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We have just a little bit over a month before season two of Andor drops. I cannot freaking wait. Talk about the perfect show for the moment that we are in. If you aren’t familiar with Andor, it’s a prequel to the events of Rogue One, which itself is a prequel that leads directly into the beginning of A New Hope. Essentially, it tells the story of how Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) ended up as a member of the Rebel Alliance in their scrappy fight against the Empire.
For a while, Andor’s showrunner, Tony Gilroy, had planned to follow the example of other successful series and publish season one as a “script book” so fans could buy a compilation of the first season’s scripts in book form. Succession has successfully published the scripts from its first four seasons in book format. According to Gilroy, they had put the entire project together and had every intention of releasing it…and then, AI blew up thanks to ChatGPT and became mainstream. So, to prevent his scripts from being fed to AI, Gilroy canceled the book project completely.
“Andor” creator Tony Gilroy recently told Collider that he will not be making any of the scripts for the “Star Wars” series public out of fear they will be used to train artificial intelligence systems. Gilroy had been planning to release the scripts for the show’s first season in a book format that fans could purchase, similar to shows such as HBO’s “Succession.” However, the rise of AI effectively killed that plan.
“I wanted to do it,” Gilroy said about releasing the scripts. “We put it together. It’s really cool. I’ve seen it, I loved it. AI is the reason we’re not. In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it’s just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the f-cking robots anymore than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses.”
“Andor” is gearing up to return for its second season on April 22. The first season of the show took place over the course of roughly a year in the life of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he transforms from a small-time criminal to a man prepared to join the fight against the Galactic Empire. The 12-episode second season is split into four chapters of three episodes each. Each chapter will cover a few consecutive days in each successive year before the events of “Rogue One.”
“The writers on the show and myself, it’s a pretty fancy bunch of writers, really, in a way. Everybody’s very experienced,” Gilroy told Collider about his staff. “We only get together for five or six days in the beginning to talk about the story, and then we kind of go, and they do their thing, and then they go away. But I always have them as a reference to call upon.”
Joining Luna in “Andor” Season 2 are returning cast members Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O’Reilly, Kyle Soller, Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, Faye Marsay, Varada Sethu and Forest Whitaker.
”Why help the f-cking robots anymore than you can? Hell yeah, Tony! Sadly, someone out there has probably already fed the actual episodes to AI for some reason or other. That said, I don’t blame Tony for protecting his intellectual property and not wanting to help feed the AI beast himself. I don’t think all AI is bad, but I do think without regulation and a solution to its negative environmental impact, it’s a dangerous, slippery slope that needs to be addressed now. It’s a bummer that he decided to scrap the book, though, because Star Wars fans probably would have been all over that.
If you’ve never seen Andor, the first season finale has this incredible monologue by Fiona Shaw, who plays Maarva Andor. Without going into too much detail, it’s about how it’s time for the people of the galaxy to stand up and fight the Empire. If you want to feel inspired, you can watch it below (here’s a fan-transcription) and you don’t need to know anything about the series or movies to appreciate it.