“Andor” is arguably the greatest thing to happen to “Star Wars.” It’s a show that pushes the franchise forward with a unique vision that brings the galaxy far, far away much closer to our reality. And, franchise aside, it’s a masterpiece of television that uses the sci-fi genre to tell a very human story about rebellion and the cost of standing up against tyranny.
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It’s not just a fantastic standalone TV show, but one of the best examples of how to connect the dots in a franchise like this. It’s not just that “Andor” is showing the big picture story of the birth of the Rebellion and how smaller cells came together to form the Alliance; it’s also telling individual stories like how Saw Gerrera got his breathing apparatus, how Mon Mothma became a Rebel leader, and more. Rather than explaining unnecessary things in a forced way (like Han Solo’s last name), “Andor” makes the “Star Wars” universe feel bigger, and the story of the Rebellion more nuanced and connected.
Case in point, episode 2 of the second and final season of “Andor” gave us our first look at the most important location for the rebellion: Yavin IV.
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You remember Yavin IV, right? First introduced in the original “Star Wars,” it was the site of the actual base of the Rebellion. The jungle-covered moon with its massive pyramid-like structure was a striking and memorable location, and a stark contrast to the deserts of Tatooine. Still, as important as the location was, it seemed deliberately inconspicuous: a deserted moon no one would pay attention to, making it perfect for a rebel base. And yet, as we see in “Andor” season 2, and in the larger canon, there’s more to Yavin IV than meets the eye.
Yavin IV holds a lot of dangers
In the first episode of “Andor” season 2, Cassian lands his stolen TIE fighter in the middle of a jungle, where he is meant to hand over the ship to one of Luthen’s operatives. But the other pilot isn’t there; instead, Cassian gets caught up in the middle of a fight between the surviving crew of Maya Pei’s Rebel cell, who are stranded on the moon.
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It’s an important episode that shines a light on the common soldiers who fight for the Rebellion, the ones without the luxury of a lightsaber or having a wookiee as a companion. These are soldiers who get afraid, who doubt, and who — when stranded in a place they don’t know, getting attacked every night by monsters — become so desperate to save themselves that they fall apart. There is still a long way to go before the organized (but still flawed) Alliance to Restore the Republic from “Rogue One,” and even longer still to the heroic, well-oiled resistance machine that we know from the original “Star Wars” trilogy.
As for the moon? It’s hard to even begin to make a connection between this dark, damp, dangerous place and Yavin IV until we see Cassian Andor leave the moon and the shot of a familiar-looking pyramid sticking out of the jungle treeline. The episode doesn’t dwell on the specifics of the moon and its relation to the Rebel Alliance, but there are two possibilities. The first option is that the moon has a long way to go before it becomes the nice, rustic place we know from the movie, and at some point, Rebel cells start arriving and cleaning up the place and driving away the dangerous creatures with big tusks that like killing rebels. This would line up with Tony Gilroy’s comments about taking the opportunity to tell the untold story of Yavin.
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The alternative is that the Massassi Group — led by Jan Dodonna — has already established a base in the Great Temple in Yavin IV. When Andor takes off and leaves Yavin IV, we see that he wasn’t that far away from the Great Temple, but still far away enough that he wouldn’t notice if there were people there (people with walls or fences, or something that would presumably keep the tusked monsters away). After all, what we’ve seen of Yavin IV previously in “Star Wars” media is specifically the area around the Great Temple and the pyramids near it, the clearings that can harbor a rebel base, rather than the jungle itself.
Yavin IV has a long history in the expanded canon
Yavin IV has a long history in the “Star Wars” universe, though most of it is now part of the expanded Legends continuity. Other than “Andor,” the movies, and “Star Wars Rebels,” we also saw the jungle moon in Genndy Tartakovsky’s excellent “Clone Wars” micro-series. In it, Anakin fought Gooku’s apprentice Asajj Ventress on top of the pyramids, the powerful dark side energy of the location fueling Anakin during the duel.
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What we do know from the canon is that the Great Temple already existed for 5000 years before the Rebel Alliance made it their base. The temple was constructed by the native Massassi peoples of Yavin IV, who came to venerate the Sith Lord Naga Sadow as a god and dedicated the temple in his honor. In return, Naga Sadow and the Sith went full Sith and enslaved the Massassi, eventually driving them to extinction.
In Legends, Naga Sadow eventually encased himself in a Sith sarcophagus and became a source of knowledge for future Sith. Among them was Fredon Nadd, who would go on to kickstart the Great Sith War that ravaged the entire galaxy as the Sith fought the Old Republic for nearly 50 years. After Nadd, the fallen Jedi Exar Kun arrived at Yavin IV and found Naga Sadow’s temple, and once again enslaved the Massassi and forced them to build more temples around the jungle-covered moon. Kun eventually led a new Sith Empire, and even invented the double-bladed lightsaber. His spirit, which was trapped on Yavin IV for millennia, eventually tried (and failed) to corrupt Luke Skywalker when he started a Jedi Academy on Yavin IV.
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Is this a needlessly complicated history to what is just one of the many locations the Rebellion used as a base during the Galactic Civil War? Absolutely. And yet, there is something poetic about a planet that was corrupted by the Sith for millennia and harbored unspeakable evil eventually becoming the home of the rebellion that would end the Sith. To quote George Lucas himself, “It’s like poetry. It rhymes.”
