By George & Josh Bate
In addition to featuring 12 outstanding episodes of television, Andor Season 2 has also given fans an opportunity to regularly hear from series creator Tony Gilroy throughout an extended press tour for the series. Gilroy has tons of fascinating insights, with a decidedly different approach to crafting Star Wars stories than anything we’ve seen before. While much of these insights pertain to Andor itself, a recent interview with Gilroy may have shed some light on a major change to Star Wars canon.
While speaking with Josh Horowitz for the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, Gilroy made a comment that suggests the tiered system of Star Wars canon has returned. Here’s Gilroy’s quote….
“Lucasfilm is the Vatican and there’s like, a Curia. There are, I don’t know all the levels, there’s eight-ten levels of canonical material, all the way down to obscure fan-fiction. And there’s a guy, there’s Pablo Hidalgo who’s the guy who has been there, the librarian of this thing for a very long time.”
What’s so interesting about Gilroy’s comment here? Well, prior to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, Star Wars canon was structured into tiers. The movies (which were, at the time, Episodes I-VI) sat at the top of this pyramid, indicating that they are of greatest importance. As you make your way down the pyramid, you have television shows, comics, books, and video games. This system confirmed that, if there was ever a contradiction in canon, that the movies took precedent. In other terms, events in comics, books, and games hold true unless they are contradicted by movies, in which case the events of the movies are considered canon.
As far as we are aware, this is the first time that tiered canon storytelling has been brought up by a creative directly involved in modern Star Wars. If Gilroy’s quote is taken to be true, this explains why there have been a few retcons in recent years. Notably, the first episode of The Bad Batch retold Kanan’s origin story, thus retconning the events of the comic series Kanan: The Last Padawan. More recently, Tony Gilroy himself retconned the events of the Cassian & K-2 one-shot comic to tell his own version of how these two characters meet.
Overall, tiered canon is a logical decision for Star Wars storytellers and, as evidenced by the above, has probably been in operation for quite some time. However, this is the most stark confirmation of tiering canon existing in modern Star Wars. So far, the retcons have been very few and far between, never anything major, and always for the better. It’ll be hard to find a fan who preferred the origin story of Cassian and K-2 in the comic over the one we got in Andor, for instance. Moving forward, it will be interested to see how Lucasfilm deals with possible contradictions that come up.