Entertainment
The galaxy is watching! How Andor connects to a history of protest
The galaxy far, far away just watched a massacre on Andor. But did it understand what it saw — and will viewers in our galaxy?
Andor season 2, episode 8, ‘Who Are You?’ isn’t just the darkest moment in the show; it may be the darkest moment the Star Wars franchise has ever seen. Stormtroopers on Ghorman, a prosperous planet with a mineral the Empire needs to build its Death Star, attack a square full of defenseless protestors. This draws rebels into a firefight where both sides are looking for a propaganda victory.
Before the slaughter comes an excruciating buildup. Courageous protesters gather in the square, already the site of a previous Imperial massacre, chanting “We are the Ghor! The galaxy is watching!” And they have good reason to think so. The events are apparently being covered live by a handful of galactic journalists — although as Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy confirms, those journalists are working for the Empire’s Ministry of Enlightenment.
“They’re there to sell the story” of a phony attack by rebels on an Imperial depot, Gilroy says. Later, we see them focus their reporting on “Imperial martyrs” — dead Stormtroopers and Imperial employees, basically. RIP Syril, who almost figured out what his bosses were up to, never getting to answer Cassian’s question (the episode title). And RIP Ghorman itself, victim of what Senator Mon Mothma later calls a “genocide.”
Where does ‘the galaxy is watching’ come from?
But what about that iconic (and ultimately ironic) phrase, “the galaxy is watching?” If you hear an echo of a phrase from protests closer to home, “the whole world is watching,” that’s exactly what Gilroy intended.
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“It’s universal enough that I can use it,” Gilroy says, citing its usage by protestors during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 — when NYPD officers conducted one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history.
In fact, the chant goes further back than that and may originate with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. Bob Dylan did some of the popularizing, using it as a line in a song on his seminal 1964 protest album “The Times They Are a-Changing.”
Historically, the most famous use of “the whole world is watching” was by anti-Vietnam War protesters outside the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. The protestors were correct; the event was being carried live by U.S. networks and picked up around the globe.
But as on Ghorman, it didn’t end well. The world’s observation didn’t stop National Guardsmen and Chicago PD from attacking with clubs. And it didn’t stop the nation’s most famous journalist, Walter Cronkite, from having to apologize on national TV to the mayor of Chicago for calling his security forces what they clearly were: thugs.
Connecting Andor to anti-Vietnam protests also puts Gilroy in line with the origins of Star Wars itself. Lucas, who was set to direct the hard-hitting Vietnam picture Apocalypse Now before choosing his space fantasy passion project instead, fully intended the Empire to represent the U.S. military in Vietnam — defeated by technologically inferior forces.
And as dark as ‘Who Are You?’ is, it’s not the first genocide we’ve seen in what is often considered a franchise for children. As Tony Gilroy points out, there are two mind-bogglingly large genocides in the original Star Wars — the Death Star’s annihilation of Princess Leia’s home planet, and the destruction of the Death Star with millions of lives aboard.
“You know, there were no cameras on Alderaan,” Gilroy notes wryly. “I guess it’s in keeping with our show — if you keep the camera down on the ground instead of in space, you feel it more.”
Entertainment
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Credit: BJ’s Wholesale Club
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Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
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