As the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor returns for its second and final season, it has received glowing reviews from fans and critics alike. While other Star Wars television seasons have been greeted with far more tepid or mixed reactions over the past several years, Andor has remained a staggering artistic accomplishment, thanks in no small part to creator Tony Gilroy. A common refrain, even among fans of the show, is that Andor is so good because Tony Gilroy doesn’t really care about Star Wars.

The logic goes that because Gilroy is largely unburdened by living up to any lofty expectations or fulfilling any childhood fantasies, he’s been able to create a series that is great in its own right, and largely divorced from the Star Wars franchise as a whole. Part of this is because Gilroy himself once revealed in an interview that he was “not a fan fan” of Star Wars. However, in actuality, Andor is deeply, intricately, and often overwhelmingly indebted to Star Wars. It’s just that while other shows are busy providing fans with surface-level references to narrative elements of prior films and stories, Andor is engaging with much deeper-cut elements of craft and storytelling from across the whole of the Star Wars galaxy.

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Andor Season 2 Review: A Slow Start Explodes Into A Masterpiece of Galactic Espionage & Enduring Hope

Andor season 2 is a masterpiece, and perhaps the best piece of Star Wars media ever produced.

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By Colin Leggett

Tony Gilroy's History with Star Wars

baze malbus holding a blaster from rogue one

Tony Gilroy first became involved with Star Wars by accident. As Lucasfilm and Disney got into the editing process of Rogue One, the franchise’s first-ever spin-off film and the first Star Wars film to be released after the billion-dollar success of The Force Awakens, they realized things were amiss. For reasons that have remained disputed and contentious for nearly a decade now, the studios decided that the film needed substantial reworking, resulting in extensive reshoots. While credited director Gareth Edwards apparently played nice during all of this, the restructuring ultimately resulted in Tony Gilroy coming onboard as a writer and ghost director to shepherd Rogue One to completion.

Prior to this, Gilroy had established himself as a highly accomplished screenwriter and director in Hollywood. He had written for the Bourne franchise and written and directed films such as Michael Clayton and Duplicity. To this end, Gilroy was experienced in character-based espionage dramas, making him a perfect fit to oversee Rogue One’s restructuring. In the aftermath of Rogue One’s success, as Disney was looking to cultivate a roster of Star Wars streaming TV shows, an early idea that was floated was a prequel series that would chronicle the life of Cassian Andor, Diego Luna’s character from the film. What was initially pitched was something far more rote and predictable, with Cassian and his droid pal K-2SO getting into weekly hijinks, but when Gilroy was approached and asked to participate, he pitched something entirely different: a steadily crescendoing work of symphonic storytelling whose threads would intertwine to tell and authentic and visceral tale of rebellion.

Ultimately, Disney opted to go with Gilroy’s pitch, and it paid off in spades. The first season of Andor netted the franchise and the streamer some of its best reviews ever, and the second season is now earning even higher praise. And while it is true that Andor strikes a notably different tone and pace than many other Star Wars projects, to say the show is un-Star Wars is a flat-out lie.

The Nerdiness of Andor's Star Wars References

One need look no further than the first episode of the second season, “One Year Later,” to see just how palpably rooted in Star Wars storytelling the show truly is. The opening sequence of the episode literally features a character painstakingly checking all of the individual gauges and readers inside of an Imperial fighter, calling specific attention to the minutia of the design and production that went into the realization of the ship. Furthermore, the ship itself is a TIE Avenger; a model of ship that was frequently seen in Expanded Universe material (the name given to any and all Star Wars tie-in media that was rendered non-canon when Disney purchased Lucasfilm) but makes its official onscreen debut here.

Elsewhere in the episode, Imperial officials speak about the planet of Ghorman and how it has valuable resources they need to acquire by force if necessary. Not only is Ghorman a planet that has been long established in Star Wars lore, but the Ghorman Massacre that the show is poised to build to is an event that has been referenced in material as far back as the 1990's The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook. Another key story thread established in this first episode has to do with Mon Mothma’s homeworld of Chandrila, which has long been referenced in Star Wars stories such as 1993’s The Truce at Bakura, but has never actually been seen before. Beyond this, the royalty romance/political intrigue-centric storyline and the design of the Mothma estate, as well as its aesthetics, are all notably similar to Claudia Gray’s Princess Leia-starring novels, Bloodlines and Leia, Princess of Alderaan.

While other Star Wars streaming shows, such as The Mandalorian, are busy making surface-level references, such as bringing back R5-D4 or trotting out a digitally created Luke Skywalker, Andor is engaging with some of the nerdiest Star Wars stuff imaginable. This goes well beyond extensive lore references as well, as the very form of the show is in constant conversation with the films as well. One key moment in the opening dogfight setpiece of “One Year Later” features a digital crash-zoom on the TIE Avenger mid-flight, which is a digital shot that was first pioneered in the final act of Attack of the Clones. Similarly, the first season featured one of the greatest filmmaking references to the original 1977 film of any subsequent Star Wars media, when Gilroy and co. Elected to use the exact same camera movement that Lucas used to segue out of Leia’s torture scene in that film for the climax of Bix’s torture scene in Andor.

In short, regardless of the fact that Tony Gilroy professes to not be a “fan fan” of Star Wars, for anyone to say that Andor is a show that ‘isn’t Star Wars enough’ is an egregious mistake. It’s a show whose every facet, from its narrative to its themes to its camerawork, isn’t afraid to chart its own path but has also remained deeply indebted to the foundations of George Lucas’ original work.

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