“Andor” creator Tony Gilroy explains that surprise ending and final shot

Key Points

• Andor creator Tony Gilroy breaks down the inspiration behind that final image of the series.

• Gilroy also explains Cassian’s nod to the Force Healer.

• Poor, poor, poor Dedra.

Andor creator Tony Gilroy has been telling us for years that his Rogue One prequel series would end pretty much right where the film began, and we certainly saw that with the series finale’s ending montage of images (which we’ll get into in a minute). But what the showrunner never let slip was that there was something else very unexpected that would serve as the last shot of the entire show.

After we got our last glimpses at all the major characters (including Diego Luna’s Cassian), we traveled back down to the planet of Mina-Rau. Not only was B2EMO still there hanging out, but we saw that Adria Arjona’s Bix was there as well — having left Cassian a year earlier while explaining in a note that “I can’t be the reason you leave here. If you give this up for me, I’d ever forgive myself. We have to win. We have to beat them.”

But Bix was not alone in this final shot. Instead, she was carrying a baby. Her baby. Her baby with Cassian. Gilroy confirmed that parentage with Entertainment Weekly, along with the fact that Bix knew she was pregnant when she left Cassian a year earlier.

“I think it does three things for me,” Gilroy tells EW of ending on the Bix baby reveal. “It makes the sacrifice that Cassian makes and the fact that he’ll never see his child, it just makes it all more painful. I think for anybody who was in doubt about her motives for leaving or sort of said, ‘I don’t know if I would really leave’ — I want to make sure that for anybody who was in doubt [now know] ‘Oh my God, that’s why she really left!’ So I wanted do that.”

That’s not all that Gilroy wanted to do. It was also about the final beat of the story. While Andor has been the grittiest Star Wars property yet — witness the season’s attempted rape scene, among other atrocities — Gilroy wanted to leave with a different message. “More than anything, I wanted to end on hope,” the creator says. “I really want to be hopeful at the end of it. It’s a very rigorous ride. We’ve done all kinds of things in this show all the way through, but it would be a crime against nature to not finish with something hopeful, because what else do we have? I mean, we have to have that. And as long as it’s not cheesy and not some corny thing, it felt like it was really earned and legit.”

But while Gilroy wanted to end on hope, it was not necessarily the new hope (see what we did there?) of a Cassian brand extension. “It is not just a way of creating another character for Disney and Lucasfilm,” Gilroy insists. “It’s really much more about finishing on an up note and finishing with something that I think all the people who made the show really want to express, which is that in the end, we really do want to be hopeful.”

That ending also helps balance out some of those slow-motion images we saw in the final montage, including Cassian on his way to meet Tivic — a meeting that will lead to his eventual rebellion-saving demise on Scarif.  Along the way, we see Cassian looking at and nodding to the Force Healer he previously dismissed in an earlier episode.

“We tried very delicately to get the Force in the show,” Gilroy says, “I like the idea of someone who is peripherally involved in it. It’s like in Ghost! Whoopi Goldberg is the fake psychic who has a hint of actual psychic power that she’s forgotten about. That was my comp in the beginning.”

Wait, what? Andor was inspired by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost? “I love that scene where she’s grifting everybody all the time, and then all of a sudden Patrick Swayze is there and she’s like, “Oh my god, what the f—?” Gilroy explains. “The old memory of she does have something. And it’s so important that Bix has been feeling that the man that she loves has some other destiny or some other thing going on.”

Gilroy continues: “I mean, the idea of reluctant destiny — it’s biblical, really. It’s Messianic in a way, and so I want to make sure you remember that and I want to have him touch on it. It would be wrong to have him walk to that ship and touch on all the things that he touches on and ignore that little bit of pixie dust that’s sitting there as kind of a farewell.”

Viewers got to bid farewell to other big characters in the final montage. We saw Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) looking out pensively over Jedha. We watched Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) staring dramatically at the Death Star. We even caught Perrin Fertha (Alastair Mackenzie) and Runai Sculdun (Rosalind Halstead) getting wasted in a spaceship. And then there was Denise Gough’s Dedra, who appeared super depressed while imprisoned in unmistakable Narkina prison garb.

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Indeed, it seems the ISB agent is paying the price for falling on the wrong side of Krennic. So, is that the same Narkina 5 prison we saw in season 1 that she is in? Not exactly. “It’s probably Narkina 7 or Narkina 2,” says Gilroy. “It’s the women’s version.”

Considering she was an imperial baddie who oversaw the destruction of Ghorman, why do we feel oddly sorry for poor Dedra suffering such a fate? “Because she was doing the right thing!” Gilroy says. “She’s actually figured everything out, but she’s inadvertently messed up everything by her ambition. There’s maybe a couple people I’d like to see in Narkina, but they shall remain nameless. What a horrible fate. And now she’s going to be making the Death Star, isn’t she?”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly