Why do we see Clone Trooper Armor in the Andor Trailer?

When most people think of the evil empire, they picture white-clad stormtroopers, the Death Star, and might even hear the Imperial March in the background. But the latest Andor trailer has turned this assumption on its head with a group of troopers (presumably clones) in Phase II clone armor.

This makes a significant deviation from our previous assumption about when Clones were “decommissioned” and tells us quite a bit of new information about the transitionary period to the Empire in general.

When is Star Wars: Andor in the timeline?

It is clear from Rogue One material, and even from what we have seen from Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order that even just five years after Order 66 the clone troopers have been pushed out. In fact, this is one of the driving storylines of Star Wars: The Bad Batch. 

As we get into this, let us get the timeline straight. Fallen Order is set five years after Order 66, and Bad Batch (season 1) starts almost as Order 66 goes off. Order 66 happens at 19 BBY (for those who aren’t as large nerds, that’s before the battle of Yavin). Star Wars: Andor is supposedly set at 0-5 BBY or 14 years after Order 66. This makes the presence of clone (or maybe clone armor) extremely odd in Star Wars continuity.

How do the clones change the Star Wars canon?

That leaves a few options for what may be happening.

First, the writer has somehow made a mistake and released the wrong timeline. Given the attention to detail in Star Wars that doesn’t seem likely. The second is that these scenes all come from some sort of flashback, which seems possible but there is quite a lot of scenes shown for that to be the case. The third is that these are stormtroopers wearing clone armor, but we have never seen that before. That also seems like a bizarre narrative choice.

And lastly, these could just be clones, but that would also be an odd choice because of the clones’ advanced aging. Clones age at double the rate of usual humans and take 10 years to grow (Legends materials somewhat messed with that, but nothing in canon has changed yet) so these clones would physically be around 38 at this point. That is a bit old to be still fighting insurgents.

The most likely of these options seems to be that these scenes are just a flashback, but we will have to wait for some more footage to be released to figure out this puzzling conundrum. If these are clones, then we can expect some major changes to be revealed throughout the Star Wars canon.