, and that takes time and effort. If you rush it, you are going to miss all the things that make a climax impactful.
In season one, we spend multiple episodes in a work prison.
We spend a lot of time learning the mundane details of every day prison life.
And a lot of time feeling the walls close in, the inescapability of the situation.
The hopelessness.
A lesser show would have done all of this in one episode and expected us to get antsy then exploded swiftly toward the escape before we got too uncomfortable.
And that could never, EVER have had the impact that the escape episode ultimately did, leading all the way up to the brutally unanswered line “I can’t swim.”
We cannot achieve that level of emotional investment AND emotional catharsis if we didn’t have to wait for it. If we weren’t bursting with frustration. If we didn’t feel the hopeless tick-tick-tick of time in our own brains.
Similarly the long, drawn-out hike toward the Gorman massacre is absolutely essential for making it mean something. The trouble with something like Star Wars is that it has the ability to shoot up to an incomprehensible scale in two minutes flat. An entire planet is exploded in the beginning of A New Hope while we’re still figuring out what’s what.
This is why the whole “First Order” business in the sequel trilogy felt so hollow. It was just “everything that happened before x5!!!!” without taking the time to make any of it mean anything. It was not personal, it was just business. The business of filling in the blanks in a sort of plot madlibs, a thing that at no point in time derives itself from character or an honest theme.
So why does a town square massacre mean more than the destruction of entire planets? Because we saw both the danger and the resistance to the danger grow from the beginning. We saw successes and failures and complications and the slow closing of the hands around the throat. The show did a great job of giving us real-world cultural signposts to guide us through the pathway without getting too heavy-handed about it. Yes, the French-sounding Gorman language and the clothing styles left no doubt as to the parallels, yet instead of being obnoxious, it just gave wind to the sails of the natural direction of the story.
Like I said: it’s a tick-tick-tick-boom.
So many writers want to skip straight to the boom. Andor’s writers added extra ticks, until we were sweating.
To imbue something with meaning and tension simply takes time. And in order to do that effectively you have to be willing (as a writer) to tolerate a drop-off rate. Or tentative viewers. At least at the beginning. There will be people who “aren’t sure how they feel about it yet.” But if you did your job right (and I certainly think the writers of Andor did) then, by the time the viewer gets to the end, they will feel a deep satisfaction. One that a rushed story could never, ever give.
So There You have it
Well it took me like 3 months to finish writing this. I didn’t do that on purpose to emphasize the theme, that’s just my life right now. I love stories that take their time. That aren’t afraid to go the hard route, to make you wait, to show you small things that feed the big things at precisely the right moment. That beg the readers trust and then duly earn it.
Andor is such a show.
J. L. Odom 