Andor’s prison trilogy weaponizes Star Wars fan knowledge

You must fully comprehend the terror of Andor’s stunning prison arc, it helps to go back some 200 years to consider a man named Jeremy Bentham. An English political philosopher and politician, Bentham spent his late 1780s overseas and created one of the most brutal works of Western social cruelty: The Panopticon. Panopticon was a form of surveillance that is most easily linked to prisons. It’s a system designed to create the illusion of continuous observation where subjects don’t know whether they are under constant watch. One of Bentham’s earliest ideas for implementing the Panopticon was in prisons, which would be constructed with cells arrayed in a circle around a central watchtower that inmates could not see inside. All could be monitored by guards. One possibility is that they are reading a book. They couldn’t be anywhere.

The point of the Panopticon, then, isn’t really surveillance. It’s to get people to police themselves, to instill the IdeaEven if it is fiction, of a greater power. In fact, it’s likely better if it is. Stories have power. Stories are powerful and never need to be told. People can become afraid by a story.

The Narkina 5 trilogy — the trio of episodes from “Narkina 5” to “One Way Out” and largely concerned with Cassian’s imprisonment on the eponymous Narkina 5 prison facility — is Andor’s finest hour thus far. These three episodes are the final two, directed by Toby Haynes. Written by House of Cards showrunner Beau Willimon, Andor has gained a sense of urgency and specificity that doesn’t just make it good Star Wars, but good fiction, filing genre tropes down to sharp emotional shivs that arrest the viewer.

A large part of it is down to Andor’s Western-like structure, in which Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is a Man With No Name going from place to place and getting entangled in the stories of others against his will. This is possible because AndorDeep character analysis with actors that change, showing how different types of people get involved in revolutions. This includes wealthy idealists like Vel Shartha (Faye Marsay), as well as simple grifters like Arvel Skeen (Ebon Moss–Bachrach). The reasons these people have for getting involved in the burgeoning Rebellion, and the varying walks of life they come from, help paint a more complex and mature portrait of the conflicts George Lucas established in 1977’s Star Wars.

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We don’t, however, learn anything about Kino Loy (Andy Serkis). All he has is his present AndorWe see. Narkina 5 has the saddest and most pitiable inmate, a man who is charged with keeping his inmates productive and on track. He’s good at the job: disciplined, commanding, and, most importantly, motivated, with less than a year left in his sentence. Before we met him, he realized that his best chance for survival was to submit to the institutional oppression. He also learned to encourage others to do so. The cold language of Narkina 5 — where disembodied and distorted voices regularly demand that inmates get “on program” and perform docility, with hands on their heads — gave him something to conform to. Even though he realizes that the performance is solely for each other and that no one will be watching, he still conforms to it.

Prisons aren’t just buildings. They’re ideas, systems of control, machines for dehumanization. Their efficacy isn’t limited to the horrors that happen inside, but what people outside of their walls are made to think of them — and more importantly, what they don’t know about them.

One of Andor’s handful of subplots that run alongside Cassian’s imprisonment on Narkina 5 follows Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) as she seeks to secure funding for Luthen’s (Stellan Skarsgård) increasingly ambitious rebel operations. She is disappointed by the limited choices she has. Her desire to resist while she plays politics is ending its utility and she must face people that she doesn’t like.

Mon Mothma’s story does not intersect with Andor’s directly, and it’s not even clear if she’s aware of Imperial prisons like Narkina 5 — it’s implied that no one is. But she feels trapped. She’s part of the comfortable democracy Narkina5 relies upon to exist in secret. The scenes are visually linked in an intense match that contrasts her palace with the prison Andor is held in. The revolution is not something neither character fully believes in. They will not escape the other unless they can.

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All of this continues to unfold in spaces far plainer and less imposing than the military might we’ve seen in previous Star Wars stories, and with purpose. Andor leverages the iconography of Star Wars by simply not showing it, and relying on the audience’s familiarity and fandom to do its work for it. There are decades worth of Star Destroyers and Stormtrooper images in our unconscious. Andor doesn’t have to show them. We, like its characters, know they’re out there, and know what they can do. That knowledge — that terrorism — is another prison of a sort, to keep the people who are free from ever feeling free.

However, this also proves that the galaxy’s size is just too great to be controlled by brute force. It needs corporate stand-ins like Syril Karn’s former corpo-security guard colleagues on Morlana One, or crushed spirits like Kino Loy, to believe in the Panopticon’s eye. To eradicate whatever it is that others may believe in, and replace it with faith in the Empire’s power and competence.

If their victims are able to persuade each other and look around, they can believe that there is some kind of competence.