ANDOR Season 2 Included a Easter Egg Referencing George Lucas' 1971 Film THX-1138
If you blinked during the Andor Season 2 finale, you might’ve missed one of the coolest nods Star Wars has pulled in years, a visual Easter egg that references the movie that started George Lucas’ career way before A New Hope.
In Episode 12, ISB officer Dedra Meero finds herself on the wrong side of Imperial justice. After she’s caught hoarding classified intel about the Death Star, intel that ultimately helps the Rebellion, Dedra is tossed into a prison cell, and her face captured on a cold, surveillance-style monitor. It’s a brief moment, but that monitor is the reference.
As one eagle-eyed fan pointed out on X, the shot directly mirrors a scene from Lucas’ 1971 debut feature film, THX 1138. In that movie, Robert Duvall’s character is imprisoned in a sterile, dystopian facility, and there’s a strikingly similar frame of him viewed through a monitor with identifying data displayed on-screen. Check it out:
Now, THX 1138 is a bleak, minimalist sci-fi film set in a society where humans are medicated into emotional numbness and controlled by robotic enforcers.
Duvall plays THX, a worker who begins to question his reality after going off his mandatory emotion-suppressing drugs. It’s a haunting film, and it marked the first time Lucas started exploring the themes of rebellion, identity, and authoritarian control.
This isn’t the first time THX 1138 has slipped into the Star Wars galaxy either. Back in A New Hope, Luke mentions being transferred from “Cell Block 1138.” Clone Marshal Commander Bacara, who shows up in Revenge of the Sith and The Clone Wars, carries the designation CC-1138.
It’s become a quiet tradition for Lucasfilm to slip these references in for those who know where to look.
But this latest callback in Andor feels especially fitting. The series has always been Star Wars at its most grounded and politically charged, which is exactly the kind of sci-fi THX 1138 was wrestling with decades earlier.
With Andor, showrunner Tony Gilroy continues to build a bridge between Lucas’ earliest dystopian vision and the rebellion that changed cinema.