Anatomy of a Scene: The ‘Rogue One’ that makes you think ‘Andor’ was planned all along
I revisited Rogue One: A Star Wars Story the moment I was done with Andor season two, and the most fascinating scene by far is the one that comes immediately after the series’ end, which introduces Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor meeting with an informant, learning critical information about the nearly-complete Death Star, killing that informant, and then fleeing.
We are dropped into the Ring of Kafrene, a gritty, bustling colony far away from the polished corridors of Coruscant, but with an Imperial presence nonetheless. The camera lands on Cassian, moving along quickly, always looking over his shoulder, before running around a corner to meet his contact.
He is cool, almost friendly, but then more aggressively presses Tivik for the information he needs. Cassian is only rattled by the term “planet killer” and the name Galen Erso, but his competence and ruthlessness are evident from the start, which sees him assure the other man that everything will be alright when it looks like they will get caught, before shooting him in the back, so he can’t tell the Empire anything.
Cassian only allows himself a moment of bitter regret before taking off again, and this sequence, which is never directly discussed afterwards, informs his characterisation throughout the rest of the film, especially in his tense interactions with Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso.
After finding out that he was under orders to kill her father, Jyn makes a snide comment that Cassian “might as well be a Stormtrooper” if he’s going to carry out orders he “knows are wrong”, a line especially affected by the context of Andor. He snaps back, suggesting Jyn is entirely naive about what a rebellion costs, and that he isn’t knowingly following wrong orders, but he has to have faith in the Rebellion as a whole.
However, returning to his first scene, and how it reads after watching Andor, whose final arc revealed that the Rebellion had already gotten word that the Empire secretly built a superweapon, and that Cassian wasn’t retrieving new information on Kafrene but corroborating different accounts.
The rebels’ first tip, from a disgraced spymaster and his assistant, informed them that the Empire had a devastating new weapon, that it was designed by Galen Erso, and that Imperial activity on Scarif and Jedha was connected to it.
Cassian barely reacts to hearing that the Empire is making a weapon; the camera isn’t even on him when this line is said, and as Tivik goes on, the scene cuts back to Cassian just in time for him to ask, “What kind of weapon?”, the one thing he wasn’t entirely sure of, because he also knows exactly who they are talking about when Tivik mentions “someone named Erso”. In short, the way this scene fits together with the show is brilliant, and Cassian’s thought process now has added weight, as an old friend died passing this information along.
I had to work out in my head why this scene was acted, shot, and edited this way, if they didn’t know how a show that conceptually didn’t exist at that time was going to end. Cassian might not necessarily be fazed by the news that the Empire is building a weapon because the evidence suggests that they are always building weapons, but instead, he is insistent on finding out what kind of weapon this is because it’s his job to get as much information as possible. And as to why Galen Erso is an important name to him, they say later on that he is “a known Imperial collaborator”, though the rebel leaders don’t specify how they know this; it could just be a “rebel spies have brought us this information” handwave all over again.
Rogue One was well-received and commercially successful at the time, but the whole event faded fast; however, Andor, the Star Wars show no one initially cared about, fleshed out the context of Rogue One with a rich prequel story about the cost and necessity of fighting fascism, with a scene that first showcases one of Star Wars’ best characters illustrating a microcosm of this effect, so the story hits everyone that much harder.
