Rebellions are built on hope

My sister is a big Star Wars fan, so I grew up surrounded by the original trilogy. I don't particularly remember sitting down to watch the movies that often, but watching them now, I sure can recite an awful lot of the dialogue. Which came in handy, because my husband is also a big Star Wars fan. We haven't watched all of the various Star Wars properties, but we've watched quite a few.

After the first season of Andor came out, everyone raved about it, saying it was one of the best Star Wars-related properties in years. So naturally we watched it; we just finished the second season (and naturally had to finish off Cassian's story with Rogue One.) 

After watching the first season, I remember thinking that I liked it well enough--I mean, Diego Luno is fantastic--but wasn't as over the moon about it as some people. And that remains true after the second season, which I did like quite a bit. There were some plotlines that I wasn't particularly interested in (i.e., pretty much anything with Mon Mothma, though I did like the wedding; Saw, who I honestly had forgotten about being in Rogue One; that weird bit with Cassian in the group of random rebels early in season two, which I assume is Making a Statement about the looseness of the rebellion) and it felt like bits could be tightened up.

I spent a lot of time watching the second season and thinking about when this must've been written--ages ago, given the amount of time it takes to revise, film, do post-production, etc.--and how incredibly resonant it is for today's world. And I got frustrated thinking about the number of people watching this series who voted for Trump who can reconcile that (or, honestly, just not even think about it) while rooting for Cassian and Mon. It felt like the show was ripped from today's headlines, with the news that Syril's mother watches and the protests on Ghorman and how they were framed by the government and the reaction to the massacre there and the checking of papers on whatever planet that was where Bix was hiding out. It honestly felt too on-the-nose at times for me, to the point that I was distracted from the actual show.

Hopefully there are people who watched it and thought about it and thought about what the creators of Andor were trying to say about our own current political situation, and how tenuous a time it is we live in. Sadly, I wound up mostly thinking about sure, Cassian helped to bring down the Death Star. But they built another. And even after that was destroyed, the Empire rose again (much as people want to not think about Episodes 7 through 9) (OK, not think about Episodes 8 and 9; The Force Awakens was dope).

Rebellions are built on hope. Sometimes it's hard to find some. It does help knowing that there are people like Cassian and Mon and even Luthen out there.