Andor

[music]

0:00:04.1 Landry Ayres: Fire up your hyperdrives and pack your kyber crystals because today we have another edition of Pop & Locke, Star Wars edition for you. Joining me today to discuss the brand new Disney+ series, Andor, our senior fellow at the Cato Institute and returning guest, Pat Eddington. Pat, hello.

0:00:24.5 Pat Eddington: Hello there.

0:00:25.9 Landry Ayres: As well as another returning guest, our old friend, host of ReImagining Liberty, Aaron Ross Powell.

0:00:33.1 Aaron Powell: Glad to be back.

0:00:35.2 Landry Ayres: For this show, Pop & Locke, not specifically Andor, it’s very easy, I think, for me when trying to get us started, for me to kind of secretly hope that there’s a very didactic story, that it’s kind of obvious in its moral and the lesson it’s trying to teach, the takeaway it’s giving to the audience, just because it makes my job a little bit easier. There’s something to grasp onto. And I find shows that lack it sometimes feel under-​focused or lazy or forgettable. But there’s also a danger in that, and that the show can become too preachy, too niche, and it tends to sort of overplay its hand. And Andor is a really interesting series because it obviously has something to say and fits into a place in the larger Star Wars narrative and universe there.

0:01:34.8 Landry Ayres: Do you think whatever it’s trying to say, it does that even handedly and well without being preachy? Does it not say quite enough and is a little vague in a sense? I get that a lot with rebellion stories in general. I’m just kind of curious what you felt the success of the lesson it was trying to sort of get across or the moral, rather. Did you think it did it well? And from your opinion, what do you think that message was?

0:02:09.9 Aaron Powell: I think it certainly does get its message across well. And I did not find it didactic as I was watching it. But that might be because it was, to the extent that it was didactic, it was didactic in exactly the directions that I prefer and exactly the ways and messages that I myself am very didactic about. I think, though, that it is clearly a show with a message in the way that arguably no… A political message in the way that arguably no Star Wars since Return of the Jedi was, that for the most part, in particular, the Disney Star Wars, there’s obviously political elements to them, but they shy away from the hard edges of those.

0:02:55.7 Aaron Powell: They don’t engage with them directly, whereas this show felt like it could have been written by my Antifa friends. It was very clearly an anti-​fascist show about the way that fascism operates, about the kinds of people who are drawn to it, about the kinds of people who perpetuate it and about the messiness of fighting back against it and the messiness of particularly ideologues fighting back against it. And those are strong messages. And it comes through the most didactic moment, is that glorious bit at the end where we hear the passage from Nemik’s manifesto. But I think that it is a show that has a clear message. But the reason that it works is because that message is carried through in impeccable storytelling and in writing and given the opportunity to breathe in the slower pacing of a lot of the show. So, no, I think if you feel like the show is beating you over the head about this stuff, then it’s probably because you don’t really want to think about the message of it.

0:04:08.9 Pat Eddington: I would agree at kind of the meta level. It is clearly a show about taking on oppressive authority and the cost, that can come along with that. But I also think there’s just a fundamental qualitative difference here in terms of who is involved with this series. And that that’s no knock on the Mandalorian. I love that show. It’s great. But for this particular series, Disney brought in some of the biggest guns in Hollywood, essentially, to do this. And I’m talking specifically about Tony Gilroy, of whom I’m a big fan. I love the Jason Bourne series and his fascination with, maybe even obsession, with intrigue, intelligence, espionage, all the rest of that. It absolutely infuses this show in a way that really no other Star Wars franchise, either big screen or small screen or animation, has really done. And I’ve seen some whining online from some sources about the pacing of the show and all the rest of that. And I think that’s probably coming from people that are more used to the slam, bang, everything blows up in every scene kind of thing that you get with an awful lot of these things.

0:05:34.3 Pat Eddington: But I think that it’s, as Aaron said, to me, it’s the very quality of the storytelling. And I’m not just talking about the large arc of opposition to the Empire and the coming together of it. I’m also talking about just a lot of the human aspects of this that you see, where some of the key characters that are involved on the rebel side would definitely be, they are recognisable to me as intelligence operatives, because in a lot of ways, they’re very unsavoury.

0:06:03.3 Pat Eddington: You look at Andor himself, at the beginning of this series, this is a guy who’s just out to make a buck, right? He’s just out to survive, trying to get by on Ferrix as best he can, trying to take care of his ailing mother. These are very, very down to earth, kind of day-​to-​day life type things that to me, at least, give the storytelling here a greater depth than almost anything else that Disney has done to date. And at the same time, at kind of the top of this little pyramid, you get this incredible performance by the magnificent Stellan Skarsgård, who for me, at least, when he’s on screen, generally, he steals it.

0:06:47.6 Pat Eddington: He has such a commanding presence. And this character of Luthen Rael is so absolutely fascinating. Where did this guy come from? How do you go from being an antique dealer, to, essentially, the organiser of an intergalactic rebellion? Right? There’s a lot more to this guy’s story that I hope we wind up finding out before we get there. But then, finally, the other aspect of this, of course, is taking place on Coruscant with a very familiar figure in terms of Genevieve O’Reilly as Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila. And we’re beginning to see, especially towards the end here, just exactly how Manichaean she can be. We see her in the last episode, essentially setting up her own husband for a fall with respect to covering her tracks in regard to the money that she has been funnelling to Luthen to help make the rebellion possible to begin with. I will say that that was not exactly a twist that I saw coming. I thought it was brilliantly done. I loved it. But I think that’s what appeals to me is, you see these relationships and I would be willing to bet that on kind of a, on a basic familial level, Aaron can identify with the teenager dealing with teenagers and teenage issues with respect to what you’re seeing with Mon Mothma’s daughter, Lieda, going off essentially in kind of a fanatical direction.

0:08:22.2 Pat Eddington: So I think all those things, the master narrative, but then all these personal stories and we haven’t even talked about Vel and Cinta and that relationship essentially beginning to get… A personal relationship, at least, romantic relationship beginning to disintegrate. So you see so much essentially going on here that it’s rich. It is very rich overall compared to, I think, most of the other offerings that Disney has had in this genre.

0:08:52.9 Landry Ayres: In particular, I was drawn to it because, like you said, there is a… It’s not, necessarily realism, but there is a… With the lack of the Force and the Jedi presence in the story, it is felt very palpably. So many of these things and so many of these events would happen so differently if there was even some Jedi involvement or sort of rumblings of them. But I think it makes it that much more elevated and realistic and sort of makes you forget you’re in the Star Wars universe in an exciting way.

0:09:35.8 Landry Ayres: You still feel the sort of ambience of it, but you aren’t taken out of it by, Ewan McGregor making lightsaber sounds with his mouth, that type of thing. So I was also kind of curious what you felt the lack of that very, very prominent fixture of the Star Wars universe did, because other than I think a handful of stories, Rogue One, which obviously this is building up to, we can sort of talk about that a little bit later as well, I am hard pressed to remember many, if any, instances of a Star Wars story without the Force and Jedi being a very prominent part of the story. And this makes it really interesting, specifically when you Start talking about who the villain is. Not only is it just the Empire, which is usually with the Sith, which gives it this kind of evil sort of puppet master, Machiavellian type thing. It’s just the Empire and the nature of that political organisation lends itself differently. So I’m curious what you two made of that.

0:10:51.7 Aaron Powell: The groundedness is central to this on a lot of different levels. So you mentioned the characters, but there’s also, the production of it ties into that. So there are no CG generated characters in this. There are very few aliens. The ones we do see are the impeccable industrial light and magic animatronics work and makeup work, but they don’t play much of a role. We’re looking at people. It, unlike the other Disney series, it doesn’t use that LED wraparound screen technology. It’s all location shoots and actual buildings and actual props and so on. And that gives it a sense of place that you don’t get in the other shows. And as you were saying, as you were asking this question, Landry, it made me think a couple of days ago, I read a New York Times review of Andor, which was a review of just the first four episodes, I think. And it was lukewarm and the objections to it, the dislike of it came from, I think, exactly the direction that you are raising right now, which was basically, where’s the Star Wars in this?

0:12:10.2 Aaron Powell: We don’t have heroic characters. We don’t have these big heroes saving the day. Andor is not particularly likeable as we see him early on. It’s kind of messy. It doesn’t seem to be… The story seems to be all over the place and disorganised, but all of that is exactly what makes the show so good is because, this is a show about… To tie it back into the politics of it, this is a show about the early days of resistance to authoritarianism and that comes from, and again, I’ll reference Nemik’s glorious passage in the… I think it’s in the last episode. But resistance to fascism comes from individual ordinary people making small choices that cascade into big choices.

0:13:04.1 Aaron Powell: And that’s what we’re watching in this show is, it’s not Skywalker saving the day, it’s not destiny, it’s not chosen ones. It’s not Ubermenschen or powerful beings with lightsabers. It is just ordinary people who at some point said, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to take this small action that endangers me.” But hoping, dreaming for a better world and a better world for… Again, it also gets away from the Star Wars saviour complex of, Luke is going to save the galaxy. This is more like, “I just care about the people around me. I see them hurting and I want to do something about it, however small,” and the way that that cascades.

0:13:51.7 Pat Eddington: Yeah. And I think that, in the very early parts, of course, of the Mandalorian, there is this absence of any obvious, Force wielder anywhere on the horizon. And even in the Mandalorian, certainly the first season, we get a very different kind of Force wielder than we’re used to. Visually, it’s very familiar, a miniature version of Yoda, of course. But it’s not central to the success, essentially, of the Mandalorian and it’s certainly not what drives it. And even more so with Andor, we see what a real rebellion actually kind of looks like. And Nemik’s… I don’t know who wrote Nemik’s manifesto. I don’t know who the writer was, but that is some true poetry. And the idea that, as Aaron indicated, all these additional little acts going on, of course, I think about this in the context of the original American revolution, a very narrow revolution to be sure, a revolution by, of, and for White Protestant males for the most part, right? But by the same token, it was these acts on the part of individuals and somewhat organised militias, in Massachusetts and elsewhere that ultimately produced this larger congealment, if you will, of an organised resistance to the British, and British rule.

0:15:26.2 Pat Eddington: And you see that, but in much more stark terms here, this absolutely, the empire, the tactics they use are straight out of a Nazi or Soviet playbook, in terms of the torture and all the rest of that, all the kinds of things that they’re engaged in. So this is a really, really, in comparison to almost anything else in Star Wars, an extremely dark series, a series in which the people that are impacted by this have to create their own hope because in essence, we don’t have any Jedi. And at the same time, we don’t have any Sith, right? In this particular series to date, we haven’t seen any inquisitors. We haven’t seen a cameo by Darth Vader. This is just other human beings in the service of the empire, engaging in banal acts of brutality in exactly the way that I think those of us who studied world history here can readily comprehend. So for me, that’s just another reason why the show works so well. And of course, as we get in… And it’s my understanding that this is only a two-​season deal.

0:16:38.8 Pat Eddington: So they’re going to wind up having to accelerate things going from 5 BBY up to, essentially, 0 BBY. And for the benefit of those who may be listening and are not as versed in this, in the Star Wars universe, the destruction of the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin, is used essentially as the demarcation point for dates, so BBY, Before the Battle of Yavin, ABY, After the Battle of Yavin, for those who maybe are not as geeked out on this as the three of us are.

0:17:11.4 Landry Ayres: I will call out Pat and say that before we started recording, he did show off his Apple watch to us with the Cassian Andor wallpaper face watch. And is it the rebel alliance arm band or the resistant… He’s got the Star Wars arm band in addition to the wallpaper.

0:17:29.2 Pat Eddington: It is the Andor armband, and the specialised watch faces that are available. I don’t want to give a commercial for [0:17:41.1] ____ without being properly compensated. But yeah, I will say that in the nearly 60 years that I’ve been on this planet, I have never hawked a commercial item that way before, but that gives you a sense of just exactly how much of a fanatic I am about this series.

0:18:00.4 Landry Ayres: Right. I wanted people to know that there… This is coming from a true believer.

0:18:02.8 Pat Eddington: Yeah.

0:18:03.7 Landry Ayres: Someone you can trust, who knows what they’re talking about. The notion of the banality of evil is very, very present in the series because, all of… Almost all of the true antagonist, bad guy coded characters, because as Aaron talked about, it’s a very messy story. But even the coded good guys have a lot of moral grey areas. They don’t make good choices. They set things in motion that are not just like, “Well, I wish they wouldn’t have done that.” It really makes you question, maybe they’ll have some sort of redemption in the end, but they have not done great things in their life, which makes it interesting and complex. But in the realm of the truly evil characters, I’m curious to talk about them because they all express a type of evil in a different way. So I know we talked about this a little bit before. Aaron, you have a very interesting or you have a very succinct take on one of the evil characters that you found really interesting. Would you like to share that with us? And Pat, if you have one for somebody else that you find interesting, feel free to share.

0:19:21.4 Aaron Powell: Sure. So Syril, our corporate security agent at the beginning is our mall cop, right?

0:19:29.5 Landry Ayres: All right. He’s like Paul Blart?

0:19:32.1 Aaron Powell: Yes. Our mall cop is, I think, the most interesting bad guy in here because he is so fundamentally pathetic. And part of that is, I think speaks to a lot of the banal types of evil that we see in the world right now, or if not types of evil, at least a kind of banality that enables others to perpetuate evil. And there’s a moment in there, I believe it’s in the scene where he’s being interrogated by Dedra, the Imperial security bureau agent.

0:20:12.7 Aaron Powell: But he says that basically what was driving him was there had been order. The murder of the two cops at the beginning by Andor was an instance of disorder in his mind, even though the disorder was created by the corruption of these police officers. And I think that’s an important point for a lot of law and order sorts of people is that law and order is often the source of the disorder. But he is really upset by this because he lives this incredibly ordered life where he wants things to be a certain way, even down to making his uniform more buttoned down and fitted and orderly than those of his colleagues. And that’s what’s ultimately driving him. I don’t think that he has this, the fascism of the core of the empire. I don’t know that that carries over to Syril so much as he just sees the empire as representative of order in a disordered galaxy and wants to maintain that. And that desire runs deep and is the cause of a lot of evil. And I’ll give an example that one of the most frustrating things that I witnessed over the last several years was the response to the George Floyd protests.

0:21:36.7 Aaron Powell: And the way that you saw a lot of people who had for years said criminal justice needs to be reformed, police are brutal, they are murdering people, we need to figure out how to stop this, these communities are oppressed by corrupt cops and a corrupt system and so on. And then the George Floyd killing happened and there were protests. And a lot of those protests were disorderly. And what you saw was a lot of people who had, in their words, been in favour of, had expressed sympathy for these people who were basically fighting for their freedom, wanted their freedom, wanted their liberty. But their response to it was, “But not that way. Please stop with the disorder. If you’re blocking traffic, you’ve gone too far because that inconveniences me. If you’re marching down the streets, I don’t really like it. I suddenly don’t feel safe. What we need is law and order. We need to bust heads. We need to clear it up. The way you’re going about agitating for your freedom is the wrong way. What you need to be doing is instead voting, participating in these clean processes that I am comfortable with, that I’m in a privileged position within,” and so on.

0:22:53.4 Aaron Powell: Stop being disorderly. Order comes before freedom. We talk about ordered liberty and for a lot of people, it became clear that the order mattered a lot more than the liberty. And that is the quintessentially Syril. And I think it is one of the biggest barriers to genuinely advancing freedom for people on the margins of society, is that they don’t have a way to get it through the processes. So we see that with Mon Mothma when she keeps giving speeches to a gradually emptying-​out Senate of people who just don’t care. And when she’s in one of her cocktail parties and the guy, they’re talking about being comfortable in the empire. And one of the people she’s talking with makes some joke about how, the only thing he’s uncomfortable with, “How much I’m drinking right now,” or something like that, that it is hard for people in positions of privilege to accept how messy it is to agitate for liberty because to them it looks like disorder.

0:23:55.9 Pat Eddington: Yeah. So Syril would really not have been down with Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty, I don’t think. I think he would have had a fundamental problem with them. I find that character and his relationship with ISB Lieutenant Dedra Meero to be really interesting because this guy obviously is like completely star struck in love with her. That is like the number one, he may have a priority of order, but his number one priority clearly is her. And I thought it was a really powerful scene, though, when he saw the young man throw the homemade bomb, he clearly realised what was going to happen and he broke through the barricade and he was heading in one direction. That wasn’t for the kid with the bomb, he was heading for her. He was looking to try to take care of her. And he ultimately does. He is a pathetic character also because if I’d been him I would have… If I had a mother like that, I would have offed her. I would have, seriously, no doubt at some point. I would have just got a gun and killed her. This is a woman who literally would drive me to violence.

0:25:05.6 Pat Eddington: The way that she treats him. My meter would have been pegged out even when I was a teenager, at that point. So I think that the damaged upbringing that he had has clearly shaped his worldview and warped it in dramatic ways. But to get to your question, Landry, there are a number of these ISB types that I find interesting. Blevin, who is the ISB guy who gets into conflict with Dedra Meero over jurisdiction, essentially, she wants to track down a particular piece of very sensitive imperial hardware. He stands in her way, basically, all but threatening to try to find a way to derail her career. And then the guy that’s almost at the top of the food chain there, Major Partagaz, that is also a very, very interesting guy to me because he is, so far, skillfully walking a fine line with respect to how he handles his supervisors and his agents on one hand, and how he handles, obviously, an extremely angry emperor over the success of the rebel raid and heist on Aldhani. And Meera is clearly somebody, you kind of have the sense, at least I have the sense, that if they were listening to her, they’d be way ahead of the game in terms of going after the rebels.

0:26:36.1 Pat Eddington: But in that scene where the other rebel commander who we only see essentially as a hologram in a prior episode, Anto Kreegyr, as his folks walk into this ambush that Luthen Rael could have prevented but he wanted to protect his own source in the ISB, in that dialogue, you really kind of see why Partagaz is where he is because he’s telling her in no uncertain terms, “Today was not about prisoners, today was about wiping the taste of Aldhani from the emperor’s mouth. So this guy is a bureaucrat, he’s a skilled bureaucrat in the service essentially of the emperor and of evil. This is the only real link essentially. With the exception of the appearance in a previous episode after Aldhani of, I believe it was Colonel Yularen, who figured of course in The Clone Wars, it was one of the commanders that Skywalker and Obi-​Wan dealt with. But that for me, looking at Partagaz and where his character ultimately ends up, I find it interesting because he’s obviously very comfortable in his duties but he’s walking that line between the emperor and trying to keep control of his own people and actually get results. So I find him interesting. I find most of the ISB guys and gals quite frankly very, very interesting.

0:28:09.7 Landry Ayres: Both of these examples I think are very telling in distinct ways. Syril, so much of it is about that his values are in order and in strict regimented ways that things should be and respect and a lot of that is trickling down from what he is being told by his mother. Also based on the way that they are developing his relationship with Dedra, to me it very much screams that they’re trying to hint at, not explicitly, but making him appear almost like an incel or something like that where he hasn’t received, and whether or not it’s explicitly sexual in nature, but he is a person who feels he has been denied things that he has earned or he is obligated to and in doing so is reacting out. At the same time his mother is trying to tell him about, it sort of seems fond for an ordered, regimented, almost high society way of doing things that existed when she was young and maybe the world isn’t exactly the way that it was before. And so there is a desire to regain an order that has been lost, which is in a lot of conservative rhetoric these days.

0:29:43.0 Landry Ayres: It’s not necessarily about… A lot of them do talk about trying to retain the control that they hope to have, but in a lot of senses it’s much more about trying to regain something that has been lost and is gone. It’s not about conserving anything. It’s about trying to find something new, almost like a rebirth. I could see them possibly seeing this rebellion as both something to squash but also something to manipulate. Partagaz also exemplifies this as well, when he talks about… One of the first things he asks is, “What is our mission?” to all of these different ISB agents. This is really where you see just how I think manipulative and twisted he is as a character because he is a bureaucrat. While bureaucracy gets positioned as a banal form of evil because it’s well, they’re just following orders, checking off lists, and out of this institution evil things happen, Partagaz understands that those institutions and the structures that he is building and enforcing, he understands the ends of them and how those means interact more than I think other people are willing to admit. When he says security is an illusion, we are health providers, and he uses the metaphor of disease and squashing cancers throughout the body of the empire.

0:31:21.2 Pat Eddington: Yeah, literally a full dehumanisation of the opposition. They’re not human beings. They’re a disease to be exterminated.

0:31:30.6 Landry Ayres: And then shockingly enough, I think it’s Maarva at the end also uses a similar disease metaphor to describe the empire. Which is, I thought, really interesting, both using the same metaphor to describe those types of things. They’re finding all of the things that they have lost or lost control of perhaps or want to rebirth. And in certain instances, they’re saying, let this foment enough because then once it uprises, we can clamp down on it and then you get the PORD Institution, which allows them to access even more power, which is obviously reminiscent of legislation that we’ve seen across history, things like the Patriot Act or the former president calling for the complete termination of the Constitution or something like that. Not like that’s ever been said before or anything.

0:32:29.9 Pat Eddington: Yeah. So the one point that I do want to make with respect to Luthen, and this is like in the larger scheme of rebellion, you can’t build a sustainable rebellion by sacrificing people and then letting other people see you sacrifice them and not have them basically say, “Is he going to do that to me next?” Which is why I love the exchange between Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera and Luthen when he came to basically wave him off of warning Anto Kreegyr that the empire was onto them. That’s not how you build a sustainable movement. And I think that that’s why in the end, Luthen’s character is going to have, obviously no pun intended, a dead end arc. But that for me is one of the major character flaws, probably the major character flaw that Luthen Rael has is that he’s willing to make extreme sacrifices that are actually counterproductive in the end. And I guess we’ll find out if he makes any more such choices in season two.

0:33:39.5 Aaron Powell: When you talk about the role of myth and a mythological past and re-​establishing it, when you talk about the idea of the health of the body politic and disease and fixing that and the way that these things get manipulated, you are simply describing fascism. That is what fascism is. And it should not surprise us that that’s how they talk. And it should not surprise us that they seek to co-​opt. 15 years ago or so, I think it was, Jonah Goldberg wrote a rather dumb book called Liberal Fascism where the thesis of that book was he had noticed that the Nazis wanted to socialise medicine and promoted vegetarianism. And he said, “Hmm, maybe progressives are the real fascists.” And what he didn’t understand, and I think the book was widely criticised for this, was, fascism as a movement, one of the things that it does is co-​ops the language and principles of the left as a way to establish itself among the people who left principles appeal to. And so it says they care about health and wellness and these things, we’re going to use that. We’re going to embrace it as a way to integrate ourselves and then extend it out to “oh, and it’s the immigrants who are part of the problem,” or “it’s the people who are not… The Heron folk who are part of the problem.”

0:35:06.3 Aaron Powell: Let’s operationalise it against them. And then let’s concoct this myth of the past where things were better and then blame the enemies we don’t like as the cause of it. And we will use the tools of the state to support you in a way that will enable you to regain your lost status against these usurpers and enemies and so on. So it simply is what we’re watching in this show is fascism. And what we are watching from the budding rebellion is the way that anti-​fascism operates.

0:35:43.5 Landry Ayres: That’s really interesting, Aaron, especially based on what my first question was, which is talking about something being too didactic or not didactic enough. Specifically, I always think about this when there’s rebellion stories, there’s revolution and something like that, because if it’s vague enough, and I think Andor is not vague enough, I think it does a very good job of saying this is what the fascism is. And if you’re looking at this and you’re taking it the wrong way, that’s on you. They’ve done a good job of that. But it is, I think it seems so easy in lesser stories for the people who would support the fascism to look at the rebels, the people who are really going through something and saying, “That’s me. I’m the one who is being oppressed, because people are telling me that I’m a fascist.” And then they see themselves as a rebel, which emboldens them to try and act in the manner and use the mechanisms of the state to further oppress people that they do not like. And that is specifically… That’s still happening with Andor. I read an article today.

0:36:57.0 Landry Ayres: I read an article, I think it was in the Christian Post that was like, oh, another anti-​Trump thing. And it was hating on Andor and I think Rings of Power because it was like, “oh, women and Tolkien.” But then I read another article, I think it came up, it was PJ media or something. And it was like, it was Tony Gilroy who had apparently said that he was loosely thinking of Nancy Pelosi in the portrayal of Mon Mothma. And not specifically that he lionised her, but he was like, she seems like a woman in a position like that, that is using the mechanisms that she has to try and create resistance. And whether you think that’s successful or not, is for you. But people were just that would make sense if it were the other way around, and she was actually fighting for the empire. And it became the circular argument about how the state and the Biden administration is the empire and they’re actually the ones that are oppressing people. And it becomes this circular logic. So you’ve got this latching on to the language and oppression and sort of health of people in our democracy and saying, no, that’s actually us.

0:38:12.3 Landry Ayres: So I’m always curious, is there a way that you can tell these rebellion stories and avoid that complication? Or is it just something that you have to be prepared for when you are dealing and fighting against fascists?

0:38:29.4 Aaron Powell: I think it’s something you have to deal with. Especially in an environment where everything has become so politically charged and everybody views everything through a political lens. I’m thinking back to, I don’t remember which Star Wars show it was, but there was a Black woman main character in it. Maybe this was Obi-​Wan Kenobi, which I didn’t watch, I only watched the first episode of. But she was getting a lot of, as expected, like racist and misogynistic abuse on Twitter. And the official Star Wars Twitter account responded to someone in support of her and someone replied to that saying, “Don’t politicise Star Wars.” And the official account pointed out first off… Maybe I’m getting this confused, and it was when they’d done something with a gay character. I think it was actually someone with a gay character in this case, maybe. And they said, “The existence of gay people is not political.

0:39:34.9 Aaron Powell: And also our name is Star Wars.” And I think that we live in an environment right now where people don’t want to view everything politically, but then also don’t view their own views as political. They view them as baseline. And so when every character is a White male, White men, particularly right-​leaning White men just see that as that’s kind of the baseline. That’s normal. And if you stick a woman in there, then you’re sending a message versus just, “women exist, guys.” Or you put a Black character in or you put a gay character in, or you acknowledge the mechanisms of power and the way that power reifies and reinforces hierarchies. And that is a political act. The very pointing that out is seen as like unduly injecting politics into it. I don’t think that’s escapable because I think that there’s just, everyone expects everything to be political. They look for it and they read politics into stuff that isn’t. And because a lot of people’s political views are just simply uninformed and kind of dumb, they take genuine critiques as kind of ignorant and dumb, right? If they push up against beliefs that they themselves hold.

0:41:01.9 Aaron Powell: And I don’t know what you… I don’t think that means you should avoid politics. And I think that’s the real… The real bright spot of Andor outside of just the show itself being as good as it is, is this is not something Disney was doing before, was making something as clearly political in the way that George Lucas, when he said, “Oh yes, the Ewoks were the Viet Cong.” He was being intentionally political and making a point about American empire and so on. Star Wars has shied away from that and a return to that and embracing that that’s what this is, a show about struggles for freedom and about the politics of evil and so on. Lean into that, embrace it and Star Wars will be better. And the fan boys who think that pointing out that fascism is bad is injecting politics into Star Wars. I don’t know. They can read or watch something else.

[laughter]

0:42:07.0 Pat Eddington: They’ve missed the entire point for the last 40 years. I think is probably what I’d have to say. But with respect to the Kenobi series, the actress in question, Moses Ingram, for me, she stole the show and the amount of hate that she got was at least as great. And I think probably greater than what John Boyega got when he was cast as Finn in the sequels. And I was more interested, quite frankly by the third episode, I was far more interested to see where she was going to end up than I was Obi-​Wan. And I wish they had done a better job ultimately with her story arc. It wasn’t terrible, but I think it could have been even better. But yeah, I think, look, there are an awful lot of White, probably largely Protestant males out there who grew up watching either the original series as I, or the original trilogy as I did, or more recently, and I think this is where a lot of this is coming from, folks who came of age when the prequels were made, and maybe the animated series and all the rest of that.

0:43:18.8 Pat Eddington: And they’ve just been so used to seeing heavily White male characters in the lead that the idea that you can have anything else is just somehow heretical. It just speaks to the larger social pathologies that we’re still struggling with in this country. And I give, I do, like Aaron, I give Disney credit for being willing to push back. I think they should have pushed back harder. You saw the same thing, this manifestation of a similar mentality with respect to Gina Carano in The Mandalorian, right? She engaged in some commentary that one could make an argument that she has a right to say what she wants to say. But by the same token, Disney is a company that wants to appeal to the largest audience it can. And she was, in many cases, I think, clearly attacking non-​heterosexual people. So Disney made a choice, and she’s no longer with the franchise. So they have tools at their disposal at Disney to make the point that they wanna make about what the message essentially, not just of this particular series, but of Star Wars overall should be.

0:44:32.6 Pat Eddington: And I’m totally with Aaron on this. The more that they get back to utilising this franchise to tell really great human stories, but that still address head on political issues, I think is really important. To talk about another entire franchise, this is why Star Trek, the original series, was such a big deal back in the ’60s. That kiss between Shatner and Nichelle Nichols in that one episode that was seen as scandalous at the time, right? But Roddenberry’s fundamental vision was of a society that was essentially supposed to be colour blind. And I think the more that Star Wars kind of pushes in that direction, as far as I’m concerned, the better. That’s what we need ultimately more of, if we’re going to actually be able to build a society, a sustainable society, with a meaningful politics where everyone actually feels like their voice is being heard. And I grew up in Southwest Missouri, which is like, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Texas, they have nothing on Missouri, Southwest Missouri, in terms of racism, endemic racism, right? And so I grew up seeing a lot of this kind of stuff.

0:45:57.3 Pat Eddington: And the fact that it’s so still with us, and it’s so toxic, culturally and politically. And the idea, and I think there’s just so much of this, right, that somehow, if you’re not seeing White male characters, White Protestant males are being somehow disenfranchised, right? They are somehow now being shunted aside, and they’re losing ground to kind of go back to, I think, some of the points that you were making, Landry. The reverse is what’s the case here. Most everybody else who doesn’t look like the three of us have had a hell of a time the last two centuries in this country, trying to climb up the social, political, and economic ladder. And it’s something when you see a Moses Ingram succeed in Kenobi, and you see a Mexican actor like Diego Luna succeed so brilliantly in this series. As far as I’m concerned, that’s something to celebrate. And the fact that we have so many people in our society who see that essentially as falling backwards is just, it’s baffling to me.

0:47:07.2 Landry Ayres: I just want to say that it is the case that tyranny requires constant effort because it is unnatural, and that freedom is a pure idea, and it occurs spontaneously and without instruction.

[music]

0:47:24.4 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle, @PopnLockePod. That’s Pop, the letter n, Locke, with an e, like the philosopher, Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favourite show or movie next time.