“Andor” Season 2 comes with an optional 14-minute Season 1 recap for those who need to catch up before delving into the first three episodes, which become available tonight on Disney+. But it’s simply a rundown of the significant events that culminated with the Ferrix uprising and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) deciding to join the rebellion. As the opening title of the Season 2 premiere notifies the viewer, it’s one year later, BBY4, and a great deal has happened between the recap and the first scene.
“When we leave [Cassian] in [Season] 1, he’s on Luthen’s [Stellan Skarsgård] ship. Everybody’s been trying to kill him, and he says, ‘Man, just kill me or take me in.’ And that’s where we leave him,” said “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy when he was a guest on an upcoming episode of The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “So I’m dropping a year and I need to do so many things [in the opening scene], the most important is to say [Cassian’s] job title has changed. He’s no longer a recruit.”
Season 2 opens on a character we’ve never met, Niya (Rachelle Diedericks), an Imperial employee doing routine checks on a flight of experimental TIE Fighters, one of which she’ll arrange for Cassian to steal. It will be her first mission for The Rebellion — she’s on the verge of taking a step that will change the course of her life forever, and she is understandably nervous when she meets up with Cassian and asks, “If I die tonight, was it worth it?”
Cassian, with a newfound steely poise, comforts Niya, “This makes it worth it. This. Right now. Being with you, being here at the moment you step into a circle. Look at me. You made this decision long ago. The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you are doing what you can to stop them. You are coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.”
Said Gilroy of the scene, “That’s a leader’s speech, that’s a speech that he could never have given in the first season. I want you to feel that that speech is maybe not the first time that he’s given it, that there’s a history of what’s happened over the past year. I want you to feel his experience over the past year without ever ever giving specifics about it.”
Gilroy indicated the way this scene fills in the year-long gap in Cassian’s development was “a proof of concept” for what would be Season 2’s biggest writing challenge. Halfway through the enormous undertaking of making Season 1, Gilroy and Luna realized their original plan of doing five seasons — one season of television for each year leading up to the events of “Rogue One” — would be impossible. The last four years would need to be condensed into the four three-episode cycles of Season 2. Each three-episode cycle would begin like the premiere, jumping one year into the future.
“I don’t know if anybody ever did this before, I don’t want to be cocky about it, maybe someone did it, but we don’t have a comp where you just drop a year and come back for three days, four times. What does that mean in a story that’s carrying 30 characters, and a story that has canonical implications?” said Gilroy of what he was confronted with as he started sketching out Season 2.
“My own dignity, or my own rule book, was this would lead to a lot of really bad exposition and a bad version of, ‘Chris, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you and since last we met,’ and all that kind of shit that goes on. We didn’t want to do any of that. And the idea of negative space — it’s almost like painting, it’s almost music in a way — it’s like what happens if we just drop out?,” he said. “Can I come back for three days? And when you start to play with it, if you know where you’re going — and most of the characters are already established, so they’re already on a trajectory — you have the organizing principle of these four years, and it was a gas to put it together.”
Cassian’s “This makes it worth it” speech also accomplished another big goal for Gilroy, who wanted, right from the start, to capture the almost “quasi-religious” experience of someone taking the step to join the Rebellion. Said Gilroy, “I want something to remind the audience of how the show can make them feel, what the Rebellion means to the people.”
Gilroy said when Niya tells Cassian, “I’ve been happy here, that may sound strange to you,” was when the scene finally started to pull together on the page, because it unlocked, with a simple line of dialogue, what makes the scene so moving.
“She’s really human, she’s really sacrificing, she’s never gonna be back in this place again,” said Gilroy of Niya’s line. “The show starts with a very, very major decision. This woman’s going to give him the keys to that car. She’s going to walk out of her job, she’s got 12 minutes to get away, and she’s going to be on the run for the rest of her life.”
The series creator admits there have been many times when “Andor” felt like a burden, an enormous battleship he didn’t always want the responsibility of steering for nearly a decade of his life, but it was the dramatic possibility of scenes like this one that excited him and made his own sacrifice worth it. Explained Gilroy, “The opportunity for people making decisions that mattered on camera, legitimately without, like, forcing it, the organic decisions that are coming up constantly is just gold.”
Grounding the start of the season with such a major decision was by design. If Season 1 was about Cassian and his fellow citizens of Ferrix opening their eyes to what could no longer be ignored, Season 2 would be about the sacrifices and impossible choices that come with joining The Rebellion. Niya’s moment in the first scene is one of a dense tapestry Gilroy is creating in the 12-episode arc.
“If you look at insurrection and rebellion and oppression and revolution and totalitarianism all the way through, the variety of experiences is incredible,” said Gilroy. “You’ll only do this once in your life, and this is as definitive a survey of revolution as I think you’re going to get on television for a while, it would be a shame not to get as many colors in there as possible.”
There is decidedly more action in Season 2, as the Imperial fascists’ grasp tightens, the rebellion grows, and the story moves toward the conflict in “Rogue One” and “Star Wars: A New Hope.” And after the Niya scene, Gilroy and team plunge the audience into Cassian’s heart-in-throat narrow escape as he struggles to learn how to fly the new TIE Fighter while coming under attack. But there was something else Gilroy liked about starting Season 2 with the longer, slower, dialogue-driven five-minute scene that preceded it.
“So I wanted something really elegant, but also everybody said we started so slow before [in Season 1], so part of me is kinda like, ‘Fuck you,’” said Gilroy. “I’m like, OK, well there’s no music, there’s this speech, and maybe some people are squirming for a minute. And they don’t squirm after that.”
“Andor” Season 2 released Episodes 1-3 Tuesday, April 22 on Disney+.
To listen to Tony Gilroy’s May 14 interview on “Andor” Season 2, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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