It’s a key moment in galactic history, the Ghorman Massacre which saw countless killed by the hand of the Empire…or did it? We’ve only heard about the event in canon from a certain point of view (first mentioned in the EU era in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook from West End Games back in 1990 and expanded upon elsewhere) but in an expansive interview with Collider, show creator Tony Gilroy gives a bit more background on what we can expect when the second season of Andor arrives on 22nd April on Disney Plus.
COLLIDER: The latest teaser for the series revealed that we’re going to see Ghorman, which some Star Wars fans know for the devastating Ghorman Massacre. When you’re looking at the references to these various events that we have only heard of, what went into the decision to choose which to show us?
GILROY: It’s the five years. I get those five years. So, in those five years, there’s a couple of really big… You map it out on a calendar, on a piece of paper, “Okay, here’s where I’m going to go. Here are my four blocks. Here’s where these things happen.” Mon Mothma leaving the Senate is canonical. There are a couple of other events in here. The development of Yavin is canonical. Obviously, the discovery of the Death Star and whatever intelligence there is, espionage, that leads to the beginning of Rogue One is canonical. I had to get to all those things.
Ghorman, interestingly, is canonical but completely undescribed. It’s a total blank slate.
There’s also a bit of confusion about the Ghorman Massacre, and what is the Ghorman Massacre? There’s a lot of confusion within canon. So, it was an opportunity to rebuild in a really significant way. It’s a very significant part of our show that can do a lot of different things for us. Quite honestly, it’s very expensive to build, so we really want to use it as much as possible so it carries over five different episodes. I’m really confident that the really deep, passionate Star Wars community will appreciate how we’ve straightened out that story.
COLLIDER: That concept, just hearing you describe it, is what works so well. Because in a situation like a massacre like that, there are different kinds of points of view and how it’s disseminated throughout the galaxy and how that story is told. So, finding a way to show it is going to be, I think, interesting for audiences. With the season being more condensed, were there situations where you found yourself having to truly kill your darlings to make the story work within those time jumps?
GILROY: The writers on the show and myself, it’s a pretty fancy bunch of writers, really, in a way. Everybody’s very experienced. We only get together for five or six days in the beginning to talk about the story, and then we kind of go, and they do their thing, and then they go away. But I always have them as a reference to call upon. The idea of killing darlings always seemed like such a rookie thing to me, like something you get used to doing early on. I’m always happy when I’m cutting and editing, and so that’s sort of a natural thing. There are places where there were things that we might have done that were economically impossible for us to do, so in that sense. But, no, it was mostly exciting to write it. It was mostly exciting to have the year-long gaps. None of us had ever had the opportunity to do that before, deal with that much negative space.
There’s plenty to unpack from this expansive interview with Collider, so stay tuned as we dig into it here on the site and on Good Morning Tatooine and Making Tracks.
