Spoilers for Andor Season 2
Andor’s second and final season is over. When Mr. Rosie and I were watching the last set of three, I sobbed uncontrollably at the end of the tenth episode, “Make It Stop.” (We will absolutely get spoilery in a minute.) Andor’s arc was originally planned to take place over five seasons. The series starts at 5 BBY, which is five years before the Battle of Yavin takes place at the end of A New Hope. Each season would take place over the course of one year. These plans quickly changed, however, and the series was shortened to two seasons that was broken up into three-episode blocks, with each set a year before we got to the events of Rogue One.
Since Andor has gotten so much critical acclaim, a lot of fans have found it odd that they would choose to limit themselves to two seasons. After all, there is a lot of story to tell. Well, there were several reasons why production decided to do a truncated series, but they involved cost, production time, and the emotional labor of telling a story about fighting facism.
The scale of it all: Andor was conceived as a five-season story, but due to the “scale of the show,” series creator Tony Gilroy revealed they had to rethink how to tell Cassian’s story with fewer episodes. Fans might want more Andor, but in a May 2022 interview with ComicBook.com, Gilroy said, “I think when the show comes out everybody will forgive us for not doing that. The show is huge and it’s just physically impossible. So then we were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ And then the answer turned out to be incredibly elegant and perfect because we knew where we wanted to go. Every now and then you get really lucky and the solution turned out to be really fortunate for us.”
It’s expensive to make: Andor is also an expensive show. According to Forbes, the two seasons cost Disney at least $645 million to make. Ratings-wise, for the week of May 1-8, 2025, Andor was the second most-watched original series on streaming, per Variety.
A unrealistic timeline: Andor was initially envisioned to have five installments. The first season was set five years before Rogue One, with each follow-up taking place over a subsequent year, leading into the events of the 2016 prequel movie. But after coming to terms with Andor’s long production schedule — the first season took two years to make — Gilroy realized it wasn’t a realistic timeline for the series.
“You just couldn’t possibly physically make five years of the show,” he told Variety in August 2022. “I mean, Diego would be, like, 65. I’d be in a nursing home. We were panicked. We can’t sign on to this forever.”
Diego Luna’s thoughts: In March 2023, Luna confessed that filming season 2 of Andor was “bittersweet because every day I know I’m a day closer to the end. It was really nice to approach a series knowing there’s an ending,” he explained at an event, per Variety. “It doesn’t happen!”
Diego’s mental health: That same month, the actor spoke with the outlet and revealed that the show only have two seasons was “really important for my mental health … Knowing this is the end, I want to enjoy it and get the best out of this experience.”
Genevieve O’Reilly’s thoughts: As for Genevieve O’Reilly, who played Senator Mon Mothma, she recalled that the cast and crew knew season 2 was “going to be our last shot.”
“So this might sound strange, but the collective ambition of everyone on, particularly, season two was palpable,” she told Vanity Fair in May 2025. “That collective ambition—I could see it there, and I felt deeply proud to be a part of that. I could see that magic that everyone was reaching for.”
Spin-offs? No Andor spinoffs have been announced, but actress Adria Arjona, who portrayed Bix on the series, said she would be open to reprising her character someday. “I feel like a big spinoff could be later in my career,” she told Variety in May 2024. “I got a tattoo for Bix. My makeup artist from the show did it in my trailer.”
A Bix/Cassian spin-off? When asked if he would return for a movie centered around Cassian and Bix’s relationship, Luna told The Hollywood Reporter, “I would love to tell the story of these two characters during the year we don’t see between season one and season two. “This moment of history in a galaxy far, far away is at its darkest, and to have the opportunity to see a love story … could be so beautiful and unique,” he added.
I have a lot of thoughts and would love to hear what others think. As far as the Season 2 format goes, I think it’s a mixed bag. I thought they did a spectacular job with what they were working with. Do I wish we’d gotten more fleshed out storylines for characters like Bix, Saw Guerra, Cinta, Vel, and Wilmon? Yes! But I understand the production constraints and think they did a great job despite them. I’ll start with my most controversial opinion: I honestly did not hate Bix’s ending. That said, it would have really served the character much better if she hadn’t been relegated to stay-at-home-girlfriend for much of the season. The truncated series did Bix a disservice. Elizabeth Dulau should win an Emmy for her outstanding and nuanced portrayal of Kleya, and shoutout to Robert Emms as Lonni. That Kleya/Lonni scene in the gallery took months off of my life. I also thought that it was such powerful symmetry that Syril spent his career hunting Cassian only to have him ask, ”Who are you?” during their confrontation, while Luthen’s response to Dedra revealing that she’d spent years learning his identity was, ”And I’ve known you all along. Hardly seems fair.” Just so, so good.
While Andor is incredibly good TV, it’s also so timely. It’s about normal people finding their place in a rebellion against fascism. It just feels deeply personal. One of the biggest lines that’s being quoted from Season 2 is Luthen’s very poignant, “I think we used up all the perfect.” It’s a great line, but I think the incredible reuse of Nemik’s Manifesto was just so powerful. I will never not get shivers hearing the reminder that ”There will be times when the struggle seems impossible…” Rogue One and A New Hope are going to hit different from now on.
Photos credit: Sue Andrews/Avalon, Lounis Tiar/Avalon, Jennifer Graylock-Graylock.com/Avalon, Justin Ng/Avalon
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