I was up very early, as I’ve been doing, and I needed to sketch something, again, as I’ve been doing. So I drew the Lego AT-ST, in that gray paper sketchbook I haven’t drawn in since those early pandemic days, using the fountain pen that I’ve just started using again for the first time in a few years. This October has been a bit annoying and I’ve generally been feeling a bit stressed, and that has actually led to me sketching more. Hooray for being busy and stressed out! Anyway. I love Star Wars, by the way. I really enjoyed the Ahsoka show – slow start, I was getting irritated by all the arm folding and long pauses in the dialogue, but it all picked up. A few unresolved threads in there I felt but it was great seeing Anakin especially in Clone Wars form. Thrawn was exactly as hoped. I loved that it was genuinely a sequel to the last season of Rebels, the animated show I really loved. (I was a huge fan of Clone Wars too, and enjoyed Bad Batch; that revisited final season of Clone Wars was maybe one of my favourite Star Wars things). The fight choreography in Ahsoka was a lot better, though it’s easier to animate two-handed lightsabre fighting than to act it. still the lightsabres looked a lot less like glowsticks than in some previous Disney + shows. Speaking of, I could have a lot to say, but life’s too short, and I am awake in the middle o the night after an unexpected 3:30am wake-up. Mandalorian – I liked the first season, though it left me a little cold (a bit too style over substance); the second season I enjoyed a lot more with some great characters showing up, and had the best ending; the third season, sheesh, what the hell was that episode with Jack Black, honestly awful. Book of Boba Fett – started ok, got progressively shitter, and ended so terribly, but the slow chase scene on those ridiculous colourful mopeds was a low point for Star Wars until that Jack Black episode in Mando 3. I loved Obi-Wan Kenobi, sure there were a few choices that went the wrong way but on the whole it was a well planned out show (there were no episodes where we took a break from all the characters and spent an hour on some other story about a boring guy getting a desk job – FFS, Disney Star Wars) and it was a series that I really enjoyed. But I’m a massive Revenge of the Sith fan. And then there is Andor, a show with some beautiful moments, but was Too. Bloody. Long. And Too. Bloody. Boring. Star Wars for people who don’t actually like Star Wars. If it had dropped all at once like Netflix, instead of very slow weekly episodes that didn’t have proper endings, and you could watch it all together, it might – might – have been more enjoyable. Too many characters, too slow scenes, very hard to care about anyone at all (with the notable exception of Andy Serkis’s character), especially not the title character who was so uninteresting I thought his name was ‘and/or’, it was a show that if it didn’t have ‘Star Wars’ on the title would probably be a lot better off, but people like me would not have watched it. Honestly I watched it all, but my family took to skipping episodes (especially those ‘middle of the story’ ones) and I didn’t even have to recap, because there was nothing to recap. All those episodes, I was wondering if there was an editor’s strike or something. Too many not very interesting British actors playing side characters acting in that very boring way you see on the worst kind of ITV drama, and do you really need to see how someone gets from one place to another every single time, sat on the bus with them, walking across that hill, dudes this is Star Wars and we have places to go. And then there is Cyril. I know that isn’t how they spelled it, but they have a guy called Cyril who loses his job, obsesses about a woman in uniform (who takes pills to pull all-nighters working on solving a case like in all the serious detective dramas), goes home to live with his mum, eats bowls of cereal in her kitchen while she badgers him about a job she can get him with his uncle or something, and he gets that job and sits at a desk in a cubicle in a big office, and obsesses about the woman in uniform he fancies and about ‘and/or’ he wants to get back at – who wrote this show, Morrisey? This isn’t Star Wars, it’s a low budget Channel 4 drama set in the north of England that occasionally says the word ‘space’ or ’emperor Palpatine’ when it is nudged and remembers to. And people on the internet love it, they’re all “it’s my favourite Star Wars!”, because they don’t want kids shows, they want serious and slow and dark and grown-up (and people called Cyril who eat cereal and work in a cubicle), and that’s fine, keep it, and if you like it good for you, it’s good to like things, I like a lot of things I’m sure you hate (like the Phantom Menace), but Andor is only Star Wars because it says it is. Anyway enough of all that, I’m going back to bed.