The Rogue Ones: A Star Wars Andor Podcast returns for one last episode with hosts Mike DeAngelo and The Playlist’s Editor-In-Chief, Rodrigo Perez. As with the previous episodes, each week, our hosts will recap and review the latest “Andor” episode and welcome cast members and creatives from the show to discuss all things “Andor” and all the intrigue and machination of the “Star Wars” galaxy.
In the latest episode of The Rogue Ones, our hosts break down their thoughts on the season one finale of “Andor,” entitled “Rix Road,” which dropped on Disney+ today. After the discussion, Andor showrunner himself, Tony Gilroy (“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “Michael Clayton”), joins the podcast to further break down the themes and goals of season one, including the finale and teasing what’s to come.
For the uninitiated, “Andor,” created by Academy Award-nominated writer/director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”), serves as a prequel to “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (which Gilroy rewrote and worked on extensively in the reshoots), which itself is a prequel; set just before the events of “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.” The Lucasfilm series follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) five years before meeting Jyn Erso and the gang in ‘Rogue One,’ as he finds himself thrust into the middle of a budding rebel cell with plans to put a stick in the Empire’s eye. It’s a first for the “Star Wars” universe, as it acts as a political spy thriller that really considers the age of oppression, life during wartime, and what it’s like to be on the ground as a member of the rebel alliance and as a member of the Imperial Army. Going even deeper, “Andor” really examines what it’s like for everyday people struggling under an oppressive regime. The show also stars Stellan Skarsgard, Genevieve O’Reilly, Adria Arjona, Kyle Soller, Fiona Shaw, and more.
The show has been largely embraced by the “Star Wars” fandom as the series continued, with many calling it the best “Star Wars” of the Disney era. Much has also been discussed in the fan community regarding how “Andor” does or does not change the game for “Star Wars” shows moving forward. During the interview, Tony Gilroy shared a lot about what’s to come in big-picture terms.
So what is in store for season two exactly? Well beyond connecting to ‘Rogue One,’ introducing characters like K-2SO and potentially other familiar characters, Gilroy intimated we’re going to see more of the cost, emotional, moral, spiritual, or otherwise, of putting on this rebellion.
“There’s a scene in [‘Rogue One’] with Diego, in the [Yavin IV] hanger at the end, and [Jynn Erso] comes out and says, ‘they’re not going to go through with it,’ and Cassian is there with this whole band of guys behind him [including Melshi],” Gilroy explained. “Look, we have been killing, betraying, sabotaging, destroying our moral fabric over the last few years, and we’ve done everything, and if we don’t do this, then everything’s going to be for naught. So [we’ll] see some of that come together.”
Another element that Gilroy said they’ll dive even deeper into in season two is a lot of the nascent challenges and difficulties that Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) faced in season one— scaling up an enterprise, the rebellion that’s built on paranoia, lies, secrets and more clandestine qualities.
“What do you do? If your product is paranoia, how do you collaborate?” Gilroy asked rhetorically. “How do you scale up the secrecy? How do you take that out of the garage, and how do you play with other people? So over the next four years in the second [season], you know we’re going to be dealing with—you know we’re going to end up in Yavin, and the rebel alliance that alliance is really messy. There are heroes in there, there are losers in there, and there are wannabes in there; it’s really messed up. But it’s like any political coalition.”
Gilroy also teased the political fates of many alliance members and how some diverging ideologies leave them on the outside looking in.
“What happens to Saw Guerra? What happens to the original gangsters? What happens to all the real hardcore maniacs who built it, are they welcomed in? How do you do that? That’s going to be one of the things we’re really going to be exploring and what Luthen says in episode 10 is true; that’s no game there,” Gilroy says about the epic monologue where Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael says he’s put everything on the line of this cause and he’ll likely never live to see the dawn of a new day. “He’s opening a real vein there, and I’m never going to undercut what he says there, but how do you go forward? How do you do that?”
Gilroy suggested that infighting, backbiting, and internal struggles look like they will be the order of the day.
“That’s been true all through history,” Gilroy said about the difficulties of putting on a revolution and getting people with the same endgame goal to agree on how to do it and how to fight that war. “I’m cherry-picking from 3,000 years of revolution and all kinds of history, but if you want a comp, go look at Russia in 1916 and look at how all the factions chew each other up as much as they go after the Czar. They’re fighting each other as hard as they’re fighting the power.”
It was also revealed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment during the finale that Cassian was indeed [SPOILER ALERT] building pieces for the Death Star weapon while in prison on Narkina 5, as many fans suspected.
“The easter egg at the end [of Andor having built pieces for the Death Star], it’s fun, it’s cool, and a lot of people picked up on what it was already. It didn’t turn out to be so much of a secret. It’s confirmation.”
But Gilroy stressed that a more significant element of it all was the theme of destiny, an idea he thinks they’ll lightly tread over in season two.
“But there’s another element of it that’s there for me – Cassian Andor he’s kind of Zelig, not in the way that he’s a shapeshifter, but he is in an incredible number of places, legitimately, that have some synchronicity,” he continued. “He does Aldhani, which causes him to go to prison, where he ends up making this part, that he doesn’t even know what it is, to a thing he’ll never know until it’s the thing that actually kills him. That’s just one of the things that I don’t want to get all ‘pixy dust’ about it, and whatever we explore like that will be very lightly handled, but there’s an element of destiny here.”
As for the upcoming season two of “Andor,” which is already being shot, and what they learned, Gilroy said, in some ways, they’re more confident because they’ve already pulled it off. On the other hand, now you’ve got to do it all over again and top yourself, which can feel overwhelming.
“Well, you know what they always say, ‘You jump out of a plane the first time, you don’t know what you’re in for.’ It’s the second jump that’s the really scary one.” Gilroy said of moving ahead to Season two. “We have the benefit of knowing that we only have to do it one more time, and we have the tremendous wind at our back of having built a community.”
Here’s our spoiler-filled podcast breakdown of “Andor,” Episode 12, and our conversation with returning guest Tony Gilroy.
All episodes of “Andor” are available now on Disney+.
The Rogue Ones is part of The Playlist Podcast Network—which includes The Playlist Podcast, Yellowstoners, Deep Focus, The Fourth Wall, The Discourse, Bingeworthy, and more—and can be heard on Apple Podcasts, AnchorFM, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and now on Spotify. Be sure to subscribe and drop us a comment or a rating, as we appreciate it. Thank you for listening.