If there were an award for taking a series of grim clips from a grim show and making them seem absolutely joyous, then the trailer for Andor season 2 — coming to Disney+ on April 22 — would be a lock to win this year.
As fans of season 1 know, Andor can be many things (prison break drama, political intrigue, pulse-pounding spy thriller), but light and fluffy it ain't. According to creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, Andor is really a Charles Dickens-like tale: an orphan tries to escape his circumstances, finding friends and foes who expose the dark heart of a cruel era.
That orphan is of course Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), one of the rebel spies who (spoiler alert for a 9 year old movie) dies after transmitting the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance in Rogue One. Gilroy is clear about the fact that the show finishes where the movie starts.
So we already how Season 2 will end: with Cassian perfectly willing to kill a colleague who would slow down his escape, and perfectly ready to die fighting the Empire.
Cassian's fate — indeed, the fate of all the rebel figures we see in this trailer, including future rebel leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) — is to be haunted by all the suffering in service of that cause. (That's precisely the point of Mon Mothma's most famous line, the first time we met the character, in Return of the Jedi.)
You can see it here in their worried faces, Cassian's brief smile and fun 1950's-style disguise notwithstanding.
You can certainly see it in the hardened gaze of Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), also returning in season 2. Saw, as we know from Rogue One, Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, is the most morally-compromised rebel in the galaxy — so much so that Mothma and her shadowy contact Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) shun his methods.
Rael, also seen looking sad in the trailer, already summed up where all his fellow rebels are heading in Andor season 2. "I've given up all chance at inner peace," Rael said in season 1's most critically-acclaimed performance. "I made my mind a sunless place, I share my dreams with ghosts, I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do."
What is that trailer music trying to say?
At first blush, then, it may seem out of sync that a 2004 rock anthem by Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now," plays over these images. The music draws our attention to the colorful party Mon Mothma is attending, the latest in a series of elite gatherings for the Senator, rather than her anguished look.
Meanwhile, the editing makes it seem like Cassian and his hooded colleague are detonating a bomb in a building behind them with the coolness of action movie heroes, not the hardened mask of reluctant rebels.
Still, Earle's lyrics speak to another powerful story thread in Andor. The song implores listeners to make a stand, to "rise above your fear and tear the walls around you down" no matter where you are. That recalls the Season 1 speech by Kino Loy (Andy Serkis), who overcame his fear and helped his fellow prisoners to escape by working together.
It also fits with the "fight the Empire" speech delivered by Cassian's adopted mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw) via posthumous hologram in the season 1 finale. According to the director, Gilroy's original line for Maarva was "fuck the Empire" — evidently a much more rock-and-roll statement than Disney+ would allow.
The Season 2 trailer contains another, potentially more troubling song lyric, however. It's delivered by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, returning to the franchise for the first time since Rogue One). "What a swell party this is," we hear Krennic say, over an image of him gazing lovingly at his pet project, the Death Star.
That's clearly taken from the Cole Porter song "Well Did You Evah," most famously performed by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the 1956 movie High Society. The song is a satire of two drunk, gossiping party guests, who treat even the potential destruction of Earth lightly, and repeatedly return to the scene around them with the same line: What a swell party this is!
You might expect that Krennic says this line at the same shindig where we see Mon Mothma. It would fit Coruscant's political elite, the people we've already seen wilfully ignoring the rise of the Empire all around them, with a wink at the audience.
But it would also breach one of the ground rules of the franchise as laid down by George Lucas. Star Wars, historically, doesn't wink at the audience. There may be a lot of fun to be had in it, but the galaxy far, far away takes itself very seriously when it comes to making itself immersive and believable.
You may find reminders of Earth culture in the distant future (remember, this is all happening "a long time ago"), but they are all deliberately mashed up with each other, creating something that feels new and alien.
The cantina band in A New Hope may be playing something that sounds like swing music, but they're also weird insectoid aliens using unusual instruments. (Actual Earth musicians were thrown into the much-reviled Star Wars Holiday Special, proving the point.)
So Krennic directly quoting Cole Porter? This ain't it, chief. We've never heard the word "swell" in a Star Wars story for the same reason we've never heard "groovy": it's too clearly connected to a time and place on Earth.
We can only hope that Tony Gilroy is doing the same here as he did when he stepped in to reshoot Rogue One: cutting a controversial trailer that contains moments never seen in the final cut.
Because hey, even Charles Dickens needed to add some layers of fluff and fun so the public could swallow his grimmest stories.
