Andor Just Changed the Origin of a Deadly Starfighter
That stolen TIE Fighter in Andor Season 2 is kind of a big deal.
In the three-part premiere of Star Wars: Andor Season 2, almost all of Cassian’s journey involves him stealing a prototype TIE fighter from the Empire and smuggling it back to some resistance cells of the burgeoning Rebel Alliance. For longtime Star Wars fans, the shape of this starfighter will look vaguely familiar, resembling a version of the curved-wing TIE fighter Darth Vader flew in the Death Star Trench in A New Hope, but also the pointed-tipped TIE Interceptors from Return of the Jedi.
But which TIE fighter are we dealing with in Andor? It turns out that this plotline retcons a bit of Star Wars starfighter history and pays tribute to a classic 1994 video game in the process.
Spoilers ahead for Andor Season 2 Episode 1!
The first three episodes of Andor Season 2 find Cassian stealing a TIE fighter from an Imperial facility, flying it to a rendezvous on Yavin 4, and eventually making his way back to Bix and Wilmon on the planet Mina-rau in the third episode. But which ship is this? As teased in the trailers, this is a prototype ship, but it’s almost certainly the rare TIE Avenger, which, although it was canon up to this point, originated in the 1994 game Star Wars: TIE Fighter.
The reason we know this is probably a TIE Avengers is because it has a hyperdrive and much more advanced weaponry than a regular TIE fighter. The wings are also a bit different from the TIE Interceptor. Although not stated outright, Andor stealing this ship will clearly give the Rebels future knowledge about how to take these ships down, which could explain why in the regular trilogy, Rebel starfighters tend to take out all sorts of TIE fighters with relative ease.
But the interesting wrinkle here is that the idea that certain TIE fighter designs might leak to the Rebels comes from the very first mission of the game TIE Fighter, in which you play as an Imperial pilot trying to stop a a researcher named Zaarin from leaking designs of another soup-up starfighter: the TIE Defender.
A screenshot from the 1994 game 'TIE FIGHTER.'
In essence, much of the 1994 TIE Fighter game was all about trying to find various leaks from within the Empire, which very much informs the entire plot of both seasons of Andor.
From a dot-connecting point of view, Cassian’s TIE Avenger could represent a kind of dead-end for the Empire. Yes, Darth Vader’s TIE Advanced x1 is very similar-looking to this TIE Avengers, but it’s obviously not the exact same ship. Cassian clearly has a hard time flying this ship, which makes it seem like the Empire might have streamlined the design after the fact. Even though Cassian was posing as a test pilot, you could squint and consider that the Empire might have still learned something about this ship from the enemy capturing it.
One thing that the series Andor makes clear, though, is how much bureaucracy pervades the Empire, which allows the various Rebels to steal everything from information to starfighters. Never forget, this is the same supposedly efficient Empire that was looking for Cassian throughout Season 1, even though they had him locked up in an Imperial prison for part of the series.
So the stolen TIE Avengers is, in a way, an extension of that metaphor: Yes, this technically predates Vader’s TIE from A New Hope, and it’s the direct ancestor of the TIE Interceptor from Return of the Jedi. But Cassian’s successful theft of this ship proves that the Empire was sloppy and disorganized in a way that we might not have thought of before. Which was exactly the case back when certain types of TIE fighters, like the Defender and the Avenger, weren’t even canon.
