After a long wait, season two of ‘Andor’ is arriving in April. The ‘Star Wars’ show, a prequel to a prequel, ended up being a surprise hit. It ditched the Jedi and the Force to focus on the violence, backstabbing and subterfuge behind the insurgency of the Rebel Alliance. It even showed that AKs were around a long, long time ago. Now the second and final season is bringing back the big bad of ‘Rogue One’ to face a new challenge.
Ben Mendelsohn was already confirmed to be reprising his role as Orson Krennic, the director of Advanced Weapons Research Division. The second season of ‘Andor’ is set to cover the four years leading up to ‘Rogue One’ and an interview with Empire Magazine shed new light on just what Krennic is up to. Instead of taking on the burgeoning Rebel Alliance, Krennic is struggling to get the Death Star financed.
Perhaps the Imperial military, much like the Department of Defense, can’t pass an audit. And like the Pentagon, it seems like the Advanced Weapons Research Division’s leader is going to be spending much of his time pushing for getting acquisitions approved. After all, in a time of peace backed up by the threat of Darth Vader, is there really a need for a battle station capable of destroying planets? Perhaps years of fighting the Separatists and then even more years replacing Republic-era battleships with the more recognizable Imperial Star Destroyers really did eat up the budget, even for an authoritarian state rife with a military-industrial complex.
It will be interesting to see how a superweapon ends up behind schedule. The ‘Star Wars’ films already established that the Death Star was in the works by the time the Empire was formed at the end of the prequels. The battle station and its superweapon laser are costly projects with long development periods, with ‘Andor’ showing that pieces of it were built by slave labor inside prisons. ‘Rogue One’ showed that even with the station mostly built, the laser was taking longer than expected. Is there an Imperial Senate equivalent of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Department of Defense to report when a program’s costs overrun certain thresholds? The Death Star is of course a secret program, so it likely wouldn’t be reported, but how does the military explain where the money is going?
So where is the money coming from? Where is Krennic having to pull from in order to get the project to completion? And not just for the construction of it — the logistics to keep it supplied alone have to be astronomical. What Senate bills are full of vague language that directs money to the Death Star?
Krennic made for a great villain ‘Rogue One’ in part because he was less military leader and more careerist defense official. For all of his bluster, he couldn’t match Darth Vader or actually military commander Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry using CGI to appear as the late Peter Cushing). The Empire interview also revealed that Mendelsohn’s bureaucrat will be clashing with one of the main villains of ‘Andor,’ Imperial Security Bureau supervisor Deedra Meero (Denise Gough). One of the strongest subplots in ‘Andor’ was the Imperial Security Bureau’s infighting and bickering. While the Empire’s state security force was busy trying to hunt down nascent rebel cells, it was also wrapped up in office politics and debates over resources and how to use them. Meero herself struggled to get more attention to signal and human intelligence, while her superiors were focused on broader strategy. It looks like season two will pit an acquisitions chief against an intelligence operative, with the two fighting over counterinsurgency tactics. For a galaxy far, far away, this feels like something out of the Global War on Terror. Surely it won’t be as much of a headache for the Imperial military the way the littoral combat ship is for the Pentagon.
Unlike today’s Pentagon, when the acquisition challenges are about adapting to rapidly changing technologies and cheaper weapons of war, the Galactic Empire is sitting pretty comfortably by the time of ‘Andor.’ In fact, the military strategy behind the Death Star was the Tarkin Doctrine. As Tarkin said in ‘A New Hope’: “Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” But when the Empire was on the verge of greatness, it was this close, and financing became a problem.
Given that the show is a prequel to ‘Rogue One’ — itself a direct prequel to ‘A New Hope’ — and showrunner Tony Gilroy has said the last scene of the series will lead directly into the 2016 film, it’s fair to guess that Krennic will figure out the Death Star budgetary issue. The question is how it will resolve, and what Imperial infighting audiences will get to see come out of it.
There is a solid chance ‘Andor’ will feature Krennic going before a Senate committee to answer questions about why the weapons development budget is spiking this year.
‘Andor’ season two premieres on Disney+ on April 22, 2025.