What we expect to see in Andor‘s second season for Cassian, Mon Mothma, Kino Loy and more
After a stellar first season we're already looking forward to the return of Andor, which promises deeper character growth and stronger ties to Star Wars canon
TV Features Cassian
Cassian Andor’s end had already been told in the powerful yet heartbreaking finale of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and as the first season of Andor comes to a rousing conclusion, the origins of Cassian’s conversion from self-serving lone wolf to self-sacrificing Rebel spy have been revealed. But we also know there’s another chapter, in the form of Andor’s forthcoming season two, to be unveiled which will bridge the gap in this detailed, nuanced boots-on-the-ground view of the developments that led up to the original Star Wars saga.
Since this gritty show is not especially given to Jedi-like prophetic visions, The A.V. Club instead will make some considered speculation on just what may lie ahead on the hyperspaceway for Andor in the next season, which is expected to tie the remaining two years of Cassian’s personal rebellion to his fateful mission to steal the plans for the Death Star for the Rebel Alliance. It’s a potentially dark road, but at least we know for sure that K-2SO’s gonna pop up along the way to add some much-welcome sass, and maybe a metallic backhand or two.
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A Formula 1: Drive to Survive-style subplot about an aging Sebulba and Ben Quadinaros defending their podracing titles.
(Seriously though, love this show’s boldness of showing us zero other characters from the main Skywalker tri-trilogy. I do wonder if Deedra’s ambition in pursuing the Rebellion gets her an audience with Vader in the next season.)
Dedra shows Syril gratitude by providing him and his mother a luxury apartment within the Empire’s newest battle station the “Death Star.” (“Don’t let the name scare you, your living quarters are ten times the size of what you’re used to now, decked out in the galaxy’s finest accoutrement, and, of course, personal chef and waitstaff will be provided.”) Syril will be put in charge of hemispheric trench venting ports – a mid-level, comfortable position that includes a staff of 8 subordinates.
“It’s really more of a political job than anything. I mean those ports are way too small to be of any consequence. Just file a monthly inspection report and that’s pretty much all you have to do.”
I really hope the show gives us a scene where Dedra, Syril, and his mother are sitting at a table together, and we get a weird power play fight between Dedra and his mother while Syril just sits there like a kid watching Mommy and “Imperial Mommy” fight.
I’m hoping Dedra gets pissed off with Mummy and drop kicks that poisoned dwarf into the path of a certain disco laser during testing. The universe’d thank you, Dedra…
I get a strong Smithers – Mr. Burns vibe from Syril and Dedra.If they do bring in characters from the greater Star Wars universe, I hope they bring back Chancellor Valorum. Terrance Stamp is a fantastic actor and there’s the potential for a very interesting story about Valorum trying to help the rebels because he feels guilty for failing the Republic.
Yeah I feel like Meero could never really respect Syril but will keep him on a tether because he is loyal and a good lickspittle
Velorum was reportedly going to be in the other prequels, but Stamp had such a bad time on Phantom Menace that he refused to come back. Maybe enough time has passed that he’d be willing to do it now.
He said the only reason he took the role was he wanted to play opposite Natalie Portman after seeing her in “The Professional.” His first day on the set he asked Lucas where she was, and he replied “She’s on vacation. You’ll be playing to that pillar.”
honestly hsi completely vanishing works better anyway
Ex…cel-lent.
That’s interesting. Its about 30 ish years later in the timeline, but 25 years later in our world, he’s actually about the right age.
Dedra meets Syril’s mother: “So you have designs after my son?”
Dedra brings Syril’s mother a fruitcake, Syril’s mother loves it, close up on Syril’s terrified eyes
Season
2 is pretty easy to figure out. Story arc 1 is seeing Andor in his
prime, arc 2 is Mon Mothma becoming the leader of the Alliance, arc 3?,
and arc 4 is the story of how Andor got to the start of Rogue One.Maybe K2 for the third arc but since B2 does seem like he’ll become K2 then maybe in the first arc.
isn’t it B2(emo)?…
I pray that this show has the balls to get to the end of this series without ever once uttering the words “Jedi” or “the force.” It’s so, so good.
Depends on how it’s done and used. Making Luther a secret jedi would suck, but having someone comment “there are no jedi who can save the day it’s up to us” would be fine.
That would make no sense. People in the Rebellion used the “May the Force Be With You” saying pre-Luke. Why do Star Wars fans hate Star Wars?
Well, to start, this kind of gets into what you mean by fan. I was born in ‘73 and so pretty much grew up with Star Wars. I enjoy the originally trilogy quite a bit. That said, I’m not a fan in the sense that the diehards are. I think nostalgia is deadly for good storytelling. And I think that along with everything that makes the original series great, there are a lot of flaws. So I would consider myself a fan by any normal measure, but sort of in the same sense that I’m a fan of James Bond. I enjoy the James Bond movies. Some of them are bad. Much about them is silly. In the main they are fun. This is very much not a description of a superfan. So the force stuff was always somewhat dippy, but not so much that it really mattered. But once the movies stopped being new in any interesting way and became much more invested in the dopey mythology of the original series, all of that stuff became more baggage weighing Star Wars down.Now we get Andor. Andor is great! It’s great mostly because it has great characters and dialog and manages to feel grounded in a real universe and all of this combines to create real stakes. But it also certainly is easier to have real characters and decent dialog and a grounded universe when characters aren’t yammering about “the dark side.”
I get that the Disney Sequel Trilogy went way too hard on nostalgia bait, but that doesn’t mean that future Star Wars projects have to pretend to not exist in the Star Wars universe. It would be dumb to have a story arc where Andor has to rescue young Luke Skywalker from Inquisitors because that doesn’t really fit how this character is set up. But that is different than say “Luthen lists Order 66 when bringing up atrocities committed by the Empire.” It is such weird metric to judge the show by. Nobody said the word Jedi/Sith … which makes it better for some reason. Like seriously, I am someone who could not stand The Force Awakens and I do not get that.
I know exactly what you mean. I, too, get absolutely livid when an ancillary bit of media attempts something different from what I’m used to. Where’s the funny droids doing silly beep boops? Where’s the weird aliens doing goofy slapstick? Give us more undiscovered Jedi orphans! Give us more squads of clone troopers! Give us more easily-marketable badasses in helmets!
This is a petty and shallow bar to construct for the series.
Several predictions and hopes: Luthen will wind up doing one of several things, any of which would make narrative sense for him and continue to develop Andor in the direction he has to go: making a mistake and sacrificing himself for Andor, doing something really dastardly and forcing Andor to kill him, or perhaps best of all, being in the wrong place at the wrong time and forcing Andor to sacrifice him, as he’s now done to so many others. That last probably makes the most sense. Vel will wind up sacrificing Cinta. I actually wondered if Vel was going to kill Cinta when she first arrived on Ferrix, as a precaution. Vel is getting harder, too. And then Mothma will be in a position where she winds up having to sacrifice Vel. Dedra takes on Syril and keeps him on a tether as a loyal hound until she unemotionally sacrifices him. I don’t think Syril will turn, I just think it will underscore who Dedra is. Also, and I doubt this is true, but I really want it to be: Andor is going to take B2EMO’s CPU and transfer it into one of the K2SO robots.
My guess is the accelerated pace of next season (which is going to try to cover four years in 12 episodes) is going to result in some of the characters from S1 having their stories shortened or dropped.It’s really disappointing to have a show that is as well-paced as this was messed with.
Wholeheartedly agree. I wish they could’ve at least worked this out over the course of 3 or 4 seasons, if they weren’t able to commit to 5.. I love the depth the pacing gives this show.
uh why will it do that, did they announce that? and also: this season jumped forward two years or something, wasn’t a huge deal
Yes the showrunner and star both said they originally had planned for five seasons but didn’t think they could keep a show of this scale going for that long and opted to end it after two seasons. You can find the comments online pretty easily. And I believe this season takes place over one year only – you don’t really see characters like Mon Mothma’s teenage daughter getting visibly older as you’d expect if it was a longer period. I know these are all technically aliens though so who knows.
how long was andor in jail?
Just going off of Googling, looks like 40 days or so. The article I found says there is a 30 day time jump in episode 8 between when he first starts in prison and the end of the episode. Then episode 9 and 10 play out in a relatively short period of time after that.I mean we know Kino had roughly 250 days left on his own sentence when Andor gets in and is still toiling away. So it couldn’t have been more than a few months (assuming years are measured in Earth time in SW).
Did they say whether Kino is coming back or not? I got the strongest impression that he dies there – the point of the scene is resonate with Luthen’s speech about fighting for a “sunrise he’ll never see”, and the last look we get at Kino is one of resignation as he looks at the men he has given a chance at freedom to. I remember thinking he’d be the way that Dedra finds out Cassian was at the prison, and if we saw him again, it would be in the context of him being tortured. I’ll bet Bix plays a role in programing K2-SO. Mon’s marriage feels like a ticking time bomb, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she ultimately ends up estranged from her husband and daughter – forced to choose the Rebellion over an intact family life. I’m thinking there’s a good chance that Jimmy Smit’s Bail Organa shows up in season 2. We know he’s involved with the Rebellion, and he’s another pro-democracy Senator like Mon.
I had thought that Mon’s husband was going to meet a nasty end, and she would pin her missing funds on his gambling.
Can they make the Andor parts more exciting and Mon Mothma parts less inscrutable? Thanks
it wouldn’t be modern Star Wars if they didn’t find a way to shoehorn Asoka Tano in there somewhere.
It’d be pretty simple to fit her in there as the voice of “Fulcrom” on a radio giving the rebels some information.
I’m hoping the next series doesn’t indulge the fans too much. Too much fan-service is lazy writing – and it’s a big-arse galaxy, so there are plenty of opportunities to tell stories. That said, I want Disney to have the guts to go full-on Peterloo at some point. In case you’ve never heard of the Peterloo Massacre, it was when the British Army charged at a crowd of 60,000 at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester (St. Peter’s Field is actually a large square or plaza in central Manchester) and killed fifteen protestors. What were they protesting? Why, something that Mon Mothma knows plenty about: representation and parliamentary corruption. It’s one of the darkest moments of modern British history (well, erm, it was the 16th of August, 1819, but we measure history here in Britain in terms of centuries) and sparked a chain reaction of uprisings across England and helped usher in the full downfall of Regency Britain. Sound familiar? (And you lot think Britain has a boring history, LOL)And I dearly hope that they resist the urge to link the second series up too closely to the events in Rogue One. They’ve already said that series two will cover four years (as opposed to this series and one year), meaning hopefully it’ll end well before the events of Rogue One are meant to take place.
A star-crossed romance: Dedra Meero and Syril Karn????hard NO sorry that is that is more like: Violent creepy Incel kidnaps victim of the disturbed stalking and hopes for the Stockholm syndrome.
How many months in between new seasons of Andor? Better be never more than 12.
This is the series to introduce a young Ezra
The mention of Krennic reminded me of something that bugged me about the post-credits scene in the Andor finale: why was the Death Star so close to completion? In the scene you see droids assembling the big space laser dish thingy—this looks like the final stage of construction, and the rest looks done—and then in Rogue One, you see the dish getting set into place… FIVE YEARS later? It just seemed like a weird fudging of the timeline to me. Anyone else? Any theories?