Andor Season 2 Will Be Dealing With Massive Time Jump
As Season 1 of Andor approaches completion, Season 2 is set to kick off production in the United Kingdom the Monday before Thanksgiving, as was confirmed earlier by its showrunner Tony Gilroy.
The upcoming 12 episodes will be broken into four three-episode arcs, each separated by about a year, covering four years, leading up to the events of Rogue One.
In addition to time jumps between the arcs, there will another year-long time jump between Season 1 and Season 2.
You see, as Tony Gilroy revealed before, the show was initially planned to be five seasons long, but then all the seasons after the first were reduced to three-episode arcs. The most likely reason for such drastic reduction in screentime is not difficult to guess.
As Tony Gilroy put in a recent interview to Rolling Stone:
"Because the first year is really about him becoming, and the last line of this tranche of 12 episodes will sum up where we've been trying to get to. And we come back a year later. It'll be very different. The next four years [of story] are not about becoming a revolutionary. They're about learning to be a leader and how difficult it is to put the alliance together and what happens to people who are the original gangsters versus the establishment and a lot of different other issues."
Tony then addressed the idea of time jumping in greater depth: "When you jump a year, what happened in between? You know the people, you know what their trajectory was. It's energizing. We will be starting new characters, obviously..."
He continued, "There will be all kinds of new things and will be just as granular as we ever were. And really, the second half is about, what does time do to these people? People grow up and people get tired and people betray each other and people change their minds and people get weak and people get crazy."
Hopefully, the show does not end up skipping too much character development during all the time jumps, as it follows the rest of Cassian Andor's path from a small-time criminal to a rebel commander he is by the time of the movie. Season 2 will also feature an entirely new team of directors – Ariel Kleiman, Janus Metz and Alonso Ruizpalacios will each helm an arc, so we'll have to wait and see if Season 2 would maintain the quality of Season 1.