Star Wars easter eggs you may have missed in Andor

One of the biggest complaints regarding the new Star Wars spinoff shows and movies has been the lack of new content: few to no new planets to explore, too many repeat characters, too many ties to the Skywalker legacy, too much fan service. It’s no surprise that when Star Wars: Andor was announced, half of the fan base rolled their eyes and sighed in distress; did we need another Star Wars show about a character we’d already met in the movies, set before the conclusion of a story we already knew?

As it ends up, yes. With season 1 good and wrapped, Andor has a 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and countless positive reviews from critics and viewers alike. It’s gotten praise for being original, gritty, and showing a different side of the Star Wars universe. The show paints the Empire a fascistic machine run by intelligent, cunning, and strategic bureaucrats. They’re scarier than they ever were when staffed by clumsy Stormtroopers.

But while it blazed new trails, showrunner Tony Gilroy still found room to give Star Wars fans some sweet doses of nostalgia along the way with some perfectly placed easter eggs. Let’s discuss some of these below. BEWARE OF SPOILERS!

5 BBY

We see this subtitle pop in the first few moments of the pilot episode. This is a nod to to the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope, released in 1977. “BBY” stands for “Before the Battle of Yavin,” the decisive Rebel win over the Empire where the Death Star was destroyed. So when Andor starts, we’re five years before this turning point. We may not have a lot of prominent cameos on this show, but the writers still take to situate it within the greater context of the Star Wars universe.

Separatist symbol in Kenari

Early in the show, we get a flashback to when a young Cassian Andor was living on the planet of Kenari with other orphan children. A group of them investigate a crashed spacecraft that was carrying some type of biochemical weapon. The symbol of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, or simply the Separatists, is on the uniform of of the people inside. However, when Cassian’s future foster mother Maarva arrives on the scene to scavenge for parts, she claims that the ship is operated by the Repubilc.

As we remember from the Star Wars prequel series, the Separatists were the enemy of the Republic in the days before the rise of the Empire. However, the Republic Senator Palpatine was actually puppeteering the Separatist leadership the whole time, using the threat they represented to increase his own power.

So how does that answer the question of why Maarva would look at people bearing the Separatist symbol and call them Republic officers? Dork Side of the Force writer Ephraim McFarland has a theory that the ship was manned by Republic officers disguised as Separatist soldiers, and that they were on their way to use the biochemical weapon they were carrying on a Separatist planet, crushing the morale of true believers in the movement. According to this theory, it was all ordered at the behest of Senator Palpatine, who was then rapidly consolidating power towards the end of the Clone Wars. As for why exactly the ship went down and how Maarva was able to figure this out, those may be questions for another day.