🍿 The first “prestige” show in Star Wars history has arrived

Wednesday

Sept 21 2022

Rebellions are built on hope…

For a certain type of person, there’s never been a better time to be a Star Wars fan. After all, we just got back-to-back TV shows about Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, two of the most beloved characters George Lucas ever created. But for anyone hoping for more grounded storytelling in the Star Wars galaxy or (dare I say it?) a movie, it’s been a rough few years. If you were starting to give up hope, we’ve got some good news.

Andor might just be the best Star Wars show ever made thanks to its reliance on practical effects, methodical storytelling, and a sprawling cast of characters who feel more like real people than mythological archetypes. Today on Inverse you’ll find our review along with interviews with the cast and explainers on some of the most interesting changes Andor is bringing to this galaxy far away.

Sadly, you’ll have to wait a little longer for that new Star Wars movie, though.

What's New

Review

Star Wars

Andor is the first “prestige” show in Star Wars history

Andor might be the first prestige Star Wars show ever made.

Yes, we’re aware that The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi exist — not to mention The Clone Wars and Rebels — but Andor is doing something different. It’s borrowing its ideas from the golden era of television, and in the process, it could be ushering in a new age of Star Wars as we know it.

The series follows Rogue One breakout star Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). But he’s a far cry from the confident rebel spy we watched sacrifice his life for the cause in 2015. Here, Cassian is a different man on a much simpler mission. He’s trying to track down his sister, and he’s not about to let his own morals get in the way.

Read our review

Inverse Interview

Star Wars

Andor redefines a popular Star Wars character in "disturbing" new ways

“Andor is the story of a refugee,” Diego Luna tells Inverse.

The heart and soul of Andor is, of course, the rebel spy Cassian Andor himself. The series covers his journey from a selfish vagabond to a selfless hero who pays the ultimate price. For Luna, that meant creating a new version of the character with an entirely different worldview, and one ripped from everything he finds comfortable.

“He's been forced to move and leave everything behind more than once you can tell,” Luna says. “He ends up finding a way to regroup and start again.”

“We know what he's capable of,” the actor continues, “but how far can we go? How far can we go in a man that has lost faith in himself and his community?”

The answer, apparently, is incredibly far. With 24 episodes ahead of it, Andor has its work cut out in order to turn Cassian into the man we met in Rogue One.

Not good

Space

NASA discovers a problem with the Webb Telescope

NASA detected a problem with its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the agency announced on Tuesday, and as a result, it had to put a slate of observations on pause.

JWST observes the Universe like never before, and its breathtaking first images and data are clear indicators of its prowess. To do this, it draws information across multiple wavelengths of light. Scientists rely on any number of the 17 observational modes on JWST to pool information from great distances, which helps them to reconstruct a picture of what is happening far, far away.

But NASA announced in a JWST blog post that one of these modes — found on an instrument designed to be “beyond anything that has been available to astronomers to date” — is not working properly.

Learn more

RIGHT STUFF

Science

New study shows one of Saturn’s icy moons may be extremely habitable

You need more than water to support life, and a recent model suggests that Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus could have the right stuff.

NASA’s late Cassini spacecraft didn’t find evidence of a key ingredient for life in the giant space geysers erupting from Enceladus, an ocean-world moon of Saturn, but planetary scientist Jihua Hao (of the University of Science and Technology of China) and his colleagues say their computer models of the icy moon’s geology and chemistry suggest it could be there anyway.

They published their results in a recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rockets

Innovation

SpaceX Starship passes a critical test

SpaceX’s giant rocket to Mars and beyond could take its first orbital flight sometime within the next year — but questions around where it will fly from caused delays in the company’s planning applications. Now, we know that the company may launch Starships from either the SpaceX Starbase in Texas (which has prompted controversy) or NASA’s Cape Canaveral in Florida.

On Monday, SpaceX successfully fired seven engines on the Starship Super Heavy prototype’s “Booster 7” at its Boca Chica, Texas Starbase. This was the highest number of their new Raptor engines ever tested simultaneously, marking another crucial step toward Starship’s deployment.

The fully-reusable ship could be the key to achieving CEO Elon Musk’s dream of a city on Mars, but it will depend on how it performs in upcoming tests. A flight to orbit, previously expected to take place in 2021, could now take place sometime within the next year, Musk said on Twitter last month.

Learn more

Meanwhile...

New study links extreme heat to harassment at work

Mars lander uses seismic data to locate meteorite impact craters for the first time ever

DC’s most underrated movie of all time is on Netflix

'House of the Dragon' Episode 6 trailer solves the show’s biggest cliffhanger yet

Today in history: English writer J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was published September 21, 1937.

Song of the day: "September," Earth, Wind & Fire

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