Star Wars Andor S1E8: "Narkina 5" (continued more)

Back on Ferrix, Mom has been scoping out the old hotel that they're converting into the local imperial barracks. Her health is on the decline, physically and possibly mentally as well. She's apparently trying to see if there are any old underground access tunnels still intact leading in, so that a rebel force could theoretically sneak in and wipe out the garrison by surprise. Whether she actually is in communication with any sort of rebel group, or if she thinks she is in communication with such a group, are not clear at all. She might just be slipping into manic delusions as age and grief catch up to her, or she might actually be scouting for an armed militia.

Bix (who has fortunately not suffered any more visible facial trauma in the month or two since we last saw her) and that other friend of Cassa's whose name I never caught have been trying to look after Mom. She isn't making it easy for them though.

Whatsisname wants to try and get her into a retirement home (apparently the empire hasn't defunded all of those out of existence quite yet). But, they can't do that without Mom's own consent. And she's not willing to go anywhere; she knows what she wants to do with her little remaining life.

Of course, if the ISB really is about to grab all of Cassa's known friends and relations, then whether or not Mom actually has a plan and a group may not matter unless the plan goes into action very, very soon. Bix and Whatsisname might not be any better off themselves. Especially Bix if anyone saw him pay her that midnight visit after he came back from Aldhani.

As Bix and...fuckit, I'm just gonna call him Larry...as Bix and Larry have an outdoor argument over what to do with Mom, they are observed from the shadows by Val and Sinta. I didn't think the latter ever left Aldhani after slipping back into the crowd at the end of the heist, but apparently she did!

You know...in light of this next conversation, I'm starting to wonder about Sinta.

Val proposes that they abandon their futile vigil at this point and try to pick up Cassa's trail elsewhere. Sinta says that they should split up; one of them stay here and keep monitoring his old community, while the other runs off to do more detectivework. Val objects, partly on the grounds that they've already been separated for long enough. Sinta counters that their relationship comes fourth, and the revolution comes first, second, and third. And then she tops it off with the sentence "I'm a mirror, Val. You love me because I show you what you need to see."

Which, um. If that's her self-perception, and if she's not on Aldhani anymore, I have to wonder if she actually is dhani at all. Maybe she was just some lackey of Luthen's who could pass as an Aldhani native, learned their language, and started the infiltration a few months ahead of the other team members?

If so, then that makes the whole operation way grosser. The dhani were just used and abandoned by the rebels with no local input at all, no different from how they were treated by the empire.

...

The worst part, though? If this is the case, then the rebels were still probably in the right to have done it.

I feel like I need a shower after typing that. But...fuck. I don't know. Am I wrong in that assessment? I kind of want to be wrong.

Well, hopefully Sinta actually is dhani, and her participation in the heist represents the will of at least a minority within their community, in which case this question is irrelevant. To be fair, even if she was living on Aldhani for most of her life until the heist, it would still make sense for her to GTFO in case she's recognized by a soldier who saw her or security footage of her, so thinking about it some more it's not so strange for her to be here now.

...

So, Val goes to hunt elsewhere, and Sinta stays here and keeps watching. I feel like this is a lot of manpower to spend on tying up a loose end when theoretically these two could be doing other critical work, given how short on capable agents Luthen seems to be. Perhaps this is just another symptom of disempowerment; even with the money in hand, they don't feel like they have any way to act again yet, and chasing Cassa is just to make them all feel like they're doing something.

A day or two later, ISB personnel show up in town and start having the stormtroopers arrest people. Maybe this is related to Mom's plot, maybe it's just overzealousness in the search for leads on Cassa. Well, a few seconds later it turns out to be at least one of the two if not both. As Bix and Larry watch from the crowd, one of the officers recognizes Bix's face from a briefing and calls out to her by name to come forward and submit for questioning.

She runs. They catch her.

They bring her into that repurposed hotel that Mom's been planning to blow up or whatever, and drag her before...okay, gonna have to register a minor SOD complaint here.

I get that you need to do some narrative shorthand here, using familiar faces to represent each faction and organization (ditto Luthen for the rebellion). From the Doylist perspective, I get why Dierdre is here. But...there's just this voice in my head that I cannot drown out that's just demanding to know what the fuck a sector commander is doing on the ground here in the sticks torturing witnesses *to* a witness to a crime. There were what, fifty people sitting around that table in the ISB headquarters? So each of them are in charge of oppressing a fiftieth of the galaxy, give or take, right? How many tens of billions of people is Dierdre supposed to be oppressing right now at this moment?

Dierdre is only here running a torture chamber on Ferrix in spirit, I know. But still. I'm pedantic enough that I had to rant about scifi writers and senses of scale a bit.

Spirit-Dierdre has them leave the gasping, whimpering man who they just tortured before her left inside the room a bit for Bix to see before they start on her.

So, uh. Sinta to the rescue, maybe? Hope they don't torture her too much before then. If they do, then hopefully they'll at least leave her face alone, it couldn't have been that long ago that Bix finished healing the bruises from last time.

Maybe Sinta will ask Mom about those tunnels to sneak into the building through. Or, as seems to be the local fashion, perhaps she'll torture that information out of her. Come on Mom, break before Bix does, we're all counting on you!

The final shot of the episode, which we cut to immediately after Spirit-Dierdre and her lackeys closes the door on us and starts doing god knows what to Bix behind it, is Cassa at work on the assembly floor.

Just monotonously working. Not looking up from his work. Not asking questions. His table surrounded by other tables, surrounded in turn by other assembly floors, surrounded in turn by ocean. No dialogue. Just work.


Like I said, this was hard to watch. Probably much moreso now than it would have been when it came out just a couple of years ago. Not that the industrial-security-prison complex wasn't already huge and atrocious when this episode was being written (it's not like the authors are being subtle about their real life inspirations), or that it hadn't already been getting gradually worse for decades.

But, something did change in the first half of 2025.

The global hegemon has just declared, pretty much openly, that its entire raison d'etre is to put people in prisons.

It's defunded every single branch of government, and every single one of its non-military overseas investments, and dumped that money into building more prisons and filling them. Its foreign proxies, including the one that I'm desperately trying to escape from, are eagerly marching along.

The slavery-sweepstakes of "Andor" aren't true to life, at least for the general public who aren't part of one or more targeted groups. Perhaps things approach that among America's most targeted minorities and the victims of its foreign proxies. But, I could see it happening eventually. Once the scapegoat ethnic groups are fully enslaved or exterminated, but capital still needs to grow the returns on its investment, I could see random criminalization lotteries coming into existence. I'd believe it.

Follow the logic to its ultimate conclusion, and you have a world where the only three jobs in existence are "prison guard," "prison owner," and "convict." Every single life beaten and broken into the shape of a tool for beating and breaking others. Every dream of freedom and cry of rage at the oppressors from an inmate co-opted and redirected toward other inmates. Historical "slave societies" have existed, but what we're looking at here goes far beyond that. Not just a society where the bulk of production is done by slave labor. A society in which slavery is the only reason that any living person ever does anything.

The entirety of the world's resources and all of humankind's ingenuity monopolized for the singular purpose of deprivation. Until the world overheats and everyone dies.

I don't think that world could ever actually exist. Things would break and fall into a (slightly preferable) state of bloody chaos before the One World Prison could be completed. But the fact that it's infeasible doesn't mean that people aren't enthusiastically trying to make it real. Lots of people. Very enthusiastically.

Like I said. This episode was hard for me to watch. Especially looking at my smiling three-year-old and wondering what kind of world he'll ever be able to have.

Well. Enough about Squarespace's terms of service for now, back to Star Wars.

To some degree, this episode felt like emotional torture porn. Not enough to make me call it distasteful, but still, it was a lot. The more I think about it though, the more I think that the misery really was necessary, and that dialling it down would have weakened the story even if it would have made for a better viewing experience. We need to see what the stakes really are. What an ultimate Imperial victory actually means.

This is something that, frankly, Star Wars (novels aside, maybe? I haven't read many of those) has generally shied away from in the past. We see the Empire doing over-the-top evil stuff while hunting down rebels and punishing dissidents, but these couple of Andor episodes make it clear that it actually doesn't matter if there's a rebellion or not. They build prisons, and they put people in them. If they can't put people in those prisons for a reason, then they'll just have to put them in for no reason.

It also, much like the "Empire Strikes Back" movie that I already compared it to, needs to be honest about just how damned hard rebellion is. Especially in a centralized, high-tech surveillance state, when you're still at the stage of spying and sabotage rather than armed guerilla camps. Expect to pay dearly for every victory. To suffer many times the amount of damage you inflict. For your innocent family and friends to suffer it as well. You have to just not care and do it anyway. You have to learn to value those lives as little as the empire values them.

After the gritty treatment that this series gave to the active parts of rebellion in the first half of the season, it had to do this now. Be just as blunt and just as unglamorous about the costs incurred by letting the empire persist. It couldn't pull any punches here without being dangerously dishonest. If that means walking the tightrope over a pit of misery porn, then, well, like I said, I think it managed to keep its balance.

On a production note, something I didn't give enough attention to during the summary is the music. Especially during the prison sequences. The low, grinding industrial-techno. Long, bleak notes. Like the music itself is slowly crushing you under its boot.