In the Rolling Stone interview, Gilroy addresses the criticisms against his slow-burn trio of episodes, which steadily worked on meaningful world-building and providing Cassian with an appropriate, fleshed-out backstory. Although “Andor” picks up momentum around its fifth episode and displays its true potential with each successive entry, Gilroy argues that those initial episodes are crucial as they enrich our overall understanding of what drives Cassian Andor. Gilroy said:
“You’re absolutely enriched by it. It’s like, you go watch a car commercial, and they pull out a flag, a puppy and a truck, and you go, ‘Oh wow.’ The music’s right, you really feel something for a moment, but you walk away and you never think about it again. It’s this empty-calorie thing. If you really wanna feel something, if you really wanna have something that lives with you, the requirement for that is that you really care. [You need] that investment that you made in the early episodes.”
Gilroy goes on to say that it is because we spend considerable time with Cassian as a child, and we see the trauma he undergoes and the rage he is capable of, we understand some of his actions better down the line. The shift in Cassian from being just some guy who quietly makes swipes at the Empire for survival to a dedicated rebel with an unflinching commitment to the cause is gradual, and the seeds of this transformation are sown within the first three episodes. This essentially required Gilroy and his writers to break traditional TV writing rules, as nothing here is gift-wrapped to form neat little conclusions. Just like life, events occur without proper closure, characters breathe their last without fulfilling their purpose, and grand acts of rebellion come at a terrible cost.
