From the very first scene, Andor sets itself apart from other Star Wars productions in tone and subtext. It feels darker, grittier, and with higher stakes than ever before. Despite knowing the fate of the main protagonist and a few others, the series makes us care deeply about Diego Luna's Cassian Andor and his allies, as well as enemies.
Showrunner Tony Gilroy manages to evoke almost as many powerful emotions with the scene of Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) in an Imperial prison as with Luthen Rael's (Stellan Skarsgard) lonely, unconscious death. Many scenes that he wrote proved to be highly divisive, including the much-talked-about on-screen sexual assault attempt by an Imperial officer on Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona).
But when it came to keeping the show rooted in the reality of complex socio-cultural and political themes, Gilroy had never really pulled his punches. The first scene of the first season takes place in a brothel, where Cassian goes to look for his long-lost sister, whom he had last seen on his home world, Kenari. She was the last person to call him by his real name, Kassa.
A couple of minutes later, he gets apprehended by a pair of armed officers, without having committed any crime. A scuffle follows, and Cassian ends up killing both--one accidentally, the other on purpose.
Speaking on IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Gilroy commented on where the idea of the opening sequence came from and how it grew to matter more than just a plot point. The scene originally stemmed from Gilroy wanting to explore the character's background and also explain why he has an accent in Rogue One. However, there was more to it. It was Gilroy's way of testing the water and seeing how much creative elbow room he was getting from the studio to tell the story how he wanted.
"I wanted to deal with his origin story... Maybe we go look for his sister and go to a brothel. Then the thing came up with two cops. I am sort of sketching and I end up with this really hanky moral question," Gilroy said. "And that serves two purposes for me. One, it's really dramatic and it's really interesting. It's also a challenge to Disney to say, 'Hey, we're going to put a brothel and a murder in the first ten pages of the script. You're going to let us do this."
Sex in Andor: Anxiety to nothing-burger
Speaking at the ATX Television Festival, Gilroy said, "I very consciously started the first scene in a brothel just to see what would happen and how far we could go. There’s sex. … It’s something that probably seemed at some point like it was going to be a big anxiety, and it really turned out to be a nothing-burger all the way through.”
Throughout the show, Gilroy tried to push the boundaries of what the audience is used to seeing in Star Wars television. However, he had Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy's support for it all.
"She has protected the show and protected me and wrangled a team together. When we started challenging Kathy, Kathy just kept saying yes," Gilroy said in a previous conversation with Variety. "'Oh, I’m going to put the first scene in a brothel.' 'Okay.' 'I’m going to have them kill two cops.' 'Okay.'... She backed our play and got everything that we were doing."
However, it would be wrong to claim that references to sex were completely absent from Star Wars before this. Jabba the Hutt had several sex slaves in his palace. Unfortunately for Jabba, one of them was Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) during the events of Return of the Jedi. There are several references to sex trafficking and slavery in The Clone Wars animated TV show as well.