Andor's first season is set to span 12 episodes, with the second (and final) season running for the same length. That makes it the longest Star Wars TV series on Disney+ to date, and many fans have questioned why Cassian Andor's story needs to play out over such a lengthy period.
However, we know that the first 12 episodes will span one year, with the next twelve split into four three-episode blocks with each of those taking place over a year before we reach Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Andor Head Writer Tony Gilroy elaborated on exactly how this series will connect to the 2016 movie. "Our last scene of the show, our 24th episode, will walk the audience directly into Rogue One and directly into the first scene of Rogue One," he confirmed.
In the same interview, Gilroy was also asked about his recent comments that Andor is the first and only Star Wars TV series to not use The Volume (the LED stage that creates the backgrounds we've seen in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett).
"The technology is extraordinary and it’s going to become a larger and larger force in filmmaking," the writer said. "Nobody’s against the volume, the volume is fantastic for the things that it’s for. Our show was just on a massively epic scale and people would be running off the set all the time. Right now, there’s no good way to do both."
"You have to make a decision to be a volume show or a non-volume show. You can’t jump back and forth. There are some things that we wish we could have done on volume, they might have been simpler. But our show is huge," Gilroy continued. "We have 211 speaking parts. It just didn’t lend itself to that kind of production."
The team working on Andor is certainly taking a unique approach to telling this story, but that's by no means a bad thing. Whether Cassian's life before we met him in Rogue One needs that much time to breathe is hard to say, though everything we've seen from the show thus far looks phenomenal.
Andor premieres on Disney+ on September 21.