Narkina 5

[merelydovely]

Mr. Dove and I are loving the hell out of Andor, the Rogue 1 prequel currently airing every Wednesday on Disney Plus. (We are of course enthusiastically password-sharing to gain access to the Mouse's content.) Our D&D crew has game on Wednesdays, though, so the two of us are usually playing catch-up when we do get around to watching the show.

Last night we caught up on episodes 8 and 9, and aughhhh you guys I love this show so much! It was a great pair of episodes, too: ep 8 sees Cassian arriving at a prison on Narkina 5, and ep 9 sets up an important shift in the dynamics of the prison

I felt compelled to post about it because I could finally go back and read the article that Gavia Baker-Whitelaw (Hello_Tailor, hellotailor) had posted about it when the episode came out two weeks ago: ‘Andor’ episode 8 illustrates why this show is so divisive, exploring the psychological strategy of the Empire’s prison system.

It's not specifically called out in the article, but the scene in ep 8 that stood out the most to me as characteristic of both Cassian and of Diego Luna and the way this whole show tends to work was the part where Cassian is separated from the rest of the new prisoners and has to wait for a moment while the guards on his new floor get their shit together. I couldn't find any screenshots of that scene in a quick search, so I ended up just snapping them myself.

The last time we saw Cassian, he was arriving on Narkina 5, still wearing his tourist clothes from Niamos. After an update on some of the other characters, we cut back to Cassian, who is now wearing Narkina 5 prison scrubs and being shoved down a short flight of stairs by some prison guards. Cassian is still reeling from the dramatic shift his life has taken—one minute a rich tourist on the resort planet of Niamos, the next arrested for loitering near the scene of a crime and sentenced to 6 years in prison, and now dumped unceremoniously on a prison platform in the middle of the ocean (Honestly, the first thing that came to mind was the floating Earthbender prison from the Haru episode of ATLA.)

All the shots we've had of his face up until this point have shown him totally shellshocked, in total denial about what's happening. But here he starts to wake up and pay attention, unable to stop himself from casing this guard station. He's just been explicitly told to put his hands on his head and keep his eyes to the front, and the next thing he does is look over his shoulder...he's just doing it in such a passive, shellshocky way that the guards don't immediately twig him as rebelling on purpose.

At first they're still talking directly to him, still posturing and threatening, but his movements are slow and tentative, and soon enough they're talking to each other over his head.

The guards, not thinking of Cassian as a threat (or, in fact, as a person) continue to give away details of prison security protocol as Cassian visibly starts noting down features of the guard station, his eyes flicking up, down, side to side. Guard #2, the one standing to Cassian's left with a gun, is the only one to notice when Cassian finally moves his head too noticeably to the right.

I enjoyed the way that at first Cassian is barely moving his eyes, let alone his head, and then he gently prods at the restrictions of this new environment by making a more overt movement, checking to see how alert the guards really are. He thinks of himself as a go-along get-along sort of person, someone who keeps his head down and survives, but at the same time he can't help pushing boundaries, can't help being a troublemaker at heart.

So Guard #2 orders his eyes front—but he has to do it twice. And as jumpy and abusive as these guards are, Cassian is still milking his slow, tentative, nonthreatening persona to the point that he doesn't even get slapped around for disobeying a direct order.

Even more of the guard situation is revealed, indirectly setting up a crowning moment of awesome that pays off at the end of episode 9. How many guards do we see in this scene? How many can we infer are on this level?

I love this twitchy shifty man!!!

It makes me sad that for some people this scene would read as 'dull' or 'not advancing the plot' or whatever, as Hello_Tailor reported, when this stuff isn't really even subtle, it's just not narrated outright.

To move away from this scene—Episode 8 also introduced the especially haunting detail of Narkina 5's prisoner control mechanism, which is keeping the prisoners barefoot. With the new arrivals being barked at to kick off their shoes on the prisoner transport early in the episode, and then the prisoners all having to stand in a sealed room while steam hisses out of the ceiling, the Holocaust references were, to my mind, pretty direct, without being klutzy? This is very much a show about fascism, and the Empire has always been modeled fairly directly on the Nazis in particular.

Anyway. It's a great show. Anyone else watching? It's the kind of show that's so good I don't especially feel the need to read any fanfic about it.