[COLUMN] Many Cages of Andor | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first season of Andor.

In the fifth episode of Andor, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is talking with fellow rebel Arvel Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) about what they have in common. “Sipo,” Andor offers by way of his experience. “Youth center. Three years. I was 13 when I went in.” Skeen responds, “I never heard of it.” Andor replies, “Well, you didn't miss anything.” Skeen acknowledges that even if he doesn’t know Sipo, he knows what it represents. “Yeah,” Skeen acknowledges. “They've built a lot of cages, huh?”

Andor is populated with cages and prisons. The first season’s penultimate arc unfolds on the prison colony of Narkina 5, in which inmates are used as slave labor to construct the Death Star. There is a grim irony in this, with Andor literally constructing the weapon of mass destruction that will kill him in Rogue One. As the bartender (Caroline Green) told Andor less than ten minutes into the first episode, “You pay at the end.” Andor is a show rich in dramatic irony.

That prison arc in Andor builds to a gigantic riot, with the inmates led by foreman Kino Loy (Andy Serkis). However, what prompts that riot is the revelation that the Empire is not releasing its prisoners at the end of their sentences, sentences recently doubled by the Public Order Resentencing Directive, or the “P.O.R.D.” They simply ship off the inmates who reach the end of their sentence to another prison. “No one is getting out,” Loy realized. The Empire never releases anybody.

Some of these cages are literal, like the prison cells on Narkina 5. Others are metaphorical. Andor stands out from the other Star Wars shows because of the care that it takes in its visual storytelling. The show repeatedly evokes the prison pods from Narkina 5, whether in shots on Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) framed in the neon glow of her suite’s doorways, the booth at which Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) shares breakfast with his domineering mother (Kathryn Thomas), or the sea of office cubicles that represent Karn’s future.

Indeed, despite being ostensibly the most powerful member of the show’s primary cast, Mothma is often framed in such a way as to emphasize her captivity. In conversations with her husband Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie), his dialogue is often delivered with both characters in frame, while Mothma’s reactions and responses often isolate her. Mothma is often glimpsed through windows or bars, creating the impression that even she has been boxed in by the Empire.

At one point, Mothma welcomes the crime lord Davo Sculdun (Richard Dillane) into her palatial apartment. Sculdun wonders how much Mothma has put her stamp on these beautiful, if sterile, surroundings. Mothma concedes that she has little freedom to make the space her own. “The rules are strict on décor,” Mothma confesses. “Our choices for change are limited.” This is, naturally, how the Empire polices the prisons that it constructs around its inmates.

While on Narkina 5, Andor quickly comes to the realization that the prison is understaffed. When he arrives on the workshop floor, the guard who escorted him quickly disappears back into the bowels of the prison. “He won't be back,” Loy explains. “They only come to pick up the dead and bring their replacements.” The workshops are managed by prisoners. The facility’s doctor is a prisoner. While Loy insists that the Empire must be watching, Andor disagrees.

“They don't need to care,” Andor explains. “All they need to do is turn this floor on twice a day and keep their numbers rolling. Why bother listening to us? We are nothing to them.” Andor is entirely correct, and it is a metaphor for the larger show. The power of the Empire does not exist in the boots on the ground or the guns in their hands, but in their capacity to turn citizens into both prisoners and wardens, effectively policing their own captivity.

The Empire does this by pitting its enemies against one another. It does this literally on Narkina 5 by forcing the inmates into competition motivated by productivity. Welcoming Andor to the floor, Loy presents him with the leaderboard. “See it?” he asks, point at the screen. “At the bottom? Last place. That's you. The seven tallies are the running shift totals of all the other rooms on this floor. You play against all the other tables in this room, I play against all the other rooms.” It’s all a competition.

This is the key to the Empire’s success. It builds hierarchies that force its subjects to scramble over one another, distracting them from the real threat looming overhead. Andor talks to Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) about his military experience. “I fought in Mimban when I was 16,” he explains, offering his life after Sipo. It was, perhaps, another prison. “Two years of it. Straight out of prison, into the mud. I'm one of 50 that survived. And who did it turn out we were fighting? Ourselves.”

This is a well-observed detail. Part of the magic trick that these sorts of institutions pull is dividing citizens against one another to distract from the larger systemic forces. This is evident looking at the campaigns to stoke up hatred and resentment of minorities, immigrants and trans people to help undermine solidarity among the population. This has always been true. Lyndon B. Johnson noted that, as long as a given person had another group or individual that they could “look down on”, “he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”

One of the smaller and more well-observed details is how some people respond to this chaos by embracing ordered structures in their social lives. Mothma’s daughter, Leida (Bronte Carmichael), embraces traditional and regressive social rituals, evoking the modern “tradwife” movement. Advocating for the “clarity” of these traditional beliefs, Sculdun tells Mothma, “Boundaries can be liberating.  The old ways have value.” A prison cell has walls and a roof. It provides structure.

At the Imperial Security Bureau, staff compete for attention and favor. Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser) understands that Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is motivated by a need to prove herself. Partagaz references that the Empire is making a point of “bringing in officers like [her]” and notes that she could have “a uniquely superior career.” She has more to prove, whether because of her background or because she is the only woman in the room. Tellingly, her chief rival, Blevins (Ben Bailey Smith) is the only person of color in the room, perhaps competing for his own “uniquely superior career.”

In this sense, it is interesting that Andor draws such a strong connection between fascism and capitalism. The inciting incident does not involve imperial soldiers, but “private security contractors.” The first true act of rebellion against the Empire is the theft of the Imperial Payroll from Aldhani. The prisoners are free labor, “cheaper than droids and easier to replace.” Young rebel Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther) is literally crushed under the weight of capital.

Money is a major motivator for various characters. Capitalism is built upon its own hierarchies. In this sense, Andor remains astute. It is worth acknowledging that contemporary America’s slide towards autocracy – or perhaps simply kleptocracy – has taken place under a leader who is a brand unto himself and who established himself as the archetype of nouveau vulgar rich through pop culture and reality television.

Andor understands that capitalism and fascism are interlinked, in that both ideologies are built upon the idea that some people are worth quantifiably more than others. Andor’s arc involves the character rejecting the trappings of materialism in favor of some higher ideology. Andor initially claims that he is only taking part in the raid in Aldhani for his share of the loot. However, over the course of the season, Andor goes on to become a true believer in the fight against fascism.

Andor also understands that one the great weapons of authoritarianism is the capacity to overwhelm its opponents. “It's so confusing, isn't it?” Nemik asks Andor. “So much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident.” Shock and awe can be numbing.

Once again, this philosophy is borne out by real life. The Trump Administration is engaged in a flurry of activities – represented by its voluminous executive orders – designed to make it hard for the media to keep up and easy for the public to become exhausted, distracting from the regime’s real objectives. This is entirely intentional, as Steve Bannon explained to Michael Lewis, where the way that this administration achieves its goals is to “flood the zone with shit.”

So, having identified these personal and often self-policed prisons, how does Andor see a way out? In his stirring speech designed to stoke the inmate rebellion, Loy advocates for collaboration rather than competition. “There is one way out,” he tells the prisoners. “You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us.” That’s the only path out.

The show returns to this theme in its finale, following the death of Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw), Cassian’s adoptive mother. Maarva dies on the planet Ferrix, where a dead body is cremated and cast into a brick. “They mix your ashes with mortar and local stone dust, put your name on and fire it up,” Corv (Noof Ousellam) explains to Meero. “You become a block of Ferrix brick.” Meero asks, “And then what?” Corv answers, “They find you a wall.”

There has been some debate about whether Andor is “really” Star Wars. This is obviously a nonsense debate. Fans have been arguing about what is or is not Star Wars since The Empire Strikes Back. However, the idea of “the Ferrix brick” is a beautiful metaphor for the same idea that underpins the Force, the idea that there is some invisible force that binds all people together, that the individual is connected to something larger than themselves that is more powerful than any one person.

Indeed, in some ways, Andor feels like it’s in conversation with the individualist underpinnings of the larger Star Wars franchise. As Cyrus R.K. Patell argued, the Star Wars films “invested deeply in individualist mythologies.” The franchise is often cited as a perfect example of “the Hero’s Journey”, with an emphasis on the singular hero. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) remains a truly singular figure in the Star Wars canon, haunting shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

Andor deliberately parallels Andor and Luke. Both are young men whose family are murdered by imperial forces. Both are pilots. Both are forced to flee the decaying worlds on which they live and join the Rebel Alliance. Both play a key role in the destruction of the Death Star. However, while Luke is at the center of his narrative, Andor is often a peripheral figure and an enabler. He helps the raid on Aldhani, he does not organize it. He doesn’t lead the prison rebellion, he inspires Loy.

In this sense, Andor is of a piece with the other great piece of Disney-era Star Wars, The Last Jedi, which is also a movie about the importance of collaboration and rejection of the rugged individualist fantasy of a predetermined chosen one. Andor understands that everybody is trapped in a prison, but there is only one way out: together.