Andor and its relevance to today.

Let's talk about Andor, which wrapped up its two-season arc this week. 

Public Domain, according to Wikipedia. Don't @ me.

The series is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. Anakin has already become Darth Vader, Luke and Leia are teenagers, and the Empire is charge of the galaxy -- for now. But the imperial government is committing atrocities in Emperor Palpatine's name, and people on multiple planets are beginning to rebel. Cassian Andor gets swept up in the nascent Rebel Alliance; his backstory is what the show is all about.

If you're not a Star Wars fan, I've already lost you, so I won't go into many more details. What I want to focus on is the reaction to the show and how it maybe dovetails with what's going on in our world right now.

I've heard several people say that Andor is the best entry in the Star Wars universe, or at least the best since the original film trilogy. I personally think Andor is very good, if not the best; the writing and direction are smart, and the actors all do good work. It's hard for me to call this show the absolute best of them all because I haven't seen all of them and because the shows are all doing different things. I very much liked Obi-Wan Kenobi for sentimental reasons; I loved The Mandalorian, but it feels like a Western with starships instead of horses (and let's be honest, Boba Fett was season 1.5 of Mando). 

I think what sets Andor apart is that it's meant to be an adult show from the get-go. The whizbang technology is all stuff we've seen before. There's no Grogu to lighten the mood. There's hardly any mention of the Force until the very end of the second season. It's all just people put in untenable situations and how they react to their lives being torn apart by brutality.

Which leads me to today. It's possible that this is the best possible time for this show to appear. Here in the US, we are in the beginning stages of an authoritarian takeover of our government. We are hearing about more instances of brutality every day. The modern-day resistance is taking its time to gel -- pushing back around the edges and seemingly not making much of a dent. A large-scale uprising like the Rebel Alliance may have to happen before we can beat back our modern-day Palpatine and his minions.

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I had only seen Rogue One once before Andor started airing. Once the show was over, I went back and watched the movie again. And yeah, the show is much better than the movie. Disney was hoping that Rogue One would be the same kind of hit as the original Star Wars movies -- but Jyn's character is lacking both the gravitas to pull off a serious film and the pals that made A New Hope so much fun. This time around, I found myself waiting impatiently for Captain Andor to show up so we could get on with things.

I'm not sure whether I'll ever watch Andor again, but twice is definitely enough Rogue One for me.

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One quick thing related to last week's post about the new pope: I need to say something about this YouTube video that made the rounds right after the announcement. As soon as the first guy said, "ope," I was like, "My dudes, he's not that kind of Midwesterner. You are thinking too far north." Chicagoland is not the land of Fargo, A Prairie Home Companion, hotdish, and yah-you-bet. Not even the accent is the same. If you want to hear the difference, listen first to the folks in the movie Fargo -- here's the trailer -- and then to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. If you can't tell the difference, I don't know what to tell you. Except maybe "Aw, jeez."

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These moments of bigger-than-life blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yah, you bet!

Beltane: Coping in a time of trouble.

 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

The turning of the Wheel of the Year has been on my mind for the past week or so, ever since I (foolishly) volunteered to give a presentation on the Wheel to a Pagan group later this month. (Right after I opened my mouth, I thought, "Two hours! How will I ever fill two hours on the Wheel of the Year?" And then after some brief consideration, I thought, "How am I going to cram everything I need to say into two hours?" I'll let you know how I get on.)

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Beltane is coming up this Thursday. It's supposed to be a lighthearted celebration of spring; all around us, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, things are blooming, creating, procreating. It makes you want to skip and shout.

And then you check the headlines. Every day -- sometimes multiple times a day -- there's another outrage from the Trump administration. It's foreign students, legally in this country, being snatched off the street by masked people in unmarked vans; it's kids who were born in the United States being deported, including a child who was undergoing treatment for cancer; it's federal judges ordering the administration to stop any number of illegal actions and watching the Justice Department lawyers dance around those orders without outright refusing to comply; it's a judge being arrested for showing an undocumented individual another way out of her courtroom than the one where ICE was waiting to arrest him.

To say nothing of what Trump is doing with his on-again, off-again tariffs. No sane business owner can plan anything when they have no idea what the government's economic policies will be tomorrow, let alone five years from now.

And the Buffoon in Chief wears a bright blue suit to the pope's funeral and falls asleep during the service. 

Here we are, in the light half of the year now that the spring equinox is past, but it feels like we're still in darkness.

Are we under a dictatorship yet? Are we in a recession yet?

Would knowing the answers make any difference?

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The first three episodes of season two of Andor dropped this past week. At the end of the third episode, with a major Rebel Alliance offensive in shambles and Mon Mothma's financing of the rebels under threat of exposure, the senator deliberately gets drunk at her daughter's wedding reception and dances the night away.

I wouldn't recommend it as a healthy coping mechanism, but it's a way to get through a moment when everything is going to hell around you. 

And like Andor, which has nine episodes to go, it's not over for us yet.

A blessed Beltane to you all. 

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These moments of bloggy screaming at the darkness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.