Andor creator Tony Gilroy opens up about the original plan for K-2SO’s return, detailing a scrapped episode that played out like a horror movie. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the showrunner discussed the development of Episodes 7-9, the batch that finally brings Cassian’s droid companion back to the fold. At one point, Andor writer Dan Gilroy had a concept for a “self-contained” episode that would have served as K-2’s introduction. The idea was to portray the Imperial security droid essentially as a horror movie villain, hunting down Cassian and crew during a mission where the Rebels are transporting a tanker ship back to Yavin. While the idea was great on paper, it would have been too expensive to produce, necessitating rewrites.
“Dan Gilroy wrote an amazing, entirely self-contained episode that was episode 209,” Gilroy said. “It was an amazing episode that was like a horror movie. It was the K2 story. They had to bring this huge ugly tanker ship to Yavin, and there was a KX unit that was trapped inside there hunting. It was sort of like a monster movie with K2 on it. It was really cool. We could not afford to do it. It was made clear that it was out of the range, so we had to abandon that and consolidate things.”
In Andor Season 2, the droid fans know as K-2SO first appears in the eighth episode, “Who Are You?” He is part of a group of KX units who terrorize peaceful protestors during the Ghorman massacre, killing several innocent people. As K-2 closes in on Cassian and Wilmon, one of the Ghor, Samm, crashes into the droid and eliminates him. Cassian takes K-2 back to Yavin to be rebuilt and reprogrammed into the Rogue One character audiences know and love.
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Andor is set to wrap up its run on Tuesday, May 13th with its final three episodes. Season 2, Episode 9 – “Welcome to the Rebellion” ends with K-2SO’s rebirth, teasing that he will have a sizable role to play in the show’s remaining arc.
Lucasfilm granted the Andor creative team a substantial amount of freedom when making the show, but even the critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated series had to work within some limits. Andor already has a very large budget, and the studio was likely trying to save where it could. It’s understandable why Disney/Lucasfilm balked at Dan Gilroy’s horror script. There’s obviously a lot of special effects work that goes into creating a character like K-2SO, which isn’t cheap. If the droid was featured more prominently in an episode, the costs would have gone up, and it might not have been sustainable. Fortunately, the Gilroy brothers found a way to compromise; K-2’s introduction in Andor still has traces of horror. The Ghorman massacre is one of the most horrific, terrifying sequences in the entire franchise.
The cost concerns around the scrapped K-2SO-centric episode raises questions about how large of a role the droid will have in the last three Andor episodes. Hopefully, he has a key part to play. The dynamic between Cassian and K-2SO was one of the many highlights of Rogue One, and many fans are looking forward to seeing the two together again. It sounds like Gilroy might have had to be strategic about where and how he implements the droid, so any scenes featuring K-2 should leave a memorable impact. Andor adds depth to Rogue One and changes the way fans will watch that movie, so this final arc shouldn’t be any different.
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