By the time of A New Hope, the Rebel Alliance is headquartered on Yavin IV, a small forested moon with an ancient Massassi Temple that the rebels can hole up in. We’ve seen them also using the base in Rogue One (set immediately prior to A New Hope) and Rebels (set within a year or two of A New Hope), and it will show up in the second season of Andor as well.
“I mean, we have to end up in Yavin, right?” showrunner Tony Gilroy teased in Empire Magazine’s preview of the series. “So, we’ll tell the story of Yavin. No-one has quite dealt with Yavin the way we will be doing it.”
It will be great to see the iconic base show up again, and it sounds like we could be seeing a bit more of the origins of it and how the rebels came to occupy the temple. It was built thousands of years earlier by the Massassi people, and it has been hinted at in canon (and explicitly told in Legends) that it was done in service of a Sith Lord, Naga Sadow. That means there are some interesting and mysterious aspects to this base, but it’s unlikely that a series like this would really dive too deep into that. What is far more likely is that this series will show how the rebels came to occupy the planet and built their organization there.
It’s unclear exactly how it will play out, but Gilroy’s hint that no one will have dealt with Yavin like this before does indicate to me that they could be telling more of the origins of it. At the very least, Yavin will come into focus at the very end of the series, as the show will end with Cassian Andor leaving the Massassi base to head off to meet an informant on the Ring of Kafrene, which we see when we first meet him at the beginning of Rogue One.
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