The Season One finale of Andor cemented the series as one of Star Wars’ best projects to date and almost certainly the most complete of its offerings on Disney Plus. The episode also featured a post-credit scene that clarified a much-theorized plot point from earlier in the season as it showed to what end the parts being made in the prison on Narkina 5 were being used: to assemble the first Death Star. While that scene makes for yet another interesting connection to the events of Rogue One, namely why Cassian was willing to give his life to ensure the Death Star plans got to the Rebels after potentially learning he helped build the weapon, it also may end a long-standing debate first put forth nearly 30 years ago about the second Death Star.
In Kevin Smith’s 1994 film Clerks, the film’s deuteragonists, Randal and Dante, enter into an ethical debate about the destruction of the second Death Star as seen in Return of the Jedi. Though DS-2 was, as the Emperor put it, “fully armed and operational”, it was still under construction when it was destroyed by Lando Calrissian. As Randal explained to Dante in Clerks, something about the attack “just never sat right” with him. As Dante questions him, Randal reveals that he believes a project of that magnitude would take more manpower than even the Empire could muster, meaning they must have brought in independent contractors to finish the job. Assuming they all died in the explosion, Randal believes they were innocent “casualties of a war they had nothing to do with” but Dante is not so sure. Though he doesn’t express it, Dante seems to believe that anyone willing to build a Death Star isn’t innocent. The debate is famously settled when a third party comes in and, while paying for his coffee, tells the pair that any real contractor thinks with his heart and “not his wallet.”
The events of the post-credit scene of the season finale of Andor seem to render the debate moot. While Randal was likely correct in presuming that the Empire didn’t have enough manpower to build DS-2 so quickly, neither he nor Dante posited the possibility that the Empire simply employed droids. Given the fact that droids played an integral role in constructing DS-1, it stands to reason they’d play at least an equal role in the construction of DS-2 meaning that the number of innocent independent contractors who meet their doom at the hands of Lando. Maybe Smith can work the events of Andor into another film down the road.
