After the first season of the fan-favorite Star Wars series Andor covered just one year of Cassian Andor’s pre-Rogue One espionage career, season 2 is covering four years in the same amount of time, which could lead to House of the Dragon-style pacing issues. The second and final season of Andor is one of the most highly anticipated upcoming Star Wars projects. Although some fans initially questioned the necessity of a Rogue One prequel focused on Cassian, those naysayers were quickly silenced by the most refreshingly bold, inventive, and insightful Star Wars story in years.
Tony Gilroy has created a gritty spy thriller set in a galaxy far, far away. Gilroy doesn’t have the personal ties to Star Wars lore that creators like Jon Favreau and J.J. Abrams have. He’s much more interested in exploring new characters and storylines on the vast canvas that George Lucas left behind than rehashing the past to evoke the audience’s nostalgia. The result is a bona fide TV masterpiece that would still be a must-see show even if it had no connection to Star Wars. Andor is a politically charged story about the cost of rebellion and the sacrifices that have to be made to topple dictators.
The first season of Andor is a near-perfect piece of serialized storytelling, so the Star Wars fan base has high hopes for the second season. But season 2 might be biting off more than it can chew. It has to get through four years in 12 episodes. According to Empire, the final three episodes will cover the last three days before Rogue One, which points to an even more disjointed pace. If the last three episodes are only covering three days, that means the first nine episodes have to get through three years and 362 days.
Andor Season 2 Is Covering Four Years
After writing the first season of Andor to cover the first of five years before Rogue One and seeing what a gargantuan undertaking the season was, Gilroy decided against doing four more seasons to cover each of the remaining years and chose to instead bridge the gap with a single season to wrap up the series. That means that, in the same number of episodes, Andor season 2 has to cover four times as much ground as season 1. Historically, when it comes to TV shows, less is more. It’s better to wrap up the narrative in a couple of seasons when the show is still great than to keep going and going until the show has lost all its magic. But Andor season 2 could be giving itself too much story to tell with this approach.
Gilroy has confirmed (via Entertainment Weekly) that season 2 will cover the remaining four years before the events of Rogue One. He gave a rough outline that every three episodes would represent a year: “From a narrative point of view, it’s really exciting to be able to work on something where you do a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then jump a year.” This calls back to a storytelling technique from season 1, but season 1 used that technique in a much more limited timeframe.
Andor Season 2 Might Have A Few Time Jumps
Since the final three episodes are being dedicated to the build-up to Rogue One, it seems as though Andor season 2 will follow the same structural trick as season 1 with its episode count broken up into three-part chunks. Season 1 had the table-setting early installments, then the heist arc, the prison arc, and the fugitive arc in three-episode blocks. Some of these season 1 chunks came with time jumps, like introducing the new life that Cassian had built for himself on the resort planet of Niamos with his loot from the Aldhani heist, but they only ever skipped a couple of months at the most. To get through the gap between the first season of Andor and the beginning of Rogue One, season 2 might have to skip entire years.
With this approach, Andor season 2 could end up with the same problem that plagued House of the Dragon throughout its first season. At one point, House of the Dragon jumped so far into the future that it had to switch out its lead actors. No matter how great each individual episode was (and there were some really great ones), the season as a whole felt very disjointed and uneven. Each week, new spouses and offspring would pop up without giving the audience any time to get emotionally invested in them.
Since House of the Dragon covered around 20 years in one season and Andor is only covering four years, the Star Wars spin-off’s timeframe problems won’t be quite as drastic as the Game of Thrones spin-off. But there is a very real possibility that cramming years’ worth of storytelling into some episodes and only fitting a day’s worth of events into others will result in a very bumpy season 2 for Andor. Having said that, Gilroy has proven his mettle as both a writer and showrunner, and he has a team of equally talented storytellers helping him conclude Cassian’s on-screen journey, so there’s also a very real chance that they’ll pull it off spectacularly.