There are plenty of Star Wars fans with a soft spot for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but it wasn’t until Andor that fans and critics alike seemed keen to reappraise it. The prestige drama has retroactively made the film better by using the best parts of Rogue One to make something that had never been attempted within the Star Wars saga; its first season was an in-depth character study and a radical take on dystopia all in one, and its use of relatively minor legacy characters allowed fans to consider the franchise with fresh eyes.
All that is set to continue in Andor’s second season. The series will expand its scope beyond the journey of its title anti-hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), to explore the early years of the Galactic Rebellion. It’s also taking a big risk with its timeline, jumping forward from one year to the next until it catches up to Rogue One. That means that certain characters from the film — like Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic — are guaranteed to show up. Andor has the chance to flesh out a handful of characters, but it will also take us back to an iconic location in Star Wars lore: Yavin IV.
Lucasfilm delivered a long-awaited Andor update at D23 Brazil last week, announcing a Season 2 release date and offering us our first look at the series. Andor is set to return on April 22, 2025, and previous updates have teased a story that will turn Rogue One into “a different film.” The new season has the big task of covering the five-year gap between Andor and Rogue One in a short span of time, but a new look at Cassian offers an intriguing hint about its approach.
In the first promo art from Andor Season 2 (captured by Twitter user @GoodNerd23), Cassian appears on what looks a lot like Yavin IV. The moon served as the home base for the Rebellion in its early battles against the Empire, and was a key location in Rogue One and A New Hope. Yavin was a closely kept secret, and Andor Season 2 could show us how the Rebellion picked this particular hideout and what life was like on the inside.
According to series creator Tony Gilroy, Andor Season 2 starts on Yavin before taking fans on a tour of the galaxy. “We’re going to Yavin,” Gilroy told Collider in 2022, “and then we’re going into places where we eventually need to really weave our way back to the source.”
As this season reportedly ends just as Rogue One begins, all roads will eventually lead back to the rebel base. This will be the first time the saga has returned to the moon since 2017; Yavin was a major locale in the animated Star Wars Rebels, implying a potential crossover between Andor and the live-action versions of the characters. Either way, Andor fans have reason to be excited. The show has already done a smart job of fleshing out elements of Star Wars we thought we knew, and now it could do the same for one of the franchise’s most iconic locations. It’s been a long wait for Season 2, but there’s finally a base at the end of the hyperspace tunnel.
