The first season of Star Wars: Andor traced the development of lead character Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) from a loner mercenary to a dedicated freedom fighter willing to join the rebellion against the Empire. By the time of the movie Rogue One, he's one of the rebellion's star players. The second and final season of Andor will show us how he gets to that point.
"When we meet him, it's a year later, and he's all in," Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy told Entertainment Weekly. "Luthen is a really great talent scout, a great agent and teacher as well. Cassian's utility, how far can he go? We know how far he's going to go in Rogue. By the time he gets to Rogue he can do anything. He's a master. So, there'll be espionage. There'll be leadership. There'll be all kinds of new educational tests for him along the way, and that will also challenge his relationship with Luthen and everyone else."
"He has a lot of things to learn to be the guy that we're going to see in Rogue, who's the all singing, all dancing, ultimate warfighter. The person that the Council on Yavin is willing to send on the most important mission they have. To get to that point, he still has a lot to learn."
Like the first season, the second season of Andor is structured in three-episode blocks, with each block telling its own story. In season 2, each of those blocks will take place over a different year as the story rockets through time. Originally, Gilroy and company were planning for this show to run five seasons. But he doesn't see the reduced time frame as a problem.
"If time was unlimited and money was unlimited, and we could have done the 5 seasons that we planned on in the beginning, I don't think it would be better at all," he said. "I can't think of a better way to lay it out than what we lucked into. Because the idea that it takes a year and 12 episodes for him to evolve into a revolutionary, it really needed all of that room for that."
"But as we go forward, it's emotionally powerful; it's narratively powerful; it adds to the adventure of the story; it intensifies all the romantic entanglements to have these year-long negative gaps in between and to land for just a very specific moment. It's three or four days each time we land. That has an intensification factor on all of those things in a way that I never anticipated. I've never worked on anything like that. When we brought it into the room, everyone was very suspicious. But it was really exciting to do. It's like cooking a sauce down where you just get down to the roux."
How the release schedule is different for Andor season 2
I'm glad Gilroy has a good attitude about this, but I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say I would've loved to see more seasons of this show. Andor has turned into what many fans consider the best Star Wars show Disney+ has yet produced. It feels different from anything we've seen in the universe — it's more mature, grittier and more serious — while still having its roots firmly planted in Star Wars soil.
Also, the writing is airtight, the look fantastic and the performances immaculate. So it's a bit of a disappointment that Disney feels like it's rushing the second season out the door. In the first season, Disney+ released one new episode per week. This time, the episodes will drop in blocks of three, so the whole thing will be over in a month.
"We heard about that as we finished," Gilroy told Collider about the new release schedule. "We finished the show in November. We finaled the show in November, so we really had to wait for Skeleton Crew. It's a Disney decision. There's an internal logic behind it. They have their reasons. It's kind of cool. I mean, it puts a burden on podcasters. What are they going to do? It's a movie a week, you know?"
No one has a "harder road" than Mon Mothma in Andor season 2
But at least we can count on that month to give us some excellent TV. Cassian will obviously be at the center of things, but Gilroy promises lots of drama for the other characters as well. "Cassian is sort of Star Wars Jesus running through there—this messianic character running through the middle," the showrunner said. "We know that story, and it has its own complexities. But, really, I think the surprising and shocking, emotional punch will come from from the collateral damage and triumph of the people all around him."
Take the character of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), for instance, the head of the Rebel Alliance at this early stage. He was a hugely popular character from the first season, but also slippery and hard to pin down. "I think of him as a start-up CEO," Gilroy said. "Some guy who built a business in his garage. For 15 years, he built the revolution in his garage. He and Kelya. Then, in Aldhani in season 1, they went public, and now they're out there. Now, for the next four years, how do you scale your company up? It's multinational. How do you scale your little business that was so successful in your garage and build it out? And if your business is based on on secrecy and paranoia, how hard is that to do, and how well are you going to play with others? And how welcoming are you going to be to new ideas? Those are all those are all going to be the friction for him in this second half. He has one speed, and that is to make this all happen. He'd do anything for the revolution. Anything."
Then there's Mon Mothma, the Imperial politician who is working with the Rebels on the sly. "Canonically, there's the moment where she leaves the Senate, and that's in our timeline," Gilroy said. "So we're definitely dealing with that, but I would say, of all the characters in the show, of all the hellacious things that people go through, and all of the difficulties and hardships, I don't think anybody has a harder road than she does. Because she has to do everything that everybody else does with all the tension, fear, and anxiety and she has to do it in public."
"She has nowhere to hide, and this season just ramps that up to an almost unbearable point. What Genevieve is going to do in this second season — we realized in the first season what a brilliant actress she was and that we hadn't found the limits of what she could do. We still haven't found them. But he opportunity to write for her and write her story large was very important to me in the second season."
We'll also see favorites from Rogue One get introduced, like K-2SO, the human-hating droid played by Alan Tudyk. Gilroy assures fans there's a good narrative reason he hasn't come into the story until this point, but isn't sharing details.
Prepare for the Ghorman Massacre
Whatever the reason is, I trust it will make sense, because Gilroy and his team have been very careful about timelines and internal consistency. That will surely make fans happy as the second season gears up to depict one of the most horrific events in Star Wars lore: the Ghorman Massacre, where Stormtroopers slaughtered thousands of peaceful protesters Ghorman for objecting to the Empire’s taxation policies and preventing Captain Wilhuff Tarkin’s ship from landing on the planet. The massacre is considered a turning point in the Rebellion. You can catch glimpses of the scene in the featurette above.
"Ghorman, interestingly, is canonical but completely undescribed," Gilroy said. "It's a total blank slate. There's also a bit of confusion about the Ghorman Massacre, and what is the Ghorman Massacre? There's a lot of confusion within canon. So, it was an opportunity to rebuild in a really significant way. It's a very significant part of our show that can do a lot of different things for us. Quite honestly, it's very expensive to build, so we really want to use it as much as possible soit carries over five different episodes. I'm really confident that the really deep, passionate Star Wars community will appreciate how we've straightened out that story."
While Star Wars has always had its serious side, depicting a massacre is a level of serious the franchise has usually stayed away from. And yet there seems to be a huge appetite for that sort of unbracing look at the ugliness of tyranny. Collider suggests that Star Wars: Andor feels especially relevant at a time when war is becoming more common and visible around the world, but Gilroy insists he isn't trying to comment on the news of the day.
"I've been a student of history, as an amateur, a dinner table historian all this time, and it's nothing but revolutions and uprisings and people being swept up into events that they weren't ready for and people assuming heroic roles that they had never anticipated," Gilroy said. "One of the really cool things about doing this show is the opportunity to use all the 3:00 in the morning reading I've wasted over my life to do that. So, it's not trying to rhyme with anything…"
"The sorry truth is—here’s a cliche—history repeats itself. So, I want to make the show timeless, I suppose."
Star Wars: Andor boss doesn't want to feed "the f**king robots"
Originally, there were plans to release scripts for the episodes of Star Wars: Andor. But Gilroy had a change of heart on that score. "I wanted to do it. We put it together. It's really cool. I've seen it, I loved it," he explained. "AI is the reason we're not. In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it's just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the f***ing robots anymore than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses."
The first three episodes of Star Wars: Andor season 2 drop on Tuesday, April 22 on Disney+. There are 12 episodes in all. If you want to refresh yourself (or recommend the show to people), the first three episodes from season 1 are available to watch for free now on YouTube (they're also available on Hulu).
For everyone else, we have a month and change to wait. "If I don't make you cry, I will be very unhappy," Gilroy said. I wouldn't have it any other way.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.