Warning: SPOILERS lie ahead for Andor season 1With it expected to conclude the show, Andor creator Tony Gilroy reveals how many major time jumps are in season 2. The latest Star Wars Disney+ show acts as a prequel to 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, exploring the origin story of Diego Luna's eponymous thief as he becomes entrenched in the inner workings of the Rebellion and fights to bring down the Galactic Empire. Andor left off on a major cliffhanger heading into season 2, and audiences are now getting a taste of what's to come from the next chapter of the Star Wars series.
In a recent interview with Collider to discuss the season 1 finale of the show, Tony Gilroy offered some insight for the in-production Andor season 2. The creator went into some detail regarding the season's time jumps, including that the major ones will occur every three episodes, with their main goals to be to tell "an adventure story" and "keep things on the edge" so that audiences will "want to turn the page or tune in next week." See what Gilroy explained below:
I don't know if anybody ever got to do this before, maybe someone's done it in a novel. I don't really know, I'd be curious. As writers, as dramatists, it has all kinds of really cool implications. It has a couple of things that make things difficult, they have to be very brave about the negative space between the years, and you have to really trust the storytelling to not explain everything.
Why Andor Season 2 Will Feature Multiple Time Jumps
Interestingly, Andor was originally developed with a five-season plan, with each season chronicling a year in Cassian's life and exploring his transformation into the Rebel fighter audiences first fell in love with in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Gilroy and Lucasfilm would elect to minimize this plan to two seasons of 12 episodes each, with the series creator saying the sheer scale of the original concept was "physically impossible." Gilroy recently confirmed that Andor season 2 would entail at least one major time jump, with the season premiere picking up one year after its cliffhanger finale, while the rest of the season would have a variety of jumps, ranging from three days to a full year.
Considering Andor season 2 has four in-universe years to cover of story, it's understandable that it would require multiple time jumps, though the confirmation of three-episode blocks is an interesting plan for doing so. Rather than having to encompass multiple years of story per episode, Gilroy and his writers room can better craft contained story arcs that open themselves to incremental character development, as well as setting up the next set of episodes. With House of the Dragon offering lessons on both the pros and cons of multiple time jumps within one seasons, one can hope the Andor creative team can better manage the formula than the Game of Thrones prequel.
What will be interesting to see is how certain character arcs will be wrapped up in Andor season 2, namely that of Stellan Skarsgård's Luthen, a character never seen or mentioned in the original Star Wars trilogy, nor in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Though this doesn't inherently point towards his death within the show, considering Gilroy has established major stakes in both the film and Disney+ series, it does seem likely his character will meet an unfortunate end by the time of the show's finale. In the meantime, audiences can catch up with Andor season 1 now streaming in its entirety on Disney+.
Source: Collider