Andor Season 2 Will Drop in 3-Episode Weekly ‘Chapters’

While the wait seemed long for Andor‘s return, the 12-episode release schedule for the Lucasfilm Star Wars spin-off story will be considerably more breakneck for season two. Each week three episodes will drop as chapters in different points along the timeline leading up to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

“One of the great thrills of making Andor is the scale of the story and the number of characters we’re able to meet—ordinary people, Imperial overlords, passionate revolutionaries,” creator Tony Gilroy shared in the press release. “They are real people making epic decisions, all of them staring down questions with terrifying consequences. Cassian’s journey is the soul and spine of our story, but it’s the choir that makes the show. I’m so excited for audiences to see where we go in season two.”

Keeping up with all the threads in essentially a format of four weeks of three-hour movies is an exciting prospect. Hopefully it means we get enough time with all the incredible characters we met in season one. And there’s so many of them—a lot of fan-favorite heroes and villains to keep up with. No matter which side they’re on, everyone’s arc depicts what it’s like living under the Empire in richly intriguing ways, and in season two all these character threads have to weave together in order to get us to the events of Rogue One‘s Death Star plans heist.

To do it in just a few short weeks and across time jumps suggests that perhaps each drop will be more self-contained. It will be interesting to see if each three-hour or so release will center specific arcs. There’s lots to catch up on, like seeing how Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) will continue to fund the revolution with the ever-present danger of high society politics getting in the way, and Bix (Adria Arjona) playing a bigger role alongside Andor in being a part of the revolution, which has us has us incredibly game and cautiously optimistic she’ll live to continue on her own rebel adventures.

Andor will need to tie up the power struggle between Dedra (Denise Gough) and Syril (Kyle Soller) within the ranks of the Imperial forces and filled with that freaky tension we can’t wait to see play out. There are the moving pieces instrumental to the success of the rebellion within the class-crossing dynamics among Vel (Faye Marsay), Cinta (Varada Sethu), and Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau). And the stage will need to be set for Rogue One‘s Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn reprising his role) stepping in and Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) using violent means against the impending threat of the Death Star’s might.

That’s a lot to keep track of as this specific period of Star Wars lore continues to grow and hold the fandom’s attention the most. Moving away from the weekly, single-episode release is a curious choice; one has to wonder if it’s in response to being better able to account for hours watched in a shorter span of time. While it was airing, The Acolyte seemed slow to start getting that viewership in weekly, to the point where it was prematurely not renewed. Yet at the end of the year was revealed to be the second most-watched series on Disney +, which was incredibly frustrating for Acolyte fans. It really seemed like there’s an audience who does wait for it all to be available in order to see it in one sitting, versus those of us who want to process episodes week by week.

I guess this way could be seen as splitting the difference, getting the weekly views and then getting to the numbers of those who watch it in one sitting faster in order to determine which Star Wars stories work. When the show premieres its first arc of three episodes in April, we’ll find out if it’s just a handful of episodes at once, or a cohesive singular story told across the cluster. I’m curious to see if it will feel like three movies leading up to a final movie that leads into Rogue One. All in all it’s going to be a lot, but we’ve missed these characters and they’re so essential to the state of the world we’re living in, so bring it on.

Andor premieres April 22 on Disney+.

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