The Star Wars-centric writer took aim at Disney’s other IP-heavy subsidiary while speaking with SlashFilm‘s Ben Pearson in reflection of Andor‘s production following its recent series finale.

Asked about the original version of the Disney Plus show, which was planned to have a total of five seasons before it was rewritten to what audiences eventually received due to complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gilroy admitted that while the base narrative of Cassian Andor’s final days was the same, this take had a lot of “extraneous and stupid” elements that did nothing to serve the story.

“I think in the very beginning, I think I have my original files before we even started Season 1, before we went to the writers’ room in the very beginning,” recalled the showrunner. “I think I, pre-Covid, had a, ‘Oh my God, this is what Season 1 is.’ In my urge to organize and stop panicking, I did that. So I’m sure there’s an incredible amount of stuff in there that was extraneous and stupid and has nothing to do with what we’re doing, but essentially, a lot of the story, the structure of the story is basically mapped out. If you’re going to have to go to Ghorman and you’re going to have to get to Rogue [One] and you know the rebellion’s going to have to come together at Yavin at some point, you kinda know — you have a calendar.”

Pressed by his host if there “was anything in those earliest drafts that you didn’t get a chance to do in the show because it just didn’t really make sense and you guys went in a different direction?”, Gilroy recalled, “There were all kinds of things that happened along the way.”

“Things that we actually did that — I mean, Aldhani was supposed to be a huge, gigantic festival with 10,000 people,” he explained. “Covid killed that. Dan Gilroy wrote a huge standalone episode for K-2 that was supposed to be Episode 9. We couldn’t afford to do that, so we rejiggered stuff like that. There’s all kinds of things all along the way like that. Yeah, that’s a constant adjustment. Yeah.”

Pearson then turned to discuss the difference between K-2SO’s roles in the show’s original take, which “would have been about Cassian and K-2SO roaming around and going on adventures and things like that”, and in the version of the show that was actually produced, wherein he appears fully functional in just the last handful of episodes.

Raising the question of whether or not “the inclusion of that character felt like a narrative burden for you in any way”, Pearson was met by the stark admission from Gilroy that ,”No. In the show, it’s perfect. That’s something I always intended.”

Speaking more broadly to the show’s early drafts, the Rogue One writer asserted, “The versions that they had of the show prior, they were slick and they were interesting. They were not bad, but they had a fatal flaw”.

This flaw, he explained, was the fact that the original focused far too hard on the search for a specific ‘MacGuffin’ – defined by Merriam-Webster as “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance” – in this case the Death Star plans originally found by Cassian and Jyn Erso in Rogue One.

“It seemed to me, which is if that’s your show, that we’re going to storm the Citadel in the pilot, what are you going to do in Episode 9?” said Gilroy. “What do you do? You’re just going to keep getting the disc? Trying to get the, what do they call it? I can’t remember the name of the box. What the fis the name of the box in The Avengers? What the f* are they going for?”

Met with the clarification from Pearson that said box was indeed named ‘The Tesseract’, Gilroy exclaimed, “The Tesseract!” before bluntly opining, “That’s why all those Marvel movies are all — that’s why they fail.”

“You’re just constantly…if that’s all you’re doing, then all you’re doing is just trying to get the Tesseract,” he argued before turning his attention back to the topic of Cassian’s droid companion. “If you look at Rogue, you look at how many times just in Rogue we had to hide K-2. How many times in Rogue, he says, ‘Oh, I’ll stay in the truck while you guys…’ or Cassian tells him, ‘You’ve got to stay in the truck until we come back.’ It happens three or four times, just even in Rogue. You can’t hide him. You can’t disguise him. He’s a really, really big piece of equipment to carry around, but fantastic. When you want him, you want him, but I just was like, “I don’t think you can do it, and I want to do it late.”