UPPER TIERS TELLY TALK: ANDOR & THE LAST OF US

Ay-yi-yi! I seem to be writing a lot about telly at the moment. But – hey – why not? There’s good telly on right now.

This will be dripping with spoilers for The Last of Us and Andor. So avoid if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Firstly: The Last of Us season 2, episode 2. They wasted no time getting to THAT moment, the big inciting incident from the game. The one that many fans hated to the point that they issued death threats to the game’s creators AND the actress who played Abby. You know: because they’re idiots. 

If you don’t know and don’t care about spoilers: it’s the moment where Joel dies. 

It was fascinating to look at the online reaction from people not familiar to the game. Loads of them were saying they’d never watch it again, that they'd ruined it.. Loads of them said it came too soon. But they’re missing the point of Joel’s death: he has to die – and early – for the story they want to tell to work. It’s that which motivates Ellie’s arc from that point on. You can’t delay it, you can’t soften it, or remove it, without it weakening that story or dramatically changing the narrative.

For me, it was – in both game and show – one of the boldest, bravest, and most brilliant moves I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction. To kill one of your two lead characters that early on – and out of choice, not because the actor wanted to leave – shows incredible skill and thoughtfulness. It’s not done for shock value, but in service to the story.

And then to put is us the role of Abby – the character who killed Joel! – is borderline genius. Of course many people won’t like it, because they saw The Last of Us as a shooty-shoot-shoot videogame rather than a story. They don’t want to think about the real world beyond their joypad. And that’s fine. Not for everyone. Whatever. But I absolutely stand by the right of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman to tell the story they wanted to tell. 

It hits slightly differently in the series, because in the game I interpreted it as a way to get players to think about their actions in the previous instalment. We go through slaughtering all these no-name NPCs, and it’s utterly detached from reality. As gamers, we’re densensitised to violence to a degree, but The Last of Us Part 2 tries to stop us in our tracks, and becomes an examination of the consequences of such actions.

They did something similar in the underrated Spec Ops: The Line, which starts like any other first-person shooter, and then becomes a meditation on the horrors of war. Amazing game.

In the TV show, however – in 2025 – it’s hard not to see it as a condemnation of the way violence (especially on the scale of Gaza or Ukraine) can become a cycle of death and destruction. It has – not entirely by design – become a reflection of the world as it is now. Searingly relevant. 

Likewise Andor, but we’ll get to that. 

And Joel's death made Sanja cry, which made me feel better about getting upset over the game. I don’t think I got emotional when it happened – because I think I’d read spoilers online - but I did when he fell off that balcony in the first game and got impaled. I’ve said it before, but these are the best-realised characters ever in a video game. And, likewise, they’re just so well-acted, and so well-written, in the TV show. It all feels effortless, when I’m sure it was nothing of the sort, the way they make you care. 

One thing I will say is I really admired the restraint over the killing of Joel. It was kept mostly off-screen (I read an interview with the director who said he had no interest in showing too much).

It would’ve been wrong to have Walking Dead-levels of gore in a commentary on retribution and violence itself; it was enough to imply a lot, and for Joel to die. We don’t need to see his head being split open for it to be effective. I tire of the sort of gore-porn we’re flooded with now on our screens. Show the consequences, by all means, but please don’t revel in it.

So. Andor. And! Or?

ANDOR THE REST

I woke up early, because I’ve got work to do, but I wanted to watch the first three episodes – all dropped at once – before I began.

I mean, it’s just the best Star Wars. Again. Utterly, utterly, utterly brilliant. 

Given that its creator Tony Gilroy isn’t a Star Wars fan, it’s astonishing how much world-building it manages to pack into those three episodes.

They feel more real, more rich, more lived-in than the entirety of the sequel trilogy. As a kid, I wanted to live in the Star Wars universe, because it felt like a real place. By Return of the Jedi it had lost that. The Prequels were all Queens and Jedi, and so there was nobody in those films living what felt like a real life. And the Sequels… I mean, I enjoyed The Force Awakens, but they also lacked that relatability.

And they killed Luke Skywalker, which - unlike Joel dying - I didn't approve of. I mean, it would've been fine if he'd had a chance to actually do anything before they bumped him off, and hadn't hyped his return to the hills. But anyway.

Andor feels utterly like a distillation of what spoke to me when I first saw Star Wars – and Season 2 has even managed to make me laugh a couple of times! Turns out it wasn’t lightsabers and The Force that appealed: I mainly liked the beaten-up spaceships, and people living their lives in a universe that was like ours - but not quite.

And man… Andor Season 2 is, by a quirk of timing, shockingly like our universe right now. These first three episodes were filmed over the past couple of years, yet they deal with undocumented immigrants, fake news and the control of media, and the demonisation of certain demographic groups. 

Tony Gilroy said he studied how fascism has worked throughout history in his research for Season 1, and he has managed to predict where we the world seems to be heading - because they always use the same playbook. I don’t know if anyone will actually be shaken out of their stupor by this, but it’s incredibly hard-hitting. 

It also deals with how ordinary people will just stand by and allow fascism to happen through inaction, and their own self-interest – as well as the sacrifice of those who dare to stand up. It’s proper, grown-up, telly. And it's Star Wars!!

It feels kind of relevant to me right now, because that recent Digi video where we talk about whether history is repeating – and show historic examples of fascism in the US, and how it’s often driven by capitalism – not only got us reported to YouTube for “disinformation”, but lost us a bunch of subscribers. People don’t want to hear this stuff; we get it.

But I couldn't, in all good conscience, not share it once I learned it. History repeats. Sanja has been sharing shorts from the video, and every time one went up we lost more subs.

We're literally the worst businesspeople in the world. But anyway. That's another issue.

They signal the maturity early on in Andor Season 2 with what must be the first use of “Shit!” in a Star Wars project. How much better received would The Rise of Skywalker been if the opening crawl had started that way?

“The dead speak! The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, a threat of REVENGE in the sinister voice of the late EMPEROR PALPATINE. Holy shit!”

Plus, the final episode of the three has an attempted rape. Like The Last of Us, it’s not gratuitous, but – again – shows how power gets abused. They’re brave enough to call it out for what it is; there’s no ambiguity, or dancing around it. It’s spoken aloud and given name, as it should be. 

And yet, so much of Andor is about restraint. There’s little in the way of exposition. So much is done with a glance, or a subtle change of expression. It makes it so much more impactful as a result.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how both these shows manage to deal with huge topics that are deeply relevant, and not compare their approach to how Doctor Who keeps trying to do the same sort of thing.

Sledgehammers might get the job done - certainly, Russell T Davies has the largest sledgehammer of all (and he's got a megaphone attached to it). But, while the underlying politics might the same, Andor and The Last of Us use precision forensics by comparison.

And they stand to get way more done as a result.

Paul