The first three episodes of Andor arrived on Disney+ today and I can’t wait to watch! The trailers have looked very promising and I have high hopes, more so than most other Star Wars TV shows. I always found it strange that Cassian Andor should get his own TV show, but here we are and we can only hope for the best.

I’m loving The Mandalorian as much as everybody else, and I can’t wait to watch Ahsoka. But The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi were both pretty mediocre. Will Andor be better? I love the tone we got in the trailers, of an actual hardcore, gritty war drama. Will the show live up to that tone? I surely hope so.

Join me after the jump for what I hope to get in the Andor TV show! And feel free to share your hopes, dreams and reviews of the first three episodes in the comments!

6. No Jedi

I don’t want to see a single lightsaber or Force power in Andor. None. Zip. Zilch. No Jedi. No Sith. No Inquisitors. No Ahsoka cameo. No cut away to Obi-Wan on Tattooine. I want this to be all about The Empire vs. the common man. Let the Force be a big mystery. Let Jedi be all but forgotten. I want about as much Jedi in Andor as we had in Rogue One. Simple as that.

With one exception…

5. Except the Emperor

Darth Vader is active in this time period, but we don’t need to see him. He can be off hunting Jedi still, or whatever it is that Vader does on his own time. I don’t want to see him. But I would be willing to allow the Emperor to show up. Maybe not for any actual dialogue or talking scenes. But maybe something Andor is doing features the Emperor at a distance. Maybe he attends a rally or something. Maybe he passes the Emperor in the hallway of the palace or something. I dunno. But he’s the leader of the Empire, and this is a show about rebelling against that Empire. I’d be fine if they used the leader somehow, sparingly.

4. War in the stars

Let’s get real with it. Don’t hold back. This needs to be a war show, first and foremost, that just so happens to take place in the Star Wars universe. I want the grit, I want the damage, I want the deeper exploration of what war does to people and societies. I really hope Andor puts the “war” in Star Wars.

3. Good guys making tough choices

With putting the “war” in Star Wars, I hope they don’t make it so cut and dry when it comes to good guys and bad guys. Remember when the Battlestar Galactica reboot was coming out at the height of the War on Terror? And they had episodes where the good guys were acting like real world terrorists, with suicide bombings and stuff like that. I want to see that level of grit and shades of gray in Andor. I want to see Saw Gerrera go full rebel without a cause, and for the show to follow suit. Don’t hold back! Shades of gray!

2. Very slight Rebels references

I would love to see some non-Jedi references to the show Rebels. Maybe the Ghost? Maybe General Syndulla? I don’t know the exact time frames we’re dealing with here — though they’d be easy enough to look up. But Rebels laid a lot of groundwork for the start of the official Rebellion, and I wouldn’t mind if Andor found ways to reference that — while, again, keeping the Jedi out of it.

1. An Empire that isn’t cartoonishly evil

This one might be a bit controversial to ask for, but I’d like to see an Empire that isn’t just mustache-twirlingly evil. I want to see some mundanity in the Empire. Yes, they ruled the galaxy with an iron fist for two decades, but surely some of them were just working desk jobs. Some of them probably even thought they were doing good for the people they were ruling. I’d just like to see some shades of gray in the Empire as well. More so, at least, than the usual shades of their TIE Fighters and Star Destroyers.

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