Tony Gilroy says season 2 of Andor will barrel straight into Rogue One

It’s not exactly a spoiler, at this point, to note that Cassian Andor is a man with a clock ticking over his head. After all, Diego Luna’s thief turned Rebel spy was introduced almost seven years ago in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, famously the one Star Wars movie where any and all “bad feelings” about what might happen to a characters ended up being entirely justified.

Even so, it’s somewhat surprising to hear how hard Tony Gilroy—whose TV prequel series centered on Cassian’s early life, Andor, has become the consistent critical darling of the Star Wars streaming universe—is willing to go to get Cassian to that proscribed end point. This is per a recent interview Gilroy did with Empire, revealing that the Disney+ show’s second season will almost certainly be its last, given that its final few episodes will cover “the last three days before Rogue One.” And since there’s not much for its title hero to do after Rogue One except, like, be space dust…

Of course, the irony here is that those things that make Andor so good—its brutal, nuanced depiction of life under the Empirel; its often-rapid pace; its relentless dedication to stakes—are exactly what seem to be driving Gilroy to take the show to its natural conclusion quite so soon. “Look, man,” Gilroy says in the interview, “I’m not trying to make a career here; if anything I’m on the downhill side of a long career. But this is an opportunity. This is 1,500 pages of the most dynamic material in these people’s lives to deal with. We got it right the first time, and you don’t want to let your foot off the gas.”

Andor’s second season is still filming; no word, exactly, on when it’ll arrive on Disney+, but Gilroy will apparently be driving it like he stole it when it gets here.