Andor, the Rogue One prequel series that debuted on Disney+ back in 2022, is not just my favorite Star Wars title of all time. It’s actually one of my personal favorite streaming TV series released in the last several years. I could go on about the show — starring Diego Luna as Rebel Alliance member Cassian Andor — forever, thanks in part to the way it took a Star Wars story and gave it real-world resonance. Andor, in other words, may be set in a galaxy far, far away, but it also contains a warning about the dangers of fascism that’s relevant to the here and now.
Until we get a specific return date, we’re expecting Andor Season 2 to air sometime in the first quarter of 2025 — a wait that feels interminable for us fans, but the good news is we at least have some new insight about what the forthcoming season will entail. And because the writing for Andor Season 1 was so fantastic (like Maarva’s funeral speech and Luthen’s “What do I sacrifice?” monologue, for starters), I’m pretty eager to see how the following plays out:
It has to do with the fact that Season 2 will be the last for Andor and will finish linking it to Rogue One (which, by extension, was a prequel to the very first Star Wars movie). Rather than give us a straightforward season in the form of a collection of episodes with one overarching link, Andor is basically going to use some storytelling trickery to cram more than one season’s worth of content into Season 2.
Speaking during a panel event at ACE Superhero Comic Con 2024, Luna explained how it will work. “At the very beginning before we even started, we thought we were going to manage to do multiple seasons,” Luna told attendees. “And then the first season took two and a half years of our lives.”
Luna continued by explaining the creative solution that showrunner Tony Gilroy came up with.
“So, we said, ‘There’s no way we can do five seasons of this. I’ll be with my cane pretending to be on my way to Rogue One.’ Tony came up with a great idea of doing four blocks, and each block is a year before Rogue One.”
In other words, we’re going to get four separate three-episode arcs, each of which will apparently move the story forward a year (to save particularly Luna from getting too much older than he was when he filmed Rogue One). What’s more, each separate arc will be written and directed by different people, giving them all a distinct feel — almost as if they’re separate (albeit small-scale) new seasons of the show.
Overall, I’ve been pretty disappointed with the quality of Disney+’s Star Wars shows (which is putting it mildly). The Acolyte was particularly sub-par, but that’s neither here nor there. Andor really knocked it out of the park with Season 1, and while Season 2 has a lot to live up to, the fact that the team isn’t afraid to get a little creative rather than shoehorning in overly simplistic narrative choices makes me pretty confident about what’s still to come.
