Alan Tudyk’s fan favourite droid K-2SO finally made his debut in Andor this past week in the penultimate arc of Lucasfilm’s acclaimed Disney+ series, his first encounter with Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor coming during the massacre on Ghorman and very nearly ending with the death of the rebel spy.
The episodes closed out with the Imperial security droid being rebooted at the Rebel base on Yavin 4, having undergone reprogramming to become the K-2SO we grew to know and love in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. However, showrunner Tony Gilroy has now revealed the original plan for K-2SO’s origin and introduction into the series was via a horror-tinged standalone episode scripted by his brother Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler).
“Dan Gilroy wrote an amazing, entirely self-contained episode that was episode 209,” Tony Gilroy told EW. ““It was an amazing episode that was like a horror movie. It was the K2 story. hey had to bring this huge ugly tanker ship to Yavin, and there was a KX unit that was trapped inside there hunting. It was sort of like a monster movie with K2 on it. It was really cool.”
Ultimately however, a tightening of the belt by Disney in the wake of the pandemic resulted in the plan being abandoned, with Gilroy adding: “We could not afford to do it. It was made clear that it was out of the range, so we had to abandon that and consolidate things. The whole dynamic and the economics of everything changed between season 1 and season 2.”
We’ll see K-2SO reuniting with Cassian this week as Gilroy brings the curtain down on the Rogue One prequel with the final arc of episodes Andor’s second and last season.
Season 2 of Star Wars: Andor stars Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O’Reilly, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, Adria Arjona, Faye Marsay, Varada Sethu, Elizabeth Dulau, Ben Miles, Duncan Pow, Richard Dillane, Alistair Petrie, Alan Tudyk, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, and Benjamin Bratt.
Star Wars: Andor is streaming on Disney+.
