Andor Season 2 Had To Scrap One 'Horror' Episode With A Beloved Star Wars Character

This article contains spoilers for "Andor."

As "Andor" season 2 barrels towards its inevitable conclusion and sets a new high water mark for "Star Wars" in the process, it'd be understandable for viewers to assume that creator Tony Gilroy and his writing team managed to pull off a heist of their own. After all, this is a season that has gotten away with depicting the Ghorman massacre in all its harrowing brutality, along with a dozen sequences and concepts that we've simply never seen from this franchise before. If any movie or series represented the idea of unfettered creative freedom within this beloved story about a galaxy far, far away ... it'd be this one, right?

Well, we now know that's only mostly true. Even the best and most acclaimed series in all of "Star Wars" had to make a few concessions along the way. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gilroy opened up about one particular path that he had to divert from during the writing process of this second and final season. As we saw in the latest batch of episodes, Diego Luna's Cassian Andor makes off with the mangled body of the Imperial enforcer droid that turns out to be K-2SO, the most stubborn and difficult (yet fan-favorite) member of "Rogue One" voiced by Alan Tudyk. That origin story for the inseparable pair felt like a clever bit of retconned backstory, but it could've been very different had the show's creative team followed the original plan. 

As Gilroy explained, his brother Dan (known for 2014's "Nightcrawler") scripted another way for Cassian and K2 to cross paths — and it would've taken the series in a much more overtly horrorifying direction:

"Dan Gilroy wrote an amazing, entirely self-contained episode that was episode 209. It was an amazing episode that was like a horror movie."

So, what happened to force such a drastic change of plans? Well, it's the same issue that has befallen many an ambitious writer since the dawn of storytelling itself. Money, as it turns out, proved to be the fly in the ointment.

If you thought "Andor" season 2 found the most horrific way to throw those imposing KX-series droids into action during the Ghorman massacre, well, think again. Slaughtering defenseless Ghorman civilians is one thing, but what if there was an even scarier version featuring a solitary KX droid hunting our heroes throughout the claustrophobic confines of a single ship? That could've ended up being our introduction to the cantankerous K-2SO, had things gone as originally envisioned. Tony Gilroy shed some more light on this while talking to Entertainment Weekly, describing how episode 9 might've been a K2-centric standalone story rather than the Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) power hour that it became:

"It was the K2 story. They had to bring this huge ugly tanker ship to Yavin, and there was a KX unit that was trapped inside there hunting. It was sort of like a monster movie with K2 on it. It was really cool."

Unfortunately, silly and real-world constraints like "budgets" and "practicality" ended up getting in the way and necessitated some major changes. Gilroy went on to explain why the higher-ups at Disney and Lucasfilm ultimately squashed what would've been an exorbitantly expensive episode: "We could not afford to do it. It was made clear that it was out of the range, so we had to abandon that and consolidate things." That included folding K2's introduction into the Ghorman plotline and shifting other major moments, such as Mon Mothma's stirring speech to the Senate, from episode 10 to episode 9. In the end, the final version of events feels every inch as sprawling and epic as the series has always been. But it's fun to imagine the potential what-ifs had the studio opened up its pocketbooks even more.

For his part, Tony Gilroy chalked up this fiscal belt-tightening to the dramatic change in streaming mindsets among studio executives over the past few years. The gold rush mentality that led to Marvel overcommitting to far too many Disney+ shows and Lucasfilm turning "Andor" into the most expensive "Star Wars" project ever seemingly vanished by the time season 2 rolled around. Though that could've thrown less-prepared writers for a loop, both Tony and Dan Gilroy were used to expecting the unexpected. According to Tony Gilroy, this wasn't too dissimilar to the scrambling they had to do back in season 1 with the Aldhani arc culminating in the spectacular Eye of Aldhani sequence:

"It's like what we did with Aldhani. Danny got burned twice. Danny wrote the Aldhani episode pre-Covid where there were 2,000 people in Aldhani. It was like Glastonbury, this huge festival. And then by the time we got there [after Covid] they said, 'Well, you'd be happy if you get 150 people there.' We were like, 'Oh my God, we have to change the whole story!' Everything had to change."

Though Gilroy was quick to give credit to both Disney and Lucasfilm for continuing to support his creative goals, it took a little more convincing to get others to see the vision — such as K2 voice actor and motion-capture performer Alan Tudyk. Gilroy's choice to delay K2 and Cassian's initial meeting meant potentially rubbing both Tudyk and fans the wrong way, as he explained further:

"I think Alan was probably disappointed, and I think there were fans who were disappointed, but I was like, 'Man, whatever we're going to do, we got to wait really as long as we can until we introduce him.' But then as I said to Alan in the beginning, and finally everyone came around on the idea: 'Look, we're going to wait, but it's going to be worth it, and when we get there, we'll really make a thing out of it and it'll make sense and it'll feel right."

There are even more fascinating tidbits sprinkled throughout the interview, so be sure to head on over to EW to check it out in full. The last three episodes of "Andor" will drop on Disney+ streaming Tuesday, May 13, 2025.