Andor Season 2 Might Just Break Its Biggest Rule
One moment in Rebellion history could change everything.
From the get-go, Andor has always been more like a series of movies than episodes of TV. The series was created by Tony Gilroy, a filmmaker who had only written and directed movies before. What’s more, the series was structured into three-episode arcs, effectively turning Season 1’s twelve episodes into four feature-length adventures.
Season 2 is taking this one step further by releasing the episodes three at a time, meaning we’ll basically get a new Star Wars movie on Disney+ every Tuesday night. Each of these arcs is set a year apart from each other, but there may be one big exception: a crucial Rebellion event that changes the face of the entire galaxy.
Andor Season 2’s acts of Rebellion will lead to major pushback.
In an interview with Collider, Gilroy confirmed Andor Season 2 will depict what fans have been speculating since the release of the trailer: the series will indeed show the Ghorman Massacre, the first retaliation of the Empire against the unruly masses that forced Mon Mothma to speak out publicly against Emperor Palpatine.
While we know how the Massacre went down in the non-canon Legends timeline, the event is relatively mysterious in canon. We saw the retaliation against Mon Mothma in the Rebels episode “Secret Cargo,” but we never saw the event itself. For Tony Gilroy, this was too tempting to resist.
“There's a lot of confusion within canon. So, it was an opportunity to rebuild in a really significant way,” Gilroy said. “It's a very significant part of our show that can do a lot of different things for us.”
The Ghorman Massacre leads to Mon Mothma’s first public act against the Empire.
In fact, the Massacre was so important to the story and greater Star Wars history that it goes beyond the three-episode arc structure of Andor itself. To be fair, it’s not just a matter of how important the event was but how expensive it was to bring to life.
“Quite honestly, it's very expensive to build, so we really want to use it as much as possible so it carries over five different episodes,” Gilroy said. “I'm really confident that the really deep, passionate Star Wars community will appreciate how we've straightened out that story.”
The Ghorman Massacre spanning more than a single arc makes sense, but it conflicts with another big part of Season 2’s structure: each arc is separated by a year of time. Could this event be the thing that will break that pattern, or will we see part of it in a flashback accompanied by the fallout of the event?
This may be the final season of Andor, but that doesn’t mean it has to stick to the same structure as before. Who knows, perhaps the year between two arcs will be introduced mid-arc through a time jump, giving this momentous event the screentime it deserves — almost half the season.
