ALT Early in A House of Dynamite, Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) arrives in the White House Situation Room to find one of the screens playing news footage rather than relaying situationally-relevant information. “That is not the feed,” Olivia is informed as footage plays of the (one of the recent) California wildfires in Butte County. “Same monitor was acting up yesterday.” This small dramatic beat sets up two big recurring motifs that simmer across A House of Dynamite, the nuclear thriller from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim. The first is that almost nothing works over the course of the film. As a nuclear missile races towards the city of Chicago, the United States’ military apparatus scrambles to overt catastrophe and to clearly identify the source and the cause of this strange attack. This is difficult, as the country’s surveillance mechanisms missed the launch of the missile from somewhere in the Pacific, only picking it up while it was already in flight.

ALT Every once in a while, the complaint surfaces that Andor, which wrapped up its run this week, is not sufficiently Star Wars. While this criticism is often framed somewhat ambiguously, as if it were a self-evident truth that merits no further unpacking, it seems to come down to certain elements that these critics perceive to be missing from Andor: Jedi, Sith, lightsabers, that sort of thing. The implication is that Andor is not one with the Force, and this separates it from Star Wars. This is interesting, because the Force clearly does run through Andor. The show exists on the periphery of “the Skywalker Saga”, the spine of mainstream Star Wars media. The series is a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was itself a prequel to the original Star Wars. As such, the show operates at two levels removed from the 1977 classic. There is a sense in which Andor exists at the very fringes of the narrative established in that original film.