Some of my nerdier friends don’t like it when I refer to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as “the only good Star War”. It’s mostly a joke, but the fact is – that’s the only Star Wars film I’ve been able to watch more than once, and it’s the only one that I feel has something to say politically. Now that we’ve got Andor, though, Rogue One feels mostly superseded – its dialogue and politics are cartoonish in comparison to the, y’know, actually good tv show.

I’ll talk about Andor in a separate post, because this one’s not really about either. I just wanted to set up the reason I ended up recently listening to Going Rogue, a six-episode limited podcast by film writer Tansy Gardam about the long, arduous journey of how the movie got produced and released.

It’s a research-based podcast, so there are no new revelations that weren’t publicly known, but Gardam does a great job of corralling and collating all the available information, with some amazing sound bites and nuggets from people involved in the production. It’s also a very well-structured podcast, and worth listening whether you’re familiar with Star Wars, film production, screenwriting and so on. In fact, if you aren’t, Gardam gives you good insights on film editing, ADR, screenwriting credits and the like.

Over the course of six episodes, it gets much clearer why the movie looks and feels the way it does, starting from the so-called “Deadwood in Space” idea for Star Wars: Underworld to the various versions of this concept (“How did they get the Death Star plans?”) and where it would fit within the universe.

I am, I must say, much better disposed to the movie than Gardam is, but most of her observations about the erratic nature of the film and the strange passivity of its nominal protagonist are spot-on, and honestly, make me even more fond of the movie that got made despite all these issues.

This podcast came onto my radar because Gardam is currently midway through a second series called Going Solo, about the execrable Han Solo film. And while I like this movie much less, the podcast about it is still an entertaining listen.

You’ll find both series on the same feed, by going here.