Andor Season 2 Is Changing The Way The Series Handles Time
The "Star Wars" series "Andor" is a bit of a unicorn within the franchise. After so many hits and misses in recent years, "Andor" felt like a completely different take on the galaxy far, far away. For a lot of fans, it's kind of a flawless show, and it's got a lot of us wishing it could go on forever. It is, after all, meant to explore the last five years of its titular hero's life, before he (tragically) dies at the end of "Rogue One." Given the projected timeline, one would expect "Andor" to span five seasons, one for each year. But from the very beginning, "Andor" was slated for just two seasons, not five — and in spite of our hopes for an extension, showrunner Tony Gilroy is pretty adamant about working with what he's got. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Gilroy explained why the conventional formula wouldn't have served the show — or its star, Diego Luna — in the long run:
"It was just like, 'We can't possibly do this.' It's a massive, massive undertaking, and Diego wouldn't be able to play a younger man over the next 15 years. We wouldn't be able to physically do it."
So "Andor" will run for just two seasons — and chart four years of Cassian Andor's life — no matter what. If that, too, sounds like an undertaking, it's because it likely will be — but Gilroy found "an elegant solution" that actually mirrors the structure of season 1. Every three episodes wrapped up one particular arc for Cassian. There were four arcs across the first season's 12-episode run, so "Andor" season 2 will be covering four years across the same length of episodes.
'The second half is about, what does time do to these people?'
"Andor" flawlessly executed its story in the first season, but condensing the timeline in the second — especially with so many threads and characters to keep track of — just sounds like a lot. "Andor" alone has introduced a flurry of new faces to the galaxy. They all represent a major stake in the series, and Gilroy plans to bring most of them back for season 2.
"I'm carrying forward something like 30 characters," Gilroy told Rolling Stone. Naturally, they won't all be on-screen at the same time: some may pop up in one arc and disappear for another. But what about the characters that will be central to the founding of the Rebellion across the next four years, characters like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) or Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård)? There's a chance that, with every time jump, they'll be completely unrecognizable to the person they were before. Funnily enough though, it's this concept that excites Gilroy more than anything:
"[W]hat becomes interesting is now we can play the negative space. When you jump a year, what happened in between? You know the people, you know what their trajectory was. It's energizing. We will be starting new characters, obviously, in the next 700 pages. There will be all kinds of new things and will be just as granular as we ever were. And really, the second half is about, what does time do to these people? People grow up and people get tired and people betray each other and people change their minds and people get weak and people get crazy."
If anything, the second season will be an interesting challenge to the structural status quo. And if anyone were to do it, it'd be the minds behind "Andor."