Up until now I’ve felt that the Disney+ live-action series Star Wars: Andor has fairly deftly walked the line between grounded real-world drama and a captivating spy thriller set in A Galaxy Far, Far Away. But this week’s episode, entitled “Narkina 5,” dials things a bit too far in the direction of “bleak” for my liking.
Picking up where things left off in the previous installment, “Narkina 5″– the title being the name of the planet on which the bulk of this new episode takes place– sees the title character Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna) in Imperial captivity, having been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit… though, as we know, he certainly did commit other crimes against the Empire.
Cassian gets shuttled off to an Imperial prison, which is actually less drab than I had anticipated, showrunner Tony Gilroy and his talented production designer Luke Hull having settled on something more out of THX 1138 than the lived-in Star Wars universe. It’s bright and shiny and pristine, and weirdly once again there are no non-human alien species incarcerated there– I can only imagine their punishments are even more brutal considering the Empire’s history of xenophobia. But Cassian is basically sentenced to a life on the assembly line, putting together machinery with a team of workers who are rewarded with flavor in their food-paste if they’re the fastest and punished with electric shocks if they’re the slowest… guess which happens first. Their supervisor is a fellow inmate played by Andy Serkis (though not as Snoke, as far as we know) who rules his factory floor with an iron fist as he waits out his own remaining 200-something days in the jail. It’s all very dystopian sci-fi and, I hate to admit it, doesn’t feel a whole lot like the Star Wars I know, but I’ll probably get used to that as we go along. We do check in on Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), who seems to be having the same cocktail-party conversation over and over again with her Chandrilan childhood friend Tay Kolman (Ben Miles), though I appreciated getting to learn a little more about her relationship with house-husband Perrin Fertha (Alastair Mackenzie), who came off as slightly less despicable in this episode.
Over on the Imperial Security Bureau side of things, Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) finally crosses paths with Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and gets some additional information from him about the incident on Ferrix, but somewhat surprisingly she seems just as dismissive of him as everyone else in his life when he expresses his desire to join her ranks. On Ferrix itself, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) and Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) are concerned about Maarva Andor’s (Fiona Shaw) well-being when she injures herself trying to help the Rebellion in her own small-scale way, while Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) and Cinta Kaz (Varada Sethu) watch covertly from a distance, hoping for a clue about Cassian’s current whereabouts so they can track him down and eliminate him for Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard). Speaking of Luthen, he finally takes a trip off-planet to visit the extremist Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker, reprising his Rogue One role), who immediately turns down an offer to join forces with another rebel cell. This episode is full of narrative false starts like that one, and consequently it almost feels like we’re in the sterile Imperial prison alongside Cassian. Maybe that’s intentional, but I can’t help but think I now have a better understanding of why Lucasfilm and Disney+ also chose to release the decidedly more exciting and kinetic series of animated shorts Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi today. I suspect most of Andor’s audience will agree with me when I say that in the interest of moving things along story-wise, I’m hoping Cassian gets out of that prison sooner rather than later.
New episodes of Star Wars: Andor are released Wednesdays, exclusively on Disney+.