Star Wars: Andor

[Stalker0]

Like I said, as a guy who runs Star Wars D6, that all fell flat for me. Star Wars sensors are very powerful, as the movies and other media have repeatedly shown. A military complex like that is going to pretty much instantly spot anything in line of sight, and have a sensor network laid out around it to detect things that aren't in line of sight.

However, the Star Wars movies have a very long history now of showing bad guy "incompetence". No matter how powerful the empire is supposed to be on paper, when its go time, they always have hilarious gaps in their security, troopers that can't shoot, etc etc. Whether that's the "will of the force" or "plot armor" or XYZ, take your pick...but that is certainly not new to the franchise.

 

[Celebrim]

However, the Star Wars movies have a very long history now of showing bad guy "incompetence". No matter how powerful the empire is supposed to be on paper, when its go time, they always have hilarious gaps in their security, troopers that can't shoot, etc etc. Whether that's the "will of the force" or "plot armor" or XYZ, take your pick...but that is certainly not new to the franchise.

Sure there are a few scenes of that, often involving Han or Luke, where the troopers suddenly lose the ability to conduct accurate fire even at close range - Han running into a room full of Storm Troopers (made worse in the Special edition when it goes from like 10 to like 100) or Luke swinging across the chasm in the Death Star after the blast door has been cranked part way open.

But even so, there is a qualitative difference between the presentation of the Scout Troopers on Endor back handing Solo and engaging in a running battle with the heroes and the ones on the speeder bikes in the final episode of season 1 of the Mandalorian. There is a qualitative difference between the presentation of Storm Troopers in the original movies, who aside from one or two moments do tend to win any battle that is remotely equal, and the Mandalorian having a mere Army Trooper talking openly about Storm Troopers being poor shots. There is a huge qualitative difference between the presentation of Darth Vader, Moff Tarkin, and the rest of the Imperial Leadership, and the presentation of General Hux in The Last Jedi - who goes full Cobra Commander in the opening scene and is so bad at his job that they had to make an unplanned nearly 4th wall breaking plot point of it in the final movie.

 

[Dioltach]

Don't forget the Imperials are expecting as many as a hundred locals to show up at the temple for the Eye. A small group hanging round in the hills above it the day before isn't going to seem suspicious.

 

[RuinousPowers]

Like I said, as a guy who runs Star Wars D6, that all fell flat for me. Star Wars sensors are very powerful, as the movies and other media have repeatedly shown. A military complex like that is going to pretty much instantly spot anything in line of sight, and have a sensor network laid out around it to detect things that aren't in line of sight. As soon as you get a life form or a power source in line of sight, in open country like that you are going to get scanned. That the writers ignore that is one of the few examples we have of the writers dumbing things down for the audience. There are plenty of ways to fool the sensors or the person using them, but it appears that the writers didn't want to go there.

I would have liked 10-15 more minutes to show just that sort of thing, as well as the dinner party the prior scene with Mon Mothma promised and more time to develop her plot line and maybe make the relationship with her husband more complex (as he is mostly silent in all the scenes, the audience isn't seeing what he is thinking).

But overall, this show is wonderful. It's smart. It's grown up. It's well made and well conceived. It looks really good. It's pretty much everything we haven't been seeing from Star Wars since Disney got a hold of the property, aside from Rogue One.

I guess we are supposed to write the lax security off to Imperial hubris?

 

[Stalker0]

Sure there are a few scenes of that, often involving Han or Luke, where the troopers suddenly lose the ability to conduct accurate fire even at close range - Han running into a room full of Storm Troopers (made worse in the Special edition when it goes from like 10 to like 100) or Luke swinging across the chasm in the Death Star after the blast door has been cranked part way open.

But even so, there is a qualitative difference between the presentation of the Scout Troopers on Endor back handing Solo and engaging in a running battle with the heroes and the ones on the speeder bikes in the final episode of season 1 of the Mandalorian. There is a qualitative difference between the presentation of Storm Troopers in the original movies, who aside from one or two moments do tend to win any battle that is remotely equal, and the Mandalorian having a mere Army Trooper talking openly about Storm Troopers being poor shots. There is a huge qualitative difference between the presentation of Darth Vader, Moff Tarkin, and the rest of the Imperial Leadership, and the presentation of General Hux in The Last Jedi - who goes full Cobra Commander in the opening scene and is so bad at his job that they had to make an unplanned nearly 4th wall breaking plot point of it in the final movie.

You mean the troops on endor that got their butts handed to them by primitive tiny bear people? That have lasers, modern armor, and walkers?

With respect, this isn't a one off kind of thing, there is a repeated pattern of incompetency. Every storm trooper battle in the first 3 movies is a miss fest, heck in the first movie Luke literally stands there for about 5 seconds after obi-wan gets killed with blaster fire all around him, then stands there shooting for a few more seconds before running for cover...and isn't hit once.

The death star's big weakness is another example.

There is a clear pattern here where the bad guys are simply incompetent when it matters.


Now I do agree with you that a big difference in the new movies is that the 1st order is "hilariously" incompetent, aka its actually played for laughs. The empire was far more serious, but just as incompetent.

As for Andor...this just seems like the classic "big empire that can't manage its own stuff" we have seen from the first 3 movies, nothing outrageous, nothing as laughable like in the last few movies.

 

[damiller]

And since the Empire are supposed to be Space Nazis, isn't incompetence supposed to BE the point. A large fat fascists system that only exists because average folks didn't just say "uh no thanks" out loud?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

However, the Star Wars movies have a very long history now of showing bad guy "incompetence". No matter how powerful the empire is supposed to be on paper, when its go time, they always have hilarious gaps in their security, troopers that can't shoot, etc etc. Whether that's the "will of the force" or "plot armor" or XYZ, take your pick...but that is certainly not new to the franchise.

It's the danger of trying to make a Star Wars show that is more realistic and grounded though. Tropes that an audience will accept in a fantasy suddenly become implausible.

 

[Stalker0]

Tropes that an audience will accept in a fantasy suddenly become implausible.

The idea that the rebels, who have scouted and planned for this for a while now, have figured out means to avoid the sensors, or are just using the cover of shepards gathering for the holy day (which has now been explained to us to be a big deal, and something that local people absolutely gather there for, aka its not really suspicious to see them there).... that seems pretty plausible to me, honestly way more plausible than a lot of star wars stories.

If its 100% military accurate, no...but is it in the realm of possibility for a slightly more grounded than normal space fantasy show...I think so.

 

[Dioltach]

Also, the Imperial soldiers are shown to be quite unmotivated: the junk lying around the temple, the corporal lounging on the dam while on duty, the comment that most of the garrison are there to see the spectacle of the Eye anyway. Could be that the lieutenant didn't have much trouble convincing them that a few shepherds in the hills aren't worth getting excited about at the best of times.

 

[Celebrim]

It's the danger of trying to make a Star Wars show that is more realistic and grounded though. Tropes that an audience will accept in a fantasy suddenly become implausible.

Sure, but I'm probably going to be the nit pickiest critic you can possibly get in terms of grounded. I'm literally asking, "Does this game in my Star Wars D6 game?" It doesn't have to be realistic. It just has to be plausible enough to be accepted within a game. So for me, getting defeated by Ewoks is no proof of incompetency. It's just proof that if you fight 100,000 angry intelligent chimpanzees in a game universe where the rules skew in favor of melee combat (see lightsabers as one of many examples), you are probably going to have problems. It works in a game even better than it works on the screen owing to the limitations of the special effects in the 1980's because the Ewoks in the game universe really can move like chimpanzees with claws where as the Ewoks in the movie move like little people in costumes. If you accept the most powerful warriors in the universe are swinging laser swords, you can accept that even an elite soldier is going to have problems when a half-dozen chimpanzees with sharp objects jump out of the trees like mythical drop bears and start pounding on him. Many storm troopers died when there helmets were ripped off and their throats ripped out by Ewok teeth. They just didn't show that to you in a family movie.

The biggest problems in those scenes are the biggest problems in the entire otherwise incredibly staged battle sequence - the 1980s special effects could not deal with a battle of the scale that was being shown. They couldn't show an entire legion of storm troopers, much less the tens of thousands of Ewoks that had gathered to kill them. They couldn't show a rebel fleet large enough to actually threaten 80 star destroyers. It was considered phenomenal at the time that they had 80 moving objects on screen at the same time using practical effects only. The reality is that both sides had literally hundreds of fighters in that battle. The reality is that the Storm Troopers weren't incompetent, they were just outnumbered in difficult terrain that entirely favored the native population that was heavily adapted to it.

And on top of that, I'm biased by my game world's expectations. I'm running a game in the same era in which the PC's are also criminals and are going into a mission that will also bring them in contact with the Imperial military. Plus, one of the tropes of my game is that despite the fact that many of canon special effects make the universe seem in many ways more primitive than modern reality, it's not actually. The game universe is more real than the special effects. Those computers aren't primitive. Things you see on screen have capabilities exceeding what is available now in 2022.

And one of the things that is cool about 'Andor' is it is combining the aesthetics of the original trilogy with casually displaying that no really, this is a high tech world. I loved every ones datapad in the ISB board room scene was basically a laptop.