Now, with the launch of Andor on Disney Plus, a series that promises to follow the development of Rogue One protagonist Cassian Andor from his days as a budding rebel to his death on the sands of Scarif, it’s worth looking back at some of previous attempts to dramatize the words in the crawl and explain how the Rebel Alliance came to be, as well as consider how Andor is uniquely positioned to stitch together some of these disparate narratives into a coherent whole.
The origins of Rebellion on the radio
One of the first attempts to dramatize the opening crawl and give more details about the nascent Rebel Alliance was done through a vintage format. In 1981, NPR launched a Star Wars radio drama based on A New Hope and produced with the blessing of George Lucas. It featured sounds and music from the films, with Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprising their film roles. One of the fun things about the radio drama is that it dramatizes scenes left on the cutting room floor (like Luke meeting his old friend Biggs Darklighter on Tatooine) while also adding scenes that didn’t appear in the movie, mostly in the second and Episode Three, “Points of Origin” and “Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns”. In “Points of Origin,” Leia and her father (then named Prestor Organa, instead of Bail) entertain the loathsome Imperial Lord Tion on Alderaan. Leia learns of the existence of the Death Star and the plans obtained by Rebel agents after an attack on an Imperial convoy. When she lets this knowledge slip, Tion tries to capture her but ends up being shot. This prompts Leia’s father to help the Rebellion more directly, and Leia convinces her father to let her take their ship, the blockade runner Tantive IV, to the rebels on the planet Toprawa to retrieve the plans. In “Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns”, Leia receives the Rebel transmission from Toprawa, but is tracked down by Darth Vader. She is pursued by Vader’s Star Destroyer as she tries to reach Obi-Wan Kenobi and recruit him to the cause of the rebellion, bringing the radio drama to where the first film begins. Obviously, the final act of Rogue One pretty much repeats all of that history, but the radio drama still represents a fun early take on the origins of the Rebel Alliance in a very different form.
The books and video games build more of the Rebellion’s story
Image: Del Rey
1991 saw a renaissance of sorts for Star Wars after a relatively dry period following the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983. It started not in the form of new movies, but through new novels. Specifically, the Thrawn trilogy written by Timothy Zahn, (consisting of Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command and named after its central antagonist, the seductive Grand Admiral Thrawn). The success of these novels would lead to a growing “Expanded Universe” of semi-canonical stories told in many mediums, from books to comics to video games, over the next two decades. While the Thrawn trilogy takes place five years after the end of Return of the Jedi, it briefly plays with the origins of the Rebellion through the introduction of a new character, the Corellian Garm Bel Iblis. Zahn reveals that in the early days of the rebellion, Bel Iblis was one of the leaders of three different rebel factions, the other two being led by Leia’s father (now Bail Organa) and Mon Mothma (the political leader of the Rebel Alliance in Return of the Jedi). In the story, Bel Iblis is credited with bringing the three groups together to form the nascent Alliance through the Corellian Treaty, though the more aggressive Bel Iblis often faced off against the peaceful Mothma and Organa (not unlike Saw Gerrera’s later relationship with Revolution) . After the destruction of Alderaan and the loss of Organa’s mediating influence, Bel Iblis and his loyal forces left the Rebellion to wage their own private war on the Empire (before returning to the “present day” of the Thrawn trilogy). AC Crispin’s Han Solo trilogy, another series of books from later in the Expanded Universe era, revisits the events surrounding the conception of the Death Star plans. In the final novel of the trilogy, Rebel Dawn, Han’s then lover Bria Tharen is revealed to have become a Rebel commando. He takes part in the attack on Toprava which ends with the Rebel agents there broadcasting the plans for Leia to Tantive IV, just like in the radio drama. And in shades of Rogue One, all the rebels on Toprava, including Bria, are killed in the process of pulling off the plans. The groundbreaking video game Dark Forces offers another spin on obtaining the Death Star plans, crediting their recovery to its main character, Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial mercenary (and future Jedi Knight) recruited by Mon Mothma to steal the plans for the rebels from an Imperial facility at Danuta. A later video game, The Force Unleashed, offers one of the most important and impressive glimpses into the formation of the Rebel Alliance up to that time, revealing that the game’s protagonist, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice Starkiller, was responsible for planting the seeds. by what became the Rebel Alliance under the direction of Vader himself, who hoped to use the Alliance against the Emperor for his own purposes.
The deleted scene of Revenge of the Sith
Image: Lucasfilm/Disney
Initially, Genevieve O’Reilly’s rebel leader Mon Mothma (introduced in Revenge of the Sith before reappearing in Rogue One, the animated Rebels and the upcoming Andor) had a much larger role in the final prequel film (one that would had also given Padmé Amidala much more to do in the film than angst and die of a “broken heart”). This role continues mainly in the form of the deleted scene “Seeds of Rebellion” (available as part of the Revenge of the Sith extras on Disney Plus) and the novel Revenge of the Sith (based on an earlier draft of the film’s writing) . In “Seeds of Rebellion”, Mon Mothma is present at a meeting of senators, including Padmé and Bail Organa, in which they discuss forming a Senate bloc opposed to Chancellor Palpatine’s continued manipulation of the constitution for his own purposes. This scene represents a larger subplot that Lucas originally weaved into the film, which plays a part in the novel version. He joins the Loyalist Committee, a larger group of Senators dedicated to preserving the Republic and limiting Palpatine’s power. One of their signatures is the creation of the Petition of 2,000, a document urging Palpatine to relinquish the emergency powers he assumed at the start of the Clone Wars, signed by 2,000 senators. Many of these senators, such as Bail Organa and Mon Mothma, would go on to support or join the Rebel Alliance. The legitimacy of these events remains dubious, as they exist in a strange kind of vacuum—they’re part of an official film, but also not. However, given the continuity that Genevieve O’Reilly brings to the role and Andor’s timeline, it’s entirely possible that the series could reference them directly as it develops Mothma into the Alliance leader we see in Rogue One.
Expanding the Rebellion story on TV and the recent Star Wars films
Image: Lucasfilm
Since Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012 and the reboot of the Star Wars canon, there have been many elements of a budding Rebel Alliance introduced in various storylines. This puts Andor, set in the same timeline as those stories and featuring a character’s journey from before he joined the Rebels to when he played a crucial role in that crawl-teased “first victory,” in the unique position of being able to sew all these pieces together. The Clone Wars and Bad Batch animated series, for example, feature, to varying degrees, Saw Gerrera’s Partisans, one of several disparate rebel factions operating in the space between the prequel and original trilogies. Solo: A Star Wars Story introduces the Enfys Nest and its band of pirates/rebels as a way to tease Han’s future involvement with the original trilogy’s more formally organized Rebel Alliance. Obi-Wan Kenobi recently introduced “The Path”, a sort of Proto-Revolutionary Alliance/underground railroad that provides safe passage for Jedi and Force-sensitive survivors of the Emperor’s Jedi Purge. Rebels, another animated series set before A New Hope, depicts the adventures of a very small rebel cell on the world of Lothal that is slowly absorbed into the larger galactic rebel effort. It also introduces the concept of “Fulcrum”, a coded identity for a secret agent who works to inform and coordinate different rebel cells (an identity once used by Cassian Andor), while later stories confirmed that characters from that series would they continued to serve in the larger alliance.
What it means for Andor
Stories set in the same “inter-trilogy” era as Andor are not uncommon. But given the crucial role Cassian Andor plays in the climax of Rogue One, Andor is the first of these series to star a character who is there when the…
