That one’s not a trim I’d make, I’m afraid. I’m still pro-bridging-content in as many cases as possible. “All of Star Wars is better than any of Star Wars” remains my mantra - no one show, not even Andor, should trump the franchise continuity.
It’s so interesting to me how frequently “cut Vader out of Rogue One” has become the conclusion people are coming to after Andor S2. I can’t see it actually working, especially not since the hallway sequence is one of the most singularly acclaimed bits of Star Wars anything since it came back in 2015
Plus, thematically, (and there is no way Gilroy didn’t do this intentionally in S2 of Andor) anyone who has anything to do with those plans getting out, who touches them, basically gets got. Lonni, Luthen, Melshi, Cass, Jyn… Kleya is the exception but she really does try like hell to die on Coruscant, and is pretty hollowed out when she wakes up on Yavin. Anyway, to even KNOW there are plans, to have the words Death Star inside your head is death (Dedra is going to die in that jail - maybe Kleya only lives because those are the only words she forgot?) - at some point the rebels know this and touch them ANYWAY.
and the Hallway Scene, even though Gilroy had nothing to do with it, still fits that. You boil it down, the iconography, the score, and whaddya got: Rebels, who know that they cannot survive what they’re about to do, but if they do it, the people after them will have a chance, so they do it anyway. It’s a microcosm of the larger themes of both the movie that preceded it, and the prequel Gilroy wrote specifically to lead into that prequel.
ANYWAY: If you need 5.1 audio for both “Fuck the Empire” and the re-voiced Vader/Krennic scene lemme know, I can shoot that over to you no problem