Spoilers ahead for all of Andor, including series finale “Jedha, Kyber, Erso,” as well as Rogue One.
Like many great prequels, Andor is a self-contained world that leads into another. The series finale directly plugs into Cassian’s first scene in Rogue One — itself a prequel film that tiptoes straight into A New Hope — and so as we watch our rebel-tailor-soldier-spy take off for the Ring of Kafrene, we know that we’re actually seeing is Cassian marching toward the opening chapters of his end. For those familiar with Rogue One, that knowledge has lent a deeper weight to everything Cassian experiences in Andor, and the show twists this particular knife with its final shot of Bix, previously absent from the last batch of episodes, strolling amid wheat fields holding a baby Cassian will never know existed. The image is a parting gut punch, and one that underlines several tenets of Andor’s philosophy: A rebellion is greater than one person, life extends beyond the screen, and within every detail, there exists entire worlds.
Back in 2015, Gareth Edwards, who directed Rogue One, made a fascinating observation when explaining why his film didn’t feature an opening crawl. Pinning it to a request from higher-ups at Disney, who felt that the non-mainline Star Wars shouldn’t warrant the franchise staple, he was initially reluctant to ditch the thing but ultimately conceded with the following rationalization: “The reason we exist is because of a previous crawl” — referring to the line “Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s weapon, the Death Star” in A New Hope’s opening text — “so it feels like this infinite loop that will never end.” On the one hand, I get what Edwards is saying: Hollywood’s insistence to make countless spinoffs and sequels off existing IP has become quite the morass. On the other hand, what Edwards frames as an absurdist never-ending rabbit warren is recontextualized by Tony Gilroy’s series as a font of potential. Within a single sentence about an anonymous group of “Rebel spies,” there are countless other stories to be told, and Andor serves as a remarkable reminder that this is actually a beautiful thing.
The best mythologies are the ones that allow for continuous reinterpretation, and approaching Star Wars in this way allows fans to derive richer pleasures from its long-ubiquitous texts. That’s how you get the satisfying logic of the Machete Order; the prequel films, which already reframe the movies into what is now known as the Skywalker Saga, are sorted into an experiential flow that gives the original trilogy greater emotional texture. And so I, for one, have come to perceive a new viewing set within the mainstream Star Wars experiences that threads together the narratively contiguous Andor, Rogue One, and A New Hope. I would call it the “Death Star Trilogy” given how they are broadly organized around the discovery and destruction of the Empire’s super-weapon — the plotline linked together by the “Rebel spies” sentence in A New Hope’s opening crawl — but that name has already been claimed by some to group together A New Hope, Rogue One, and Revenge of the Sith, the last of which features a quick shot of Emperor Palpatine and the newly christened Darth Vader looking at a Death Star in early construction.
So let’s call the set of Andor, Rogue One, and A New Hope something else: the “Rebel Spies Trilogy,” which overlaps with but stands distinct from the Skywalker Saga. Taken as its own narrative arc, these projects come to tell a story of rebellion and revolution that feels true to life: Challenging an overwhelming power structure is a process that requires many hands and passes from one person onto the next. Viewed through this lens, the swings between tone and perspective in each project become thematically resonant, beginning to resemble an expression of how everyone is the hero of their own journey even within a larger narrative: A New Hope is Luke’s story, Rogue One is Jyn Erso’s, and Andor is Cassian’s, though really it’s only just partly from his perspective. One of the second season’s more intriguing flourishes is how it functionally renders Cassian as but one player on a larger chessboard; in a strange way, the story of Andor also encompasses poor ol’ Syril Karn’s own journey. This is a radically expansive view of what the Star Wars galaxy can be about, which is to say it’s only tangentially about good-versus-evil space-magic brouhaha bound up in Jedis, Siths, and the Skywalker family drama.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Of course, coining a new interpretive trilogy requires a bit of retrofitting, which becomes apparent if you decide to keep jamming and throw on Rogue One after the credits roll on Andor. Having watched Cassian’s evolution from a rando into a rebel over the course of 24 episodes, decent chunks of Rogue One will hit a little weirdly. There are the simple quirks of the film being made without the knowledge that Andor would ever exist, small details like Cassian telling Jyn Erso, the movie’s point-of-view protagonist, “I’ve been in this fight since I was 6 years old,” which obviously doesn’t quite track anymore now that Andor established he was only recruited into Luthen Rael’s spy ring five years prior to that speech. Or Cassian stepping aside to let Jyn give the Big Pep Talk before their ship departs for the fateful Battle of Scarif despite the fact that, like, dude, she just got on the Rebel Alliance train. Wouldn’t the understandably nervous soldiers prefer to hear from you instead? Or, perhaps most pointedly, the fleeting romantic tension between Cassian and Jyn, which feels like it exists because it’s a movie, and you need a little something-something to juice the relationship between the characters, and that now comes off extra awkward given everything that’s since been depicted between Cassian and Bix. We’re supposed to understand that he’s a kind of flirt, but not that much, you know?
But these are all natural speed bumps for a grand story told in retroactive patchwork — there’s always going to be a bit of awkwardness whenever a prequel is made after the fact. Sequels, too: Let’s not forget that Luke kissed his sister in A New Hope because George Lucas had yet to figure out the whole “Darth Vader is Luke and Leia’s father” thing at that point. How could he have known at the time Star Wars would become an epochal hit that will spawn sequels, prequels, interquels, spinoffs, and an endlessly sprawling fictional universe with a fandom that exercises near-religious exegetical devotion to its texts? Such is the reality of how things work in Hollywood. It’s a miracle anything gets made in the first place, let alone within the Star Wars franchise, even more so when what gets produced turns out to be genuinely great.
Point is, quirks like Cassian’s incongruities between Andor and Rogue One simply don’t matter, and letting them glide by is a mark of grace and an awareness that every cultural product is grounded within its own industrial context. In addition to a whole galaxy of other reasons, this is why the strain of Star Wars fandom that insists on canon fidelity is so fundamentally boring. Room should be left for creative teams like Tony Gilroy’s to play, and whatever inconsistency that emerges should be seen by viewers as an invitation to do a bit of creative gap filling themselves. To Cassian saying he’s been in the fight since he was 6, you could think, Eh, I guess you can count what happened on Kenari. Cassian giving Jyn the floor for her pep talk might be a technical expression of Rogue One being structured around Jyn’s story, but now you can additionally interpret the moment as an expression of Cassian exercising a more welcoming view of who gets to be in the fight. And near the end of Rogue One, as the Death Star beam annihilates the Imperial facility on Scarif, you can project onto the character a sense that he’s thinking about everything that’s come before, and of Bix.
If you’re reading this, chances are you experienced the Rebel Spies Trilogy in its most straightforward form, which is to say according to order of release, working backward from A New Hope. But if you ingest the narrative chronologically — that is, from Andor onward — something magical happens. A New Hope becomes far more meaningful. It’s no longer just the origin story of one special Skywalker and the people lucky enough to be around him but also the resolution for the story of every character and planet suffering beneath the boot of the Empire over the course of Andor. The film, now almost five decades old, feels newly alive again, and it’s all because someone looked at a little detail, like a sentence on an opening crawl, and wondered what worlds could be hiding in there.
