Andor Season Two Continuity Breakdown

The second season of Andor has come to a close, bringing the end of what has been for my money easily one of the best Star Wars stories we’ve ever had. Despite by all accounts not being a fan himself, Tony Gilroy has proven that he takes established lore very seriously, approaching it with almost the same manner that he approaches real history, and this shows clearly in the results. In addition to plenty of cute little easter eggs, the most impressive aspect of the season’s continuity to me is the manner with which it tells the story of Ghorman, Mon Mothma, and the Rebellion by picking up threads from places like West End Games and Rebels while creating something entirely new and different. 

• The season opens with Cassian stealing a new model of TIE being developed by the Empire. The snowy planet is identified by the onscreen graphic as “Sienar Test Facility 73.” This is easily the most prominent onscreen appearance of the shipbuilding corporation first named by Bill Slavicsek in WEG’s The Star Wars Sourcebook, though they’ve had minor references scattered through previous series like Rebels. A company logo can be seen a couple of times based upon the one originally designed I believe for The New Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology. The prototype ship that Cassian steals is the top-of-the-line TIE Avenger, a ship from the 1994 computer game TIE Fighter. 
• Ghorman plays a major role throughout after the foreshadowing mentions in the previous season, making this not only the first onscreen appearance of the planet first mentioned in WEG’s The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook but the first ever in-story visit to its surface, which gave the show’s team a lot of leeway with defining it. The planet was named by WEG writer Paul Murphy after the film director Roger Corman. The season introduces high-quality Ghorman silk as the planet’s primary export, which was set up with multiple mentions of Ghorman silk in 2021’s The High Republic: Convergence. Preview pages for The Acolyte: The Visual Guide identify Vernestra’s diplomatic robes in that show as being made from the silk. Though this has yet to be said in any story material, Tony Gilroy has noted that the intent is for Palpatine’s black zeyd cloth robes to be made from it as well, adding an extra layer of cruelty to the atrocities committed for him there. 
• Krennic claims that they need the Ghorman kalkite for a clean energy initiative, seemingly calling back to the same cover story being used for Death Star research in Catalyst. It also doubles as a sneaky prequels wink with Krennic mentioning the Emperor’s desire for the project to supply the galaxy with “unlimited power.” 

• Erskin Semaj is a recurring character throughout the season, serving as Mon’s aide and ultimately a well-intentioned spy for Luthen. The character was introduced in the third season Rebels episode “Secret Cargo,” which part of the season ultimately serves as a sort of prequel for, but more on that later. Erskin, originally just a bit character in the animated show, was named after Lucasfilm employee James Erskine. The show fleshes him out much further, including revealing his mixed Chandrilan/Ghorman heritage, while staying remarkably accurate to both his role and appearance in Rebels. 
• The first arc includes Chandrila as a major setting, Mon Mothma’s home world first mentioned in The Star Wars Sourcebook, in its first onscreen appearance aside from the windows of the Galactic Starcruiser (I do believe the show’s depiction of the planet takes some cues from that experience). The Chandi Merle temple figure is mentioned to have been stolen from the planet by the Rakatans 25,000 years prior, referencing the Infinite Empire first introduced by Knights of the Old Republic for the second time in the show’s run. 
• Dedra mentions having been raised in an Imperial kinder-block to Eedy, a concept set up before the show’s release by a mention in The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, which tied the idea to the older COMPNOR agency. The show’s episode guide clarifies Dedra grew up in a similar facility that would come to be known as an Imperial kinder-block later on due to her age not allowing for her to be that young while the Empire was around, but the idea having older roots lines up with COMPNOR itself having roots going back to the final years of the Republic. 
• In the second arc, it’s mentioned that Grand Moff Tarkin landed his ship on top of peaceful Ghorman protesters in the middle of their capital around sixteen years prior, which would have been just after the rise of the Empire. This idea for the Ghorman Massacre, including its chronology, is the one that was originally presented in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook twenty-five years ago, and it seemed to have been made apocryphal with the mention of the massacre being much later in 2 BBY in Rebels until this season resurrected it while reconciling the Rebels massacre into a separate event. Ghorman’s planet graphic in the arc also mentions its positioning along the Rimma from The Essential Atlas.
• Bix purchases melons fresh from Ukio in a shop. Ukio comes from The Thrawn Trilogy, which introduced it as an agricultural world important for supplying the Core with food. 
• Mon mentions conviction numbers rising on peaceful planets like Tepasi, which is the Tagge family homeworld in the Core first mentioned in the 2002 HoloNet News articles. 

• When Syril tries to access his office building late in the night, he interrupts two guards secretly watching podracing. Close inspection of the Aurebesh text on the screen reveals the racetrack they’re watching is Grabvine Gateway on Baroonda, a track from the Episode I Racer game. The names of the podracers listed all belong to ILM artists. This isn’t actually the first time ILM has put together a live action version of an Episode I Racer track to have as entertainment on a screen: the Outlander Club in Attack of the Clones includes a TV showing a course from the game on Ando Prime. 
• The second arc shows that Saw has set up a temporary base on D’Qar, the very same base used by the Resistance in The Force Awakens (and shot at the same old WWII base in real life). The most recent edition of Complete Locations had an edit to reflect this in advance: a passage of text about D’Qar was changed from the previous edition to say the planet was discovered by the Rebellion before Yavin instead of before Endor. The original passage was in reference to a moment in Lost Stars later in the timeline where Thane Kyrell makes a note to flag the planet as a good site for a possible rebel base before Endor. I don’t think Saw having a base there earlier in the timeline contradicts Lost Stars; Thane is deliberately shown to be uninformed about the greater rebellion in the book and I see no reason to think he’d know about a different cell briefly using the planet a decade prior. 
• When Cassian visits the travel agency on Coruscant, a small model of the StarSpeeder 1000 from Star Tours: The Adventure Continues can be seen inside, which looks like a real toy actually made for the ride. 
• Saw’s storyline in the second arc revolves around the theft of rhydonium, a fuel seen in other shows like The Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian. It turns out Saw has a penchant for not wearing the proper equipment around the gas fumes, which is partially responsible for his breathing troubles by the time of Rogue One. Some supplementary material like the film’s Visual Guide had lightly implied Geonosian pesticide like the one seen in Rebels was responsible for his lung issues but that was never really made explicit and it could still be a contributing factor. Saw mentions his past in Onderon’s jungles and refers to the rhydo as his sister, likely a tragic indirect reference to his real sister Steela who died in The Clone Wars. 
• Kleya mentions the Grand Vizier having courted Sculdun, referencing Grand Vizier Mas Amedda and his title from the unmade Underworld live action series for the third time in the show. A different and very traditional alien called the Oathkeeper is shown to be presiding over Senate sessions in later episodes, which seems at odds with Amedda’s usual role of presiding in other stories, but Dawn of Rebellion: The Visual Guide had both foreshadowed and explained this plot point two years ago by explaining how the ancient Oathkeeper role has been resurrected by the Empire to sometimes preside over Senate sessions. 
• The sixth episode visits the planet Steergard for the first time after it received several mentions in the first season. The planet’s graphic says it’s on the Rimma Trade Route like Ghorman despite the recent edition of Complete Locations having just placed Steergard in grid O-6, nowhere near the Rimma and much closer to Hydian. This is ironically the second time that series of maps has been contradicted after placing a planet from a live action show only for a later season of that show to mention the planet being along a different trade route far away, after the same situation happened with Nevarro in the third season of The Mandalorian (the Complete Locations map had actually just patched that error by moving Nevarro to a more fitting place along the Hydian).
• In addition to the many returning characters from Rogue One, the rebel base on Yavin in this season is populated by numerous aliens from the sequel trilogy, particularly those seen around the Resistance base. My personal favorite reuse is the droid AL1-L3 from The Rise of Skywalker walking around in the background. That film’s Visual Dictionary had established her to be a survivor of the Solo Kessel droid revolt inspired by L3’s actions, and her joining the Rebellion around this era feels right. 

• One of the anti-Ghorman senators seen before Mon’s dramatic speech is identified by Aurebesh as Sen Den Gane from Roona. He bears resemblance to the Roonan Senator Edcel Bar Gane from The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars, making him a likely relative. The same screen for Mon’s speech identifies her as Sen Mothma, so Den Gane likely follows the same name pattern as Bar Gane. 
• The latter half of the season brings Bail Organa into play, portrayed here by Benjamin Bratt. His role in the Rebellion and relationship with Mon seems very in line with everything that’s been shown so far both onscreen and in the EU; the second arc of the season is theoretically around the time of Leia, Princess of Alderaan, a novel that featured both characters, and though the novel was clearly written long before the show without it in mind, I don’t think there’s anything in the two that doesn’t line up. At the end of the ninth episode, as Mon prepares to leave Coruscant, Bail tells her how he must stay on Coruscant and he’ll join her at Yavin the following year. Some have questioned this due to Rebels showing Bail with Dodonna and a team of rebels during Mon’s speech mere hours or days after the Andor episode, but close examination of that short scene and the episode’s script reveals it takes place in a “blockade runner war room,” very likely on Bail’s own ship. While he couldn’t openly flee the Senate the way Mon did, having a secret meeting with Dodonna on his personal ship seems plausible to me. 
• As I mentioned before, the ninth episode serves as a prelude to the third season Rebels episode “Secret Cargo.” That episode opens with the Ghost crew having been sent by Bail to fuel up a ship carrying an important passenger that turns out to be Mon Mothma, escorted by Gold Squadron after her flight from Coruscant. Andor takes a meta approach by acknowledging those events while somewhat undermining them, with the characters openly discussing how they will be rewriting the narrative by having Mon make the speech she eventually makes in the Rebels episode and how none of Cassian’s prior actions will be documented. Mon’s speech to the galaxy in Rebels and her Gold Squadron escort are mentioned in Andor with the timeline adding up perfectly for that episode to take place immediately after. The Rebels episode does start with an Imperial HoloNet broadcast of the same Senate speech that Mon gives in Andor; though the exact lines are different, the sentiment remains the same with both speeches denouncing the Ghorman atrocity and calling Palpatine out by name as the evil responsible. Tony Gilroy has acknowledged how he and the episode’s writer had started with the exact same speech but ultimately decided to change it to better fit the show they were writing. Some have tried to suggest the Rebels broadcast could be a third speech or those lines could happen between cuts but this feels like an overcomplication of a pretty minimal difference to me, particularly with all of the actual plot beats lining up and the spirit remaining the same. It’s essentially the same thing as a film and a novelization having slightly different specifics or lines in places, so long as the story beat remains the same. 
• The season ends up depicting how Cassian meets K-2SO, with Cassian picking up the broken droid during the massacre on Ghorman before having him repaired back on Yavin. A very different and much more lighthearted version of their meeting was shown in the Cassian & K-2SO Special comic one-shot eight years ago, well before Andor was conceived. That story showed Cassian finding and reprogramming K-2 during an intel mission on Wecacoe. No reconciliation for the differences has been suggested but it’s likely Wecacoe was a cover story produced to make K2’s past a bit easier to swallow and cover up Cassian’s true operations (Draven does explicitly mention rewriting the narrative in the following episode). Coincidentally or not, it’s also worth noting the Galaxy Map did place Wecacoe in the grid square right next to Ghorman. 
• A tooka cat, a critter first seen on Cosucant in The Clone Wars, is the first to discover Lonni’s body in the park. They previously appeared in live action in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. 

• The hospital where the ISB takes Luthen has Aurebesh on the side clearly showing it’s named after Lina Soh, the Chancellor throughout the whole The High Republic initiative. This is the fourth live action show to directly connect with the initiative after Obi-Wan Kenobi hiding “for light and life” on the Path wall, The Acolyte‘s inclusion of many elements including Vernestra Rwoh, and Skeleton Crew‘s mention of the Republic’s Great Work deliberately recalling Soh’s own Great Works. 
• Cassian mentions that the place they’re rescuing Kleya from is on Level 5124. This is about three levels down from the top level of Coruscant in that era, 5127, per behind the scenes material from The Clone Wars.