Other shows give you a ticking clock. Andor, which just returned to Disney+ for its second and final season, gives you a ticking calendar.
That’s the meaning of “BBY 4,” which appears on screen at the beginning of Andor Season 2, episode 1. Casual viewers may not remember all the way back to Andor Season 1, episode 1, when we were given another time setting: BBY 5.
Get used to it, because time jumps are coming: The second batch of Andor season 2 (dropping next week) is set in BBY 3; the third in BBY 2; and the final three episodes, hitting Disney+ on May 13, cover the events of BBY 1, and dovetail with the beginning of Rogue One.
However, Andor never explains this mysterious acronym. You’d be forgiven for thinking the “Y” refers to year. But no, BBY means Before the Battle of Yavin — another name for the Death Star-destroying conclusion to the original Star Wars movie in 1977, which George Lucas renamed Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981.
BBY and ABY (After the Battle of Yavin) became a useful dating system for Star Wars books, comics, and other media. The Empire Strikes Back, for example, takes place in ABY 3; Attack of the Clones was BBY 22. Not that either movie ever said so on screen, of course.
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And the more that Lucasfilm’s chief nerds thought about it, the less BBY and ABY made sense in the Star Wars universe. After all, the Empire didn’t fall until the events of Return of the Jedi (ABY 4). Wouldn’t the new Galactic Republic choose that as its key date?
One company veteran mocked the whole concept of the BBY dating system in a now-deleted tweet: “‘I know! Let’s make a calendar based around our second-greatest victory!’ — The Rebels.”
Lucasfilm’s 2014 canon reset, which declared all previously published novels and comics to be part of a separate, never-happened timeline called Legends, effectively did away with the dating system. But it persisted in fan discussions, and in the online resource known as Wookieepedia.
And when director Tony Gilroy came along to create Andor as a prequel to Rogue One, he needed to indicate his time jumps to viewers. BBY made sense given that Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) dies in Rogue One, mere days before the Battle of Yavin — and far from being wiped out, BBY became enshrined on screen for the first time.
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