Star Wars Just Retconned Its Previous Death Star Retcon
Who was the first person to know about the Death Star?
Forty-nine years ago, the original Star Wars fans weren’t super worried about the origin of the Death Star. In the opening crawl to the first 1977 movie, later retitled A New Hope, we were told about the Death Star in big, bold, yellow letters. But now, the 24 episodes of Andor and the two hours and 13 minutes of Rogue One have created a complex, shadowy origin story for the creation of the Empire’s ultimate super weapon. And, with the conclusion of Andor Season 2, the moment when the Rebellion becomes aware of the Death Star has been retconned, which changes the previous retcon of Rogue One.
For all of its dramatic brilliance, Andor’s obsession with assembling complex puzzle pieces that all add up to one of the easiest-to-understand sci-fi concepts ever is the ultimate Easter egg paradox. The Death Star, in abstract, is a very comprehendible thing: a moon-sized mobile space station that blows up planets. But in the final episodes of Andor, the top-secret notion of the Death Star might seem slightly confusing, even to the most detail-oriented Star Wars fan. When it comes to who knows what about the Death Star, here’s how Episode 10 of Andor is both clarifying and confusing.
Spoilers ahead for Andor Season 2 Episode 10.
The First Rebel to Crack the Death Star Case
Robert Emms as Lonni Jung, the man who revealed the Death Star.
Perhaps the most pivotal character in all of Andor, and maybe Star Wars in general, turns out to be none other than Lonni Jung (Robert Emms), a guy who has been under deep cover at the Imperial Security Bureau since Season 1. This is the guy in Season 1 who got yelled at by Luthen when he asked what his Rebel spymaker boss had sacrificed. And in Episode 10, he reveals to Luthen he’s had access to secret files for a while now, and he’s put all the pieces together — the constructions on Narkina, the mining on Jedha, the work on Scarif, and the takeover of Ghorman all connected to the thing we already know: The Empire is building a superweapon.
Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) pushes Lonni to “tell me about the weapon,” but Lonni doesn’t have the final detail: He doesn’t know it's the Death Star, but he does know Galen Erso — the scientist played by Mads Mikkelsen in Rogue One — is a crucial part of it.
Which aspects of this Death Star creation lore come from A New Hope? Literally none. What Andor is doing here is layering on the details from Rogue One with pieces from Season 1. Different parts of the Death Star are made in different places; Rogue One revealed that the Kyber Crystals power the Death Star’s main weapon, while this season has been all about how Ghorman has the right material to make the lens of that weapon. Essentially, the Death Star was a completed LEGO set in A New Hope, and through Rogue One, and Andor, those LEGO pieces have been deconstructed and their origins teased in specific storylines.
Why Did Luthen Murder Lonni?
Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) in Andor Episode 9.
As we know, Luthen’s default way for dealing with security breaches is to assassinate people who know too much. This is why Tay Kolma (Ben Miles) is taken out in the first part of Season 2, and why Mon Mothma was so afraid that Luthen might have blastered her to death in Episode 9 of Season 2. (Maybe he would have, had she not had plot armor that requires her to be alive in later movies?)
Anyway, Luthen’s brutal slaying of Lonni on that park bench in Coruscant in Episode 10 is consistent with his modus operandi. This is also a habit that Andor himself has picked up: slaying people who might know too much even if they are basically “good guys.” In fact, Luthen taking out Lonni in Episode 10 foreshadows the way that Cassian will murder Rebel informant Tivik (Daniel Mays) in the opening moments of Rogue One.
The idea here is that the Rebels know that if the Empire has kept something secret like this from themselves, anyone who knows about it in the Rebellion is in serious danger.
Why Did the Empire Keep the Death Star a Secret?
The final construction of the Death Star in Rogue One.
Because the Empire is eventually very open about the Death Star in A New Hope, you might wonder why there’s so much secrecy around the planet to begin with? Well, offscreen in A New Hope, we learn that the Emperor dissolved the Senate, and replaced galactic law with “fear” of the Death Star.
Was this plan all that smart? Was the consolidation of so much firepower in one technological terror really the Emperor’s endgame?
Various fan theories and evidence from the rest of the canon all suggest that the Emperor’s creation of the Death Star was just one more game piece in a larger, and sometimes, ever-changing, plan. Obviously, the revelation that the Death Star existed gave the Rebellion something to focus all their efforts on. Indeed, Andor and Rogue One make the case that the Rebel Alliance, eventually, is united because of the Death Star.
And yet, as Andor and The Empire Strikes Back proved, the Empire hardly needed the Death Star to dominate the galaxy. If anything, the creation of the Death Star was the thing that led to the Empire’s downfall; a fact which both Darth Vader and Dedra Meero probably would agree on.
