What to expect from Andor season 2 following the brilliant first season

Read on for a full breakdown of where we left off at the end of Andor season 1 and where we can expect the series to go from here.

You can currently watch Andor season 1 on Disney Plus by clicking the link below.

Andor is a prequel to 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It focuses on Cassian Andor before he officially joined the Rebel Alliance, with Diego Luna reprising the title role. Also back is Rogue One writer Tony Gilroy, who created Andor and serves as showrunner.

The series follows Andor years before his fateful role in Rogue One as a member of the Rebel Alliance. We see him radicalized by an unjust system that sees him hunted and wrongfully imprisoned, with a Rebel-funded heist thrown in for good measure.

The series is a portrait of an insurgency in its infancy, including all of the political dealings that happen behind the scenes.

It’s also a portrait of the early days of a fascist state, with the Galactic Empire exerting greater and greater control over its subjects. We witness not only the rise of evil but also the very mundane realities that allow evil to flourish. 

Andor has been praised by critics and fans alike, and for good reason. After some mixed responses to The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor has been met with near-unanimous acclaim.

The series offers a grounded look at the early days of the Rebel Alliance, zeroing in on deeply human stories set during the rise of a fascist government. While fans of the Skywalker Saga may miss the Force and the presence of the Jedi, Andor establishes the stakes of the Empire as it affects regular folk.

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Instead of a battle between good and evil, Andor focuses on people making difficult choices. In some cases, they’re doing their best to survive. In others, they’re finding their place within a massive, flawed system. It’s absolutely riveting, and it’s the best that Star Wars has been in years.

There will be a second season of Andor. Disney Plus ordered 22 episodes of the series, split across a two-season run.

As first reported by Collider, the second season will be filming from November 2022 until August 2023.

Based on the finality of Rogue One, it seems unlikely that Andor would return for another season after that, but never say never.

When will Andor season 2 premiere?

Disney has not set a release date for the second season of Andor, but it won’t be anytime soon. Creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy told Collider that he expects post-production to last as long as it did for season 1: two years.

Even if things move a bit faster, with fewer COVID-19-related setbacks, Andor season 2 likely won’t launch until sometime in 2024, barring any pressure from Disney to wrap up ahead of schedule.

In an October interview on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, Tony Gilroy talked about his plans for the series. He told Maron that season 1 took place in a single year of Andor’s life. Season 2, he said, will span five years and lead directly into Rogue One, narratively.

That means the series will likely explore Andor’s immersion into the Rebellion, becoming the captain and intelligence officer we meet in Rogue One.

That also may mean we’ll start to see more threads directly connecting Andor to Rogue One or to the broader Star Wars universe. Frankly, though, one of Andor’s most refreshing features is its lack of Easter eggs and winks to the fans. Instead of a revolving door of cameos or post-credit scenes teasing epic returns, Andor told a tight, self-contained story.

There were familiar characters, no doubt. Mon Mothma, who gets more screen time than ever before, anchors one of the show’s most compelling subplots. Ditto for Clone Wars veteran Saw Gerrera. But they’re tied into the rebellion in ways that explain and contextualize their presence. We may well see characters like Bail Organa, and we’ll almost certainly be introduced to Andor’s trusty reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid K-2SO in Andor season 2, but hopefully the series continues its trend of telling amazing stories without bombarding us with references to other Star Wars titles.

We’ll have to wait quite some time to find out for sure, but that’s roughly what we can expect from Andor season 2.