Andor uses Star Wars’ BBY time in the opening scene — here’s what it means

Star Wars fans who aren’t diehard were shocked at the opening scene of Star Wars. Andor, the new Star Wars show on Disney Plus, that displayed the cryptic characters “BBY 5.” Turns out it’s a way of marking time in the galaxy far, far away — one that references a pivotal moment in Star Wars history.

BBY stands for “Before the Battle of Yavin.” Yavin is the planet around which the climactic battle in Star Wars: A New Hope It happens, when Luke Skywalker destroys the first Death Star while saving the Rebel Alliance’s from complete annihilation. “ABY” stands for “After the Battle of Yavin.” BBY counts down, with 0 BBY representing the year in which the Battle of Yavin occurred. ABY is the number that counts from the previous year. ABY 1 represents the year immediately following the Battle of Yavin.

It’s analogous to our real world nomenclature, which uses CE (the “Common Era”) and BCE (“Before the Common Era”) to mark epochs of time. There’s no year zero in the real-world calendar, however. BCE and CE share year 1. This coincides with Christian beliefs in Jesus Christ’s birth. Prior to BCE and CE, historians instead used BC and AD — Before Christ and Anno Domini, or “The Year of our Lord.”

Image: Disney Plus/Lucasfilm Ltd.

The BBY5 represents five years. BeforeThe events of A New Hope. We get into the nitty-gritty of the larger Star Wars timeline — including how Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader, and the other Star Wars streaming television shows factor into things — in a larger feature on the timeline.

Star Wars properties offer this historical context as their opening scenes. All nine of the mainline movies feature a text crawl, which moves up from the bottom to appear in space. MandalorianThe other is completely devoid of that text, and provides no prior textual clues to the time or location of the episodes. It’s the same with Star Wars Story: Rogue One, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Jedi: Fallen OrderThat is the matter.

There was some fan backlash from the fandom over the inability to crawl text or mention planet names. This happened especially during the initial season. Mandalorian. Andor’s approach therefore can be seen as a bit of a concession to those upset by the omission in the recent past. Just don’t call it fan service: Showrunner Tony Gilroy has said he assiduously avoided pandering to fans throughout the show’s production.