Star Wars: Andor boss explains the ending, loose ends, and the meaning of the show

Andor, a show many Star Wars fans consider to be the best thing to ever come out of the galaxy far far away, ended last night on Disney+. Cassian Andor himself (Diego Luna) ended the series by starting the journey we find him on in the movie Rogue One, which ends (last chance to avoid spoilers) with Cassian successfully stealing the plans for the Death Star but dying in the process. Andor itself was largely about the necessity of sacrifice in the name of rebellion, so it's a fitting end for him.

But the show introduced a new wrinkle. At the very end, we see Cassian Andor's love interest Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) walking through a picturesque field holding a baby. Although Cassian will never know it, the child is his. Bix left Cassian in the previous suite of episodes, afraid that if she stayed he wouldn't be able to fulfill his destiny and dedicate himself fully to the Rebellion. According to showrunner Tony Gilroy, this final revelation helps us understand her choice better.

“I think it does three things for me,” Gilroy told Entertainment Weekly. “It makes the sacrifice that Cassian makes and the fact that he'll never see his child, it just makes it all more painful. I think for anybody who was in doubt about her motives for leaving or sort of said, 'I don't know if I would really leave' — I want to make sure that for anybody who was in doubt [now know] ‘Oh my God, that's why she really left!’ So I wanted do that.”

"More than anything, I wanted to end on hope. I really want to be hopeful at the end of it. It's a very rigorous ride. We've done all kinds of things in this show all the way through, but it would be a crime against nature to not finish with something hopeful, because what else do we have? I mean, we have to have that. And as long as it's not cheesy and not some corny thing, it felt like it was really earned and legit."

Andor is over as a show, but in theory, Cassian and Bix's son could come back in some future project; we know how much Disney loves to stretch things out. While Gilroy doesn't dismiss the possibility out of hand, that wasn't on his mind when he came up with the ending long ago. “It is not just a way of creating another character for Disney and Lucasfilm,” he said. “It's really much more about finishing on an up note and finishing with something that I think all the people who made the show really want to express, which is that in the end, we really do want to be hopeful.”

Dedra Meero consigned to a fate "worse than death"

Call me a sicko, but one of my favorite characters on Andor was diehard Imperial agent Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). In the final trio of episodes, she finally confronts Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), the person perhaps more responsible than any other for starting the Rebellion...only to bungle it. She took Luthen alive, but his surrogate daughter Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) killed him before he could be tortured into revealing secrets, which is definitely what he would have wanted. Kleya's arc may have been the highlight of these last three episodes.

As for Dedra, she is fully thrown under the bus by her superiors and ends up in the same kind of prison where Cassian Andor spent some time in the first season. “It's probably Narkina 7 or Narkina 2,” Gilroy said. “It’s the women's version.” For someone who had dedicated themselves body and soul to the Empire, this ending is tragic, ironic, and maybe grimly hilarious. I felt a lot of feelings.

"[S]he was doing the right thing!” Gilroy exclaimed. “She's actually figured everything out, but she’s inadvertently messed up everything by her ambition...And now she's going to be making the Death Star, isn't she?” Speaking to Vanity Fair, Gilroy called her fate "worse than death. Having been through Narkina, and having written through it and lived through it and sort of inhabited it imaginatively—yeah, it’s worse...[S]he is a daughter of the Empire. She is their ultimate product. She is everything. And look how they’ve treated her. Look where she’s ended up."

Loose ends

Andor ended up being quite the sprawling show. We couldn't check in on everyone in the finale. For instance, what ended up becoming of Mon Mothma's daughter, who was married off as part of a strategic alliance early in the season? "So you’ve probably seen in your life at some point where a child becomes more orthodox — whatever the orthodoxy is — than the parents," Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter. "The parents have broken free from the traditions of their parents, and then their children are like, 'No, I want go back.' I think she’s living a very comfortable country club life on Chandrila. I don’t know how happy she’ll be, but that’s where she is."

Then there's K-2SO, the reprogrammed droid voiced by Alyn Tudyk we first met in Rogue One. K-2SO comes onto the show pretty late in its run, which Gilroy explained was the only option. "[Limiting] K-2SO came from the experience of making Rogue, to be honest with you," he said. "From the very beginning, that was one of the most difficult parts of the original conversation — how long I was going to have to delay [K-2SO]? Because what can you do with him? I don’t want people to go back and diagram Rogue, but just within that movie, there are two or three or four places where we are hiding him — where he has to stay on the ship or can’t go somewhere. He’s a really, really difficult piece of equipment to carry through a story. The limitations on him are huge. He’s a very visible, troublesome piece of story gear. So I knew intuitively how long I would have to wait to do it."

"[K-2SO] is fantastic and he’s funny. Tudyk is hysterical and it’s really great. We were like, ‘OK, we’re going to [have him in the show] and let’s make it spectacular and let’s really make a thing out of it.’ And that’s what we’ve tried to do."

A different kind of Star Wars show

Andor did a lot of things that no Star Wars movie or show had done before. There was a complete lack of Jedis and lightsabers and that sort of thing. It asked hard questions about what it takes to resist tyranny and explored them with subtlety. A lot of people have watched Andor and seen parallels with the rise of authoritarianism in our own world, although Gilroy maintains that he was aiming for something more universal. "The repeating patterns of revolution and authoritarianism, and all of the attendant things that go with that, they just replicate," he told Variety. "Our show is about what happens when history comes knocking on your door, and if people find history knocking at their door, there’s probably all kinds of places they can look for references. We just happen to be the pick of the litter this week."

In a lot of ways, Andor didn't feel much like Star Wars to me. How did Gilroy and his team get away with making something so different? Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy let them. "She has protected the show and protected me and wrangled a team together," Gilroy said. "When we started challenging Kathy, Kathy just kept saying yes. 'Oh, I’m going to put the first scene in a brothel.' 'Okay.' 'I’m going to have them kill two cops.' 'Okay.' 'We want the production designer from Chernobyl.' 'Okay, good idea.' She backed our play and got everything that we were doing. We’ve been through everything, she and I, on this—all the good and all the bad. There’s no show without her. For all the shit that she takes online, it’s just insane. This show exists because she forced it to happen. What a tough job she has, man."

The gamble has paid off. The only real criticism I have of Andor is that I would have liked more. Even celebrities like Nathan Fillion are offering up free praise for the show on the red carpet:

"I just finished Andor. Really, really good television, fantastic Star Wars comfort food, no lightsabers, no magical Force, no Jedis, just: what does it take for an Empire to silence the people that would stand against them? How do they take control? It's dark, it's beautiful, it's scary, it's high stakes, and [has] really really wonderful performances."

It's a show worth watching. Both seasons of Star Wars: Andor are available to stream now on Disney+.

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