Star Wars: Andor is a prequel to the movie Rogue One, about the Rebellion's attempts to steal the plans for the Death Star. The movie was successful, but was a bit of a side story — few big name characters showed up, there were no lightsaber fights, etc. When Disney announced they were making a prequel TV series, I wondered if it would be worth the time. I was an idiot. Andor it the best thing to come out of the Star Wars franchise in years.
What distinguishes Andor is that it feels like a Star Wars show that's truly made with a mature audience in mind. That doesn't mean it can't have jokes or levity, but it has real things on its mind: fascism, rebellion, the prison-industrial complex, etc. The hero characters can be unsavory and the villain characters sympathetic. In a big franchise like Star Wars, sometimes you get the idea that the producers will hang some iconic bauble in front of the audience and trust that'll be enough to satisfy them. Andor goes further and takes us somewhere we haven't been before.
You can see that seriousness at work in the new trailer for season 2, which comes out next month. There are real things at risk here; characters like Cassian Andor are willing to die in the fight against the Empire, and if you've seen Rogue One, you know that's not an empty commitment.
Speaking to Gizmodo, showrunner Tony Gilroy certainly sounds dedicated to his vision. “We would never add anybody for fun. We’re not going to add anybody for a smile or a wink or anything like that. There’s nothing in there that’s some juicy tidbit just for the hell of it. Everything has to be organic,” he said. “That’s been our attitude all the way through: not to be cynical, and to take it more seriously than anybody ever took it. Even while we’re changing—some people feel as though it’s changing a lot—but even while we’re changing the grammar of what you can do, we’re trying very rigorously to be more serious about this shit than anybody ever has been.”
How Star Wars: Andor went from five seasons to two
So Gilroy is serious about the show, but that doesn't mean he hasn't had to change things and make compromises. Originally, his plan was for Andor to run for five seasons. But in the middle of filming season 1, the plans changed; the upcoming second season will be the show's last.
What exactly happened? Gilroy isn't specific, but it sounds like a combination of him realizing that five seasons was too many and Disney giving him some new marching orders. He rolled with it. To hear Gilroy tell it, we're lucky that Disney signed off on a second season at all. “It was actually the critical success of the release of the show, and the response—and the passion of the response, even though it wasn’t an overwhelming, we didn’t crush the audience at first—but that passion really helped Disney get to the point to start funding the second season,” he said. “Which we were just about to start shooting, because the alternative was to just not do it.”
The second season will be dividing into four chapters of three episodes each, with a lot of time passing between each chapter. This is different from the first season, which followed Cassian's journey from selfish loner to committed revolutionary over a relatively short period of time. That may not have been the shape Gilroy original wanted for the series, but he found ways to adapt.
"[I]f I was going to design this in a perfect world, I would spend one year on [Cassian’s] education and the transformation into a revolutionary. I think that one season really fits that way, and I would stick with what we did on the way out, because it just, energy-wise...I don’t really have anything else to say about it," he said. "[T]he narrative opportunity of telling a story where you drop in a year later, you leave all the negative space and you just hit like a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then you drop a year and come back for another three days, is so exciting.”
"In the end, it turns out to be just this really thrilling, again, saying it’s a challenge makes it seem more like a game, but it was just a gas to do it this way. I wouldn’t do it any differently."
The compressed timeframe means that there are a lot of big events teed up for season 2, including the Ghorman Massacre, which is a major inciting event for the Rebellion. "There’s not one single thing that’s written about it, nobody knows what it is, so we’ll define all that," Gilroy said. "I have Mon Mothma leaving the Senate, her big moment to leave, that’s on my calendar. K-2SO has to arrive, and we have to deliver enough espionage, and enough intrigue, and enough information about this mysterious energy project that leads to the exploration that’s going to happen in Rogue One. So we actually have a mystery there at the end that has to be really solved. And again, not unlike trying to tie what I was trying to do at the end of season one with Ferrix, but as the puppeteer, I’m trying to get everybody I can involved as much as possible in all that.”
The first three episodes of the second and final season of Star Wars: Andor will drop on Disney+ on Tuesday, April 22. The other chapters will also be released all at once, so that's three episodes per week until the 12-episode season is over.
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