A New Look at Andor Season 2 Confirms a Major Star Wars Event

Last night Lucasfilm dropped a special behind-the-scenes featurette giving us a better glimpse at Andor season 2–revealing some familiar ships, a few more intriguing hints at what insurgents and Imperials alike are going to be up to in the Star Wars streaming show, and seeming confirmation of a fundamental moment in the creation of the Rebel Alliance.

The three-minute featurette, currently only available on Disney+, features Tony Gilro, Diego Luna, Genevieve O’Reilly and most of the show’s cast briefly teasing the set up for season 2, which will take place across the four years between the climax of Andor‘s first season all the way up to the days leading up to Cassian’s mission to Kafrene that opened Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. But it’s also filled with a ton of new shots from the second season that builds on what we saw in the recent trailer, including Cassian’s theft of the TIE Avenger, Vel training insurgents, and some intriguing shots of Mon Mothma’s often-discussed, but rarely seen homeworld of Chandrila.

Rogue One fans will be particularly pleased to see the return of the U-Wing, seen in several shots around the Alliance’s base on Yavin IV, a few more glimpses of Saw Gerrera’s partisans, and as well as fleeting looks at Ben Mendelsohn and Alan Tudyk’s returns as Orson Krennic and K-2SO, respectively. But perhaps the most intriguing of all is the confirmation that season 2 will take fans to a very familiar world: Ghorman. Several shots we’d already seen of large crowds protesting Imperial forces in a port city–and the ensuing disaster that comes when the Imperials start firing on them–feature closed captioning that identifies the protesters as “singing in Ghor”.

Ghorman, a small world along vital trade routes between the core worlds and the Inner Rim, is the site of a devastating massacre in both the Expanded Universe and contemporary iterations of Star Wars canon, where swaths of local protesters are slaughtered by Imperial forces. The Ghorman Massacre–the prelude to which was already teased in Andor‘s first season during Mon Mothma’s storyline, where she protests blockades of supply lines to the world in the Imperial Senate–is an atrocity that becomes a rallying cry for rebel activity across the galaxy that eventually establishes support for the formal organization of the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

But it is especially vital to modern Star Wars canon, as the inciting incident that sees Mon Mothma formally resign from the Senate, labelling herself a traitor to the state in a speech railing against Palpatine’s tyranny. We see the direct fallout of the massacre in Rebels‘ third season, where the Ghost crew is tasked with escorting Mon Mothma from her fleeing of Coruscant to the planet Dantooine, where she delivers an address to the galaxy calling for disparate insurgent cells to unite into a formal Rebel Alliance. And now we know for sure that Andor is going to show us the horrors that preceded that act of defiance.

Andor returns to Disney+ with a three-episode premiere on April 22. The remaining 9 episodes will drop in three-episode “chapters” on a weekly basis thereafter.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.