At the end of the day, having watched it as a whole, this series a regrettably mediocre thing overall. It's not offensively bad or "subversive" like certain Disney-era productions, but it offers no actual greatness, either. It has certain highlights, which I've mentioned in previous comments, but it also has certain obvious flaws (which I've also mentioned).
All those things are just elements, though. Specific bits and pieces which are either good or bad. The big problem is with the greater whole. And the fault there lies in the writing.
If you look at what this series is actually about -- its actual story -- you find that it has about enough actual plot for a single film. I wish it were otherwise! In previous comments, I expressed my hope that they were taking it somewhere. Tha, even though the strech of episodes was about twice as long as it had any right to be, they might still justify at least some of the slow build-up by having a pay-off.
There was no such pay-off. Sure, the basic plot things that we knew would happen did indeed happen. But if you edit this entire season down to a single 2-hour film and treat it as the first one in a hypothetical trilogy... then any unbiased audience member would say: "Boy, this first one was all set-up! I sure hope they actually move things forward in the next one!"
And maybe that's acceptable in a film, if you promise to deliver two more. But after eight episodes, that sort of thing is no longer acceptable. At least not to me.
Just like the first four episodes (should have been two), the last three also dragged, Too much filler. These, too, could have been simply two episodes. Not enough happened to justify three. And in fact, even though they gave themselves more run-time than could be justified with this little plot, the actual finale still had some weird, jumpy editing. It almot seems as if they cut out a few actually important transitions, in order to spend more time on ponderous shots that weren't needed.
These are stupid decisions. The result is... mediocrity. This series isn't bad, but it never becomes good, either. It has its moments, but as a whole, it never becomes much of anything.
If you compare this self-indulgent too-much-filler kind of style to the smart and tight plotting and build-up of Andor, the flaws here become utterly glaring. In its tone, Ahsoka feels more like "real Star Wars". If it were trimmed down, so there was actually a good pace, we might be able to appreciate that. But this series lacks commitment and, ultimately, lacks sufficiently intelligent writing. This is a series that barely shows, and mostly tells... and then gives us "informed attributes", at best. We're told Thrawn is brilliant, but he does nothing truly impressive. We hear Thrawn say that Ahsoka will be tactically gifted in an unexpected way, but a scene later, she... charges at the front door, right underneath the Star Destroyer's guns. (Mind you: guns that can hit starfighters going at ludicrous speeds! Ahsoka makes it through on the back of her not-horse, which is obviously orders of magnitude slower than a starfighter, because... uh... plot armour. So she's an idiot who got lucky, and not in any way tactically gifted. And Thrawn is an idiot, too, because he failed to kill her despite her utterly retarded approach.)
We are told characters are smart, but we are shown only that they're kind of dumb. I suspect that, while he can write kid's cartoons with the best of them, Filoni is incapable of writing a character who is a tactical genius, because Filoni himself isn't capable of even emulating tactical brilliance.
If I compare this season to Heir to the Empire, the original story did everything better. It had a tighter plot, it was smarter, it was far better structured, it had an actual ending to its internal arc rather than just being all set-up, and it developed its original characters so that you fully grasped their motivations by the end of the book (and often within a chapter of meeting them).
Which leads me to conclude that this new attempt at that same general kind of story... is just a watered-down imitation. And it could have been a fun "alternative". I didn't set out to dislike this. I wanted it to be good! But it's not. It's mediocre. It has good elements, but not enough of them. Enough not to be bad, but not enough to be good. It could have been far more than it actually ended up being. You can see the good ideas and the great moments that truly work, but those down't manage to compensate for the shortcomings of the series.
This is better than Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett and season 3 of The Mandalorian. But the first two seasons of The Mandalorian are better than this, and Andor is far better than this. This is kind of in the same "flawed but not bad" category as Solo. While Rogue One also kind gets a "meh" from me, it's better than this-- in part because that at least fits all of its story into c. 2 hours.
Anyway, long story short: this should have been the first film in a trilogy, and once cut down to that length, the script should have received several rounds of polishing. Then, the result would have been much better.
