We’re not talking about adapting a story to accommodate different cultural sensibilities, bringing different themes/techniques to new eyes or saving something from disappearing on a dying medium.

I’ve long felt like I’ve been marooned on an island in the Star Wars fandom for not liking the Filoni method of storytelling. For those playing along at home, that’s (1) find something you like that someone else already did, (2) have your own characters repeat it (often while lifting entire lines of dialog verbatim),…

Right there with you on this being an episode the series needed. Beyond resetting the board for the characters and story, this felt like Favreau and Famuyiwa reeling the show back in to its core concepts.

I’ve already checked out on all the MCU and DC stuff. Fun ride while it lasted, and hope it’s fun for everyone else still on board, but all the multiverse stuff is a critical mass point where I can go no further.

“Don’t believe them! Don’t trust them!”

Yeah, I have a very Milhouse as Fallout Boy reaction to every new comic book thing announcement. We already did it. It took 23 movies and a mid-sized city’s worth of VFX artists, but we did it.

This stuff’s been going on since 2008. It was a worthy distraction that occasionally ventured into greatness but I’ve more…

Funny you say that, because Luthen and Lonni detailing their own deeply personal sacrifices for the cause also reminded me of another wonderful bit of Star Trek monologuing, from TNG’s “The Defector.”

I’ve said before that I’m just astonished with how much I love this series, which I would have never expected when first seeing the Andor name up on Lucasfilm’s Big, Big Wall-O-Projects planned out for the next 34 years.

Yeah, I’m kind of surprised at how disappointed I was with this one. Tossing out everything in this season for one big “Haha, the Marvel Cinematic Universe™, am I right, people?” wink to the audience just comes off as... okay? What about it?

Yeah, and I love that the stakes are so remarkably unremarkable to the point where the heroes could have all been wiped out in this mission, and it probably would have affected absolutely nothing in the greater scheme of things.

Andor has gone from the name that I didn’t really care about on that big MCU-style Star Wars Wall-O-Announcements screen to now the guiding light for every major Star Wars project going forward.

Everything with the Commandant in this episode highlights the difference between actual storytellers like Gilroy compared to the people running all the other shows, who are content with merely dumping all the toys on the table to show you Boba Fett’s new hat.

I think the aspect of Andor I appreciate most is how it repudiates the depiction of “evil” that has dominated Star Wars in both the prequel- and sequel-era films. Any shot at drama in those six movies was undone by bad guys that amounted to Saturday morning cartoon characters that had no motivation to be evil other…

I know the soap-ish elements have always been present, but I found them to be an acceptable tradeoff in return for the rest of the show that came with them.

Very, very well said.

I wouldn’t say it was the worst in the series — I think Discovery found even lower depths in its second season — but this does feel like a point where the needle is now irretrievably stuck on the Sunk Cost Fallacy end of the “Reasons To Keep Watching” scale.

Okay, then.