As a prequel to Rogue One, Andor is designed to fill in the backstory of its title character, Cassian (Diego Luna). And while it definitely answered some questions about the smuggler, it kicked off its first season with another question that’s haunted fans for years since: who is Cassian’s long-lost sister, and where in the galaxy is she?
By the time we meet Cassian in Andor’s first episode, he’s been searching for his sister Kerri for years. They haven’t seen each other since they were children on Kenari, before Cassian was abducted by two well-meaning scavengers, Maarva (Fiona Shaw) and Clem Andor (Gary Beadle). And while there’s a sense that they may never reunite — the galaxy is a big place, after all — that didn’t stop fans from theorizing about who might be revealed as a grown-up Kerri. The original Star Wars trilogy is all about two long-lost siblings reconnecting after all: it’d only make sense that Andor continue that tradition.
When Andor introduced Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau), a key figure in the early rebellion against the Empire, she seemed like a perfect candidate for Kerri. It’s taken a while for the series to address that question outright, but we finally get some answers in the Season 2 finale, which gives us bits and pieces of Kleya’s backstory... and effectively debunks a theory that’s been three years in the making.
Spoilers ahead for Andor Season 2 Episode 10.
Andor Episode 10, “Make It Stop,” wisely places Kleya and her surrogate father, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), center stage. When Luthen finds himself a prisoner of the ISB, Kleya has to assassinate the one person who’s been by her side all her life. Episode 10 only makes that choice more painful by flashing back to Kleya’s childhood, showing us her first meeting with Luthen. The latter was a soldier in some unspecified skirmish, one that likely took place at the dawn of the Empire’s reign.
The series doesn’t get specific about where they are or when this rescue takes place, but we may be able to guess with a little math. Elizabeth Dulau told TV Line that her first meeting with Luthen happened 17 years before Andor; that would place our first flashback around 16 BBY, or 16 years before the Battle of Yavin. According to showrunner Tony Gilroy, Kleya’s only six when she’s rescued by Luthen — and since Cassian is adopted by Maarva and Clem in 22 BBY, there’s no way these two characters are related.
Andor quietly refutes the theory that Kleya could be Cassian’s sister, but it never presents another alternative. Kerri haunts the narrative from the moment the show begins to its final scene, but Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter that this void is what makes Cassian the character we know and love.
“The sister, in the beginning, is so much more interesting to me as a deficit,” Gilroy revealed. “She’s much more valuable to me for Cassian as an absence. As he says in the end, ‘Maybe I should stop saving people.’ His need to return and save people and to be a savior and the compulsion to do that comes from this hole in his life, and I didn’t really didn’t want to fill that in.”
However unwittingly, Cassian did abandon Kerri on Kenari. That regret informs most of his choices throughout Andor — no matter what obstacles he faces, he always tries to return and save his loved ones. Sometimes he’s too late, as we see with Maarva’s demise in Season 1. Other times, like with Kleya — or even Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) at the end of Rogue One — he succeeds. That we never truly know what happened to Kerri is a tragedy meant to fuel him until his last day. It’s the kind of mystery designed to stay unsolved, and one of the most compelling threads introduced in Andor.
