Andor Season 2 Is Breaking Star Wars Canon, But That's OK

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Andor Season 2, Episodes 7-9. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out IGN’s review for Andor Season 2’s third arc.

Andor Season 2 hit a new high note with Episodes 7-9, the climax of the show’s Ghorman storyline. We finally learned the full truth behind the Ghorman Massacre, arguably the most important, least understood conflict in the history of the Rebel Alliance. And as a nice little bonus, we got the origin story of Cassian’s faithful droid K-2SO.

There’s just one problem. We already got the full story on Cassian and K-2SO’s unlikely partnership in a 2017 Marvel comic, and it’s nothing like the story being told in Andor Season 2. For a shared universe that prides itself on maintaining continuity between movies, shows, novels, and comics, this is probably the biggest plot hole we’ve seen from the Disney Star Wars era. Let’s take a closer look at how Andor Season 2 diverges from Marvel’s version of events, and why ultimately it just doesn’t matter that much.

The Two Versions of K-2SO’s Origin

We knew coming into Andor Season 2 that Alan Tudyk would be reprising his role as K-2SO, with the series poised to reveal how this former Imperial assassin droid came to be partnered up with Diego Luna’s Rebel freedom fighter. That story is finally told in Episodes 8 and 9.

K-2SO is one of several K-X droids dispatched by the Empire to deal with the manufactured rebel uprising on Ghorman. After Cassian narrowly avoids being killed by the droid, he lugs K-2SO’s severed remains back to Yavin IV, where the droid is repaired, reprogrammed, and reactivated. He exists as a “living” monument to the atrocities committed by the Empire on Ghorman, and one that we know will be repurposed to do some good in the galaxy. Even if Cassian has to poke and prod him the entire time.

That episode tells a completely different story from the one we saw in 2017’s Rogue One: Cassian & K-2SO Special #1. Released a few months after Rogue One hit theaters, that comic reveals that Cassian acquires K-2SO during a mission gone awry on the planet Wecacoe. He and his partners attempt to salvage Imperial intel from a decommissioned Star Destroyer, only to blow their cover and have to fight their way out.

Cassian winds up duking it out with K-2SO during this mission, eventually subduing him and reprogramming the droid on the fly. It takes several attempts, but Cassian is eventually able to transform K-2SO into an ally who helps him escape the Empire. Though he fails to extract the intel from the Star Destroyer, Cassian is satisfied with the knowledge that K-2SO’s own databanks will provide invaluable information about the Empire’s security protocols.

In short, Lucasfilm has now released two completely different and contradictory versions of K-2SO’s origin story. The comic has effectively been retconned out of existence by the Andor show, relegating it to the same Legends status as the old Expanded Universe. But does that really matter? Let’s discuss.

The Messy Continuity of the Star Wars Franchise

For a franchise with as many moving parts as Star Wars, it’s inevitable that this universe is going to experience some continuity hiccups over time. Historically (in the Disney era, at least), Lucasfilm has tried to ensure that the movies and shows respect the stories being told in the books. Many details from the Star Wars: Aftermath novels have been picked up elsewhere, and we’ve seen characters like Cobb Vanth and Krrsantan make their debuts in print before crossing over to live-action. But the pieces don’t always fit perfectly. Andor Season 2 is hardly the first example where two versions of a story don’t align, even if this might be the most glaring example so far.

There’s definitely been conflict between the Star Wars shows and books/comics before. The Star Wars: Kanan comic series originally revealed how Kanan Jarrus survived Order 66, while Star Wars: The Bad Batch presents its own, somewhat different account. The animated series Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi offers a heavily condensed account of the story told in the Star Wars: Ahsoka novel. The 2014 novel Star Wars: Tarkin reads a little funny in hindsight because Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Krennic hadn’t been introduced yet, leaving Tarkin himself to act as the Death Star’s designated project manager.

Similarly, Rogue One: Cassian & K-2SO Special #1 came at a time when no one could have predicted there would be an entire long-form series dedicated to exploring Cassian’s past. Even those within Lucasfilm’s Story Group probably assumed the door had mostly closed on Cassian following his death in Rogue One, leaving the comics free to fill in the gaps. But over time, plans changed and grew, and now we have what is probably the most glaring plot hole in Disney’s less-than-watertight Star Wars canon.

But again, does it matter? It’s not the first time the pieces of this vast puzzle don’t quite fit, and it certainly won’t be the last. The Star Wars saga is nothing if not messy, with numerous storytellers all working to flesh out their own little corners of a vast galaxy over the span of many years.

More to the point, Andor Season 2 is telling a much deeper and more thematically rich story. Rogue One: Cassian & K-2SO Special #1 is fine for what it is - a short, standalone tale tasked with answering a straightforward question. Andor is doing something far more ambitious. If showrunner Tony Gilroy and his team need to steamroll over a mostly forgotten comic in order to tell a more complex story with Cassian and K-2SO, then so be it. The show is bona fide prestige television. It needn’t have its hands tied by strict adherence to canon.

It helps to think of Star Wars not as one singular, fully cohesive story, but a series of documents retelling the history of a galaxy that existed long ago and far away. History is never fully set in stone, and is always subject to the whims and biases and interpretations of those telling it. Maybe the people of the Star Wars galaxy have multiple stories they tell about the history of Cassian Andor and his acerbic droid partner. Which one is true? Who can say? All that matters is that these “historical documents” make for riveting storytelling, and that’s certainly what Andor: Season 2 is doing.

For more on Andor Season 2, learn more about the big death in Episode 8 and brush up on every Star Wars movie and series in development.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.