What Andor’s prisoners are building does matter, says designer

Andor’s space prison fucking sucks. That’s entirely by design: The way the prison conducts itself is atrocious, using electroshocked floors to cow the prisoners into forced labor. Cassian’s (Diego Luna) biggest obstacle to getting out is fellow inmate Kino Loy (Andy Serkis) — at least until they discover the even more horrible truth. Kino and Cassian believed they could at most get their sentences down through some day shifts. However, Narkina 5’s terrifying truth is that prisoners are just shuffled about, creating endless mechanical parts to…something.

As the various teams of Unit 5-2D assemble and assemble and assemble some more, the machinery they’re constructing starts to feel evocative of something larger in the Star Wars universe. No doubt it’s a tool in the Empire’s grander mission of great evil, but: Could it be the gears of an AT-AT? A block of engine for an Imperial starship. A part of the Death Star

Luke Hull, production designer for Andor, says the point (even as of the prison break in episode 10) is to not know what they’re assembling — at least You can still get it!. As Hull tells Polygon, they’re making these parts, and the reveal is coming. Perhaps viewers with a keen eye will be able, after the 10th episode, to guess their answers.

“Within Narkina there are seven prisons, and seven floors on every prison,” Hull says. “You don’t necessarily get it from watching those brief moments of other floors, but they’re making different parts on every floor. So they are essentially mass producing something.”

The glimpses we see of the other floors during the triumphant chaos of the prison break don’t amount to much. This is a lot like Cassian’s variations on the mechanical joists that he and his team are creating.

The magic is in Andor and its horrendous space prison is that for now (or, even possibly, forever, if the show wanted to) it doesn’t matter what they’re building. Its horror speaks for itself and its inhumanity and aimlessness is its story. It’s a neat Easter egg to circle back 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 final product isn’t the point — the cruelty is.

With Cassian and Melshi on the lam, Cassian’s relationship to the Empire has been fundamentally changed, setting him on a path to confront the unavoidable tyranny of the system. Although Rogue OneThis is where he will end up. Andor is still building a journey worth following at every stage of production, because the Star Wars of it all feels so supplementary to the grounded storytelling it’s doing. In a world with terrifying space prisons and brutality, sometimes that’s all you can hope for.