When Lucasfilm announced that it was developing a streaming series centered around Cassian Andor, Diego Luna’s Rebel spy character from Rogue One, to premiere on Disney Plus, Star Wars fans weren’t particularly excited. The fan base will still ravenously consume the series, but it’s nowhere near as highly anticipated as other upcoming Star Wars series revolving around beloved characters like Boba Fett, Ahsoka Tano, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
On paper, a series about the early days of the Rebel Alliance told through the eyes of a ground-level spy doing the dirty work so that top brass like Mon Mothma and Princess Leia can keep their hands clean sounds awesome. The problem is that Cassian himself wasn’t particularly well-characterized in Rogue One. He just disappeared into the sea of generic blockbuster protagonists with generic goals and generic personalities. It’s hard to get excited about a show starring a character who’s already proven to be pretty uninteresting.
That’s not to say there isn’t hope for the Andor series. Luna is a terrific actor, Cassian was likable enough to sustain Rogue One’s two-hour runtime, and he had a handful of memorable lines and action beats, but he was ultimately pretty one-note, speaking mostly in soundbites, and he died at the end of the movie, so it didn’t seem like he had much of a future. From Tatooine crime lord Jabba the Hutt to cybernetically enhanced General Grievous to everywoman-turned-hero of the Resistance Rose Tico, the Star Wars universe has many more compelling characters than Cassian Andor who deserve their own Disney Plus series.
But Rogue One’s failure to make Cassian an interesting protagonist is an opportunity for Andor to round out his characterization. Wanda Maximoff and Sam Wilson were two of the MCU’s least interesting characters until WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier came along with extended runtimes and turned them into two of its most beloved icons. Creator Tony Gilroy can use Andor’s 12 episodes to flesh out Cassian’s character arc and give him some depth and pathos, like showrunners Jac Schaeffer and Malcolm Spellman did with the heroes of their Marvel series.
However, this will only happen if the show keeps squarely focused on Cassian, and Star Wars fans are already lining up their wish lists of legacy characters they hope will appear on Andor. Since the series focuses on the Rebellion and takes place midway between the prequel and original trilogies, pretty much every beloved character is fair game. There are even rumors that Ewan McGregor will appear in Andor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, on top of starring in his own miniseries.
As much fun as it would be to see C-3POÂ or Wedge Antilles or even an exiled Yoda in the Andor series, this approach could lead to Andor making the exact same mistake Rogue One did with its central character. In Rogue One, familiar faces like Darth Vader, Leia Organa, and Grand Moff Tarkin distracted Star Wars fans from all the promising new heroes being introduced. It was inevitable that, in a movie with the most iconic villain of all time in prime fighting form, characters like Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, and Bodhi Rook inevitably fell by the wayside.
Giving Cassian the spotlight in his own series is a good start to give the character the kind of care and depth that he deserves, but it’s not going to work if Disney just uses it as a springboard for more nostalgic Star Wars cameos. Fans might be rooting for beloved existing characters to show up in Andor to recreate the indescribable sensation they felt when Luke’s X-wing arrived on Moff Gideon’s command ship in The Mandalorian, but if Andor is filled with returning icons like Leia and Obi-Wan and R2-D2, it’ll probably end up having the same issue as Rogue One and Cassian will remain underdeveloped and bland, just on a larger scale.
Instead of leaning heavily into its fan service like Rogue One did with the hallway sequence – which is an easy way to satisfy viewers, but distracts from the focal point of the story at hand – Andor could connect to the original trilogy in subtler ways. The Mandalorian featured Luke Skywalker in its second-season finale, which wasn’t very subtle, but prior to that, its links to the original movies were more understated. The show didn’t beat fans over the head with Easter eggs; it just winked to the audience with little details like the carbon-freezing chamber on Mando’s ship, or by sending Mando to familiar locations like Mos Eisley Spaceport and the Dune Sea.
Cassian Andor doesn’t have to do anything as on-the-nose as fight alongside Princess Leia or answer to Admiral Ackbar to play on fans’ nostalgia. If he visits the Echo base on Hoth seen in The Empire Strikes Back or boards the Home One flagship seen in Return of the Jedi, Star Wars fans will be happy. Star Wars fans are a difficult group to please, but broadly speaking, they want to see exciting new stories set in a galaxy far, far away featuring a balanced mix of interesting original characters like Din Djarin and familiar fan-favorites like Luke.
Luke arriving to take Grogu away capped off The Mandalorian’s latest season with an exciting, unexpected twist, but it didn’t distract from the real focus of the series. There was no mistaking the finale’s true emotional climax: the heartbreaking farewell between Mando and Grogu. In Rogue One, on the other hand, Vader’s hallway massacre completely overshadowed the shocking deaths of the entire main cast. Andor’s best bet is to take cues from The Mandalorian instead of its own predecessor, because Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have got fan service down pat.