evening redness

The following is a drafty of a chapter from my book project on Star Wars: Andor. The plan was to have the book done before season two premiered. Given that season two debuts today, that’s not going to happen and I expect that a good deal of what I have finished will need to be rewritten. So I am sharing the work I have done, a sort of time capsule of my thinking on the show and on franchise more broadly.

Chapter Two

A place where time stands still: Prehistory and/or Posthistory

We left Cassian Andor suspended between past and future, between past life and future life, between past death and future death. More precisely, we left Cassian suspended among and within the complex relationality of manifold pasts and manifold futures. Cassian does not walk away from a past or towards a future, nor does he walk away from a future and towards a past. He walks away from a past in which he had a sister, in which he searches for his sister, even if this past will only be recounted in a future towards which he is walking. He walks away from a past in which he has already died even as he walks towards a future in which he has not yet to died but will. He walks away from a past in which he has been forgotten even as the actions he is about to take will become the condition of that forgetting.

While these pasts and futures may be ordered in any number of ways, none of those ways will be superior, more natural, or more original (in the sense of “providing an origin or point of commencement”) than any other. Whatever claim we might make about the best or proper ordering of these pasts and futures must confront competing claims with no more or less authority than our own. We might, for example, after having completed Andor, and with full knowledge of the films that precede it historically, produce an ordering according to which Cassian has already died (in 2016) by the time the series premiers (in 2022). This ordering dissipates any narrative tension with regard to the question of Cassian’s survival, but it expresses a certain tonal intensity, a sense of doom that colors all of his actions in the series. By contrast, we might produce an ordering according to which Cassian’s fate remains unknown, the actions of the series (set in BBY 5) preceding the events of Rogue One (set in BBY 1). This ordering expresses the narrative tension just described but excludes the tonal intensity. Each of these orderings is rectilinear in one manner or another. The former involves an historical rectilinearity (grounded in the release order of franchise contents) that begins with Cassian’s murder of Tivik in Rogue One and moves through his death at the end of that film and thus onto the events of Andor. The latter involves a narrative rectilinearity (grounded in Star Wars’s internal chronology) that begins with young Kassa on Kenari and proceeding through his incarceration, his search for his sister, his flight from Ferrix, and so on unto his death on Scariff. Such rectilinear orderings would stand in contrast to orderings that mix narrative and history and thus produce circularities, spiralarities, and other topologies without names, especially insofar as these other orderings might involve other franchise contents, whether narrative and canonical or otherwise. What prevents us from starting our narrative with the scene in Rogue One when Cassian first appears onscreen with Mon Mothma before proceeding to a “flashback” that identifies the senator as the character who first appeared in Return of the Jedi discussing the many Bothans who died delivering news of the second Death Star to the Rebel Alliance and then onto a “flashforward” that recounts the individual journeys that Mon and Cassian take, in Andor,to the Rogue One scene, all intercut with scenes from films, series, and other media relating to the design, development, deployment, and destruction of the several Death Stars that populate the franchise? In short, nothing but the prospect of the non-trivial amount of labor it would require to produce and consume this ordering.