TLDR: Rushed, but still good.

I quite enjoyed Andor season 1, in part because we didn’t have the caricatures and cardboard cutouts of characters. There were complicated figures and, frankly, some of those side characters stole the show.

Season 2 comes in under a looming threat, and here I’m not talking about the Empire.

I’m talking about the studio telling the director that he got season 2 to wrap up 5 years of story and not the seasons 2-5 he planned and scripted.

That leads to some rather severe compromises. Season 2 has 4 segments of 3 episodes, all telling the broader story that Gilroy wanted to tell over multiple seasons. These three episode segments are each about an hour and thirty minutes of story, telling one portion of how everyone gets to the start of Rogue One.

The question is… does it work?

Well, sort of. There are pieces that work brilliantly and there are some that feel like filler. The first three episodes sort of flailed a bit, there wasn’t the connection or bite that Season 1 had and, with far less time to build the characters, the losses didn’t have the bite that they could have.

There were easter eggs and cameos galore, but some of these felt like needless insertions, while others were just sort of put there and ignored afterward. There was no meaning or value to the works of the

The second and third segments worked better. In my opinion, the 3rd set of 3 episodes is straight out the best, though, again, it all felt very rushed.

The last 3 episodes were what it all built towards and elements of it are incredible… but there’s also not really a climax, a pay-off… you have to go watch Rogue One for that. In my opinion, with more time, more episodes, more story, that could have worked better.

There were also character and plot choices where they were “this close to greatness” and they flinched back at the last moment from making the hard decisions, or in some cases, the logical decisions. Whether that was studio execs weighing in (as with a deleted scene between Mothma and her husband Perrin) or simply made because they didn’t have the time to do what would have made more sense, I can’t say, but there are certainly marks here and there that frustrate for the fact that the rest of it was pretty good.

And that’s what I came away thinking… overall, highly entertaining and worth watching. There are a couple of insertions at parts that I found… well, irritating and annoying enough to fast forward through. Have your remote ready for the interactions with Cyril and his mother, because the irritation and emotional distress she causes her grown man-child is nails on the chalkboard irritating.

The rest, though? Perfectly good storytelling, high tension stakes, and even though we know how it all ends, it had me wanting to see what came next the whole time.

I recommend it. Though don’t watch it expecting white knights to come save the day.