Andor‘s space prison sucks. This is entirely intentional: the way the prison behaves is cruel, it uses electroshock floors to intimidate prisoners into forced labour. Cassian’s (Diego Luna) biggest obstacle to getting there is fellow inmate Kino Loy (Andy Serkis)—at least until they discover the even more terrifying truth. While Cassian and Kino thought they could at least tick off their sentences in multiple day shifts, the chilling secret of Narkina 5 is that the prisoners just get pushed around, endlessly building mechanical parts for… anything.
As the various teams of Unit 5-2D assemble and assemble and assemble more, the machinery they construct begins to resemble something larger in the Star Wars universe. No doubt it’s a tool in the Greater Bad Empire’s greater mission, but: could it be the gears of an AT-AT? An engine block for an Imperial starship? Part of the Death Star?
Luke Hull, production designer for Andorsays the point (even as of episode 10’s prison break) is not knowing what they’re putting together – at least still. As Hull tells Polygon, they are making these parts and the reveal is imminent. Eagle-eyed viewers might even be able to make their own guesses after episode 10.
“There are seven prisons in Narkina, and each prison has seven floors,” says Hull. “You don’t necessarily get it by looking at those brief moments on different floors, but they do different bits on each floor. So they’re essentially mass-producing something.”
The glimpses we see from the other floors during the triumphant chaos of the prison break aren’t much. It mostly looks like variations on the same weird mechanical beam parts that Cassian and his unit build.
But the magic of Andor and its terrifying space prison is that for now (or possibly even forever, if the show wanted to) it doesn’t matter what they build. The horror of the prison speaks for itself, and the endless aimlessness and inhumanity of the staging is its own story. It’s a nice Easter egg to return to, but as Hull points out, the structure of the prison is “like an inverted panopticon, and the organic humans are disposable parts of the machine.” The end product is not the point – the cruelty is.
With Cassian and Melshi on the run, Cassian’s relationship with the Empire has been profoundly altered, setting him on a path to confront the System’s inevitable tyranny. While Villain One tells us where this ultimately leads him, Andor still builds a journey worth pursuing at every stage of production because of everything Star Wars feels like as an adjunct to the solid storytelling it does. In a world of horrifying space prisons and brutality, sometimes that’s all you can hope for.
