Anticipating Andor; A Pre-Review

By Chris M. Barkley

Star Wars: Andor – Season Two with Diego Luna, Genevieve O’Reilly, Stellan Skarsgård, Kyke Soller, Denise Gough, Elizabeth Dulau, Faye Marsay, Forest Whitaker and Ben Mendelsohn. Written by Tony Gilory, Beau Willimon, Dan Gilroy and Tom Bissell, Directed by Ariel Kleiman, Janus Metz and Alonso Ruizpalacios. Created and Produced by Tony Gilroy. Twelve episodes.

anticipation

/ænˌˈtɪsəˌpeɪʃən/
/æntɪsɪˈpeɪʃən/
Other forms: anticipations

Anticipation is excitement, waiting eagerly for something you know is going to happen. Someone who has just proposed marriage waits in anticipation for a positive reply.

-Vocabulary.com

We’ve all been there. The waiting. Watching the news. Scrolling the internet. And then, more waiting.

Until you just can’t stand it anymore. 

In the first four months of 2025, we have already seen and enjoyed some of the most anticipated spectacles of the big and small screen already this year: Marvel Studios Captain America: Brave New World, Season Two of the Apple+ series Severance and Max’s The Last of Us, Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 and Ryan Coogler’s epic vampire film, Sinners.

In the coming weeks we can look forward to DC’s highly touted reboot of Superman, Marvel’s Thunderbolts* and the origin of the Fantastic Four, a new version of Stephen King’s The Running Man, Jurassic World: Rebirth, the very last season of Stranger Things and another long awaited sequel, TRON: Ares, among many, many other sf/fantasy/horror projects coming soon. 

But, speaking only for myself, I will be experiencing Christmas in April because after more than two and a half years, one of the best written and performed Star Wars projects ever produced, Andor, has returned.

Andor, which serves as a precursor to the highly acclaimed and Hugo Award-nominated 2016 film Rogue One and introduced us to the miserable, repressive and dangerous world of Palpatine’s Galactic Empire. 

Here, there are no Jedi Knights to keep the peace and enforce the law, only people and their officious oppressors, who are living, struggling, living and ultimately dying in relative squalor under the heel of the Empire and its minions.

I have taken great pains to avoid all of the teaser trailers and most of the spoilery images from the ever increasing number of websites promoting the series. I want to be totally captivated and surprised by what I am about to see.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a thief and smuggler, starts out as a concerned brother looking for his sister amid a world industrialized by the Empire. When he runs afoul of several corporate security sub-contractors of the Empire, he becomes a person of interest; first by a corporate drone Syril Karn (Kyke Soller) and later by Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious agent of the Imperial Security Bureau anxious to ferret out members of a rumored resistance movement.

As the season progressed, Andor is slowly and surely drawn into the orbit of two of the leaders of the Rebellion; Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), a dealer of antiquities who uses his business as a front to pass messages and currency to other rebels and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) a Senator in the Imperial Senate desperately trying to balance her political role, her stealthy activities taking place under the nose of the Emperor and that of her family, who enjoy their high living lifestyle and would probably condemn her in an instant if they knew of her intentions.

As the season ended Andor formally joined Rael and the rebels and Mon Mothma began her long and arduous journey towards becoming the leader of the Rebellion. 

Before veteran writer/producer Tony Gilroy was fully brought on board to create the Andor series, the original plan was to make a series focused on Andor and his stolen Imperial security droid K-2SO (drolly voiced by Alan Tudyk). 

Gilroy, who wrote the first three films in the Jason Bourne series, co-wrote and directed reshoots of Rogue One and was nominated for an Academy Award for the legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007), had a broader and bolder vision.

He pitched a different idea to then LucasFilm CEO Kathleen Kennedy; putting human and alien faces swept up in the struggle against the Empire. She readily agreed.

And by doing so, Andor’s progression from thief to revolutionary became more than a series of connected action sequences, it became an authentic dramatic showcase that exhibits the devastating effects his decisions has on his adopted mother, ex-paramor, friends, enemies, co-workers, criminals and rebels.

As Gilroy explained in a March 10th interview with Entertainment Weekly digital magazine:

“If time was unlimited and money was unlimited, and we could have done the 5 seasons that we planned on in the beginning, I don’t think it would be better at all,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “I can’t think of a better way to lay it out than what we lucked into. Because the idea that it takes a year and 12 episodes for him to evolve into a revolutionary, it really needed all of that room for that.”

“But as we go forward,” he continues, “it’s emotionally powerful; it’s narratively powerful; it adds to the adventure of the story; it intensifies all the romantic entanglements to have these year-long negative gaps in between and to land for just a very specific moment. It’s three or four days each time we land. That has an intensification factor on all of those things in a way that I never anticipated. I’ve never worked on anything like that. When we brought it into the room, everyone was very suspicious. But it was really exciting to do. It’s like cooking a sauce down where you just get down to the roux.”

In addition, Andor is being rolled out in a unique way for a steaming series; it will be released weekly in four sets of three episodes each, with each covering a year in the lives of the characters, all leading directly to Cassian’s fateful meeting with Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones).

Lead actor (and co-producer) Diego Luna told Business Insider the following on April 10th at a London preview: “I urge people to see Rogue One right after the end of season two. They’re going to see a different film”. He explained that once you see the personal journeys of his and other characters resolve, it will lay bare how it all emotionally relates to the events in the film.  

Recalling developing his character for “Andor” with Gilroy, Luna said: “I made my backstory, as an actor you always do that, for ‘Rogue One.’ But then sitting down with Tony and building a backstory that would make sense to see in two seasons… It’s basically eight movies! Eight movies to bring all the layers necessary to understand the man who makes that ultimate sacrifice for the rebellion in “Rogue One.”

Two outstanding episodes from Season 1, “One Way Out” and “Rix Road”, were nominated in 2023 for Hugo Awards in the Best Dramatic Presentation-Short Form category. I was very disappointed that both outstanding episodes lost to the very good final episode of The Expanse, “Babylon’s Ashes”.

Should Andor Season 2 be as exciting and worthwhile as I suspect, I strongly recommend that interested fans forget about focusing on individual episodes and consider nominating the entire season instead. (Previous full season Hugo Finalists include series such as Heroes, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Russian Doll and Severance.)

I am of the opinion that when all is said and done, these twenty-four episodes of Star Wars may be widely acclaimed as one of the best sf ever presented on television and also worthy of being one of the finest episodic television series ever made.

These next four weeks will be long remembered; we will soon see exactly how the stage was set for the Rebellion to win its first victory against the Galactic Empire and a fitting end for one of the most compelling characters ever created for Star Wars. 

AD ASTRA, Cassian Andor!

Andor Season Two Air Date Schedule:

• Andor season 2 episode 1 – April 22 (US); April 23 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 2 – April 22 (US); April 23 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 3 – April 22 (US); April 23 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 4 – April 29 (US); April 30 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 5 – April 29 (US); April 30 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 6 – April 29 (US); April 30 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 7 – May 6 (US); May 7 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 8 – May 6 (US); May 7 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 9 – May 6 (US); May 7 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 10 – May 13 (US); May 14 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 11 – May 13 (US); May 14 (UK and Australia)
• Andor season 2 episode 12 – May 13 (US); May 14 (UK and Australia)

All Photos Courtesy of LucasFilm Limited.