Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex

The Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex, located on the moon Narkina 5, included seven prison cylinders built as prefabricated heptagonal islands submerged underwater and consisting of three distinct sections: an inner core, an intermediate work ring and an outer cell ring. The command core, featuring turbolifts and service staircases that were over twelve-stories tall connecting the eight levels—including Level 1, 3, 6, and 7—with each other was located in the center of the cylinder. Immediately surrounding it was a work ring, comprised of seven work rooms per level; between the command spire and work ring were seven control rooms, one for each work room; these were called guard boxes and functioned as miniature command centers with a built-in communications center and armory. The guard boxes were accessible by three sets of narrow stairs that led down to them from each side, with the fourth side consisting of two observation windows with a door between them that led out onto a balcony overlooking the work room. The interior of the guard box included two wall racks of equipment for the guards, one holding insulated boots and the other holding weaponry. The other walls were covered in various panels and displays and a command console including a comms microphone was positioned facing toward the observation windows.

The outermost layer of the cylinder was the cell ring, connected with the rest of the facility via transparent skybridges crossing through the open atrium, a bottomless pit filled with cascading water from the prison's hydroelectric wells. The cell ring featured fourteen dormitories, one for each level's shift, and was fully isolated from the rest of the complex. In each cylinder, the topmost level peeked out to a height of thirty meters from the surface of the water to service shuttle arrivals and departures to the intake corridors and hangars.

The facility functioned both as a prison and as a factory, separating the 4,900 working prisoners of each cylinder in groups of seven—a total of ninety-eight work groups—and tasking them with labor work on complex machinery, providing incentives for good behavior and productivity. To further separate the prisoners, night and day shifts were prohibited from interacting with each other, as the one slept while the other worked. For their only shared activity—walking to and from their work rooms—they were physically separated from each other via a glossy room divider in the middle of the transfer skybridges. The site had minimum security and most wardens were armed only with zap rods, as the facility's main enforcement technique were the tunqstoid steel lined floors which could cause major pain and convulsions when activated to those standing on them barefoot. Wardens and prison guards wore special protective boots and carried floor activator devices with them at all times. Meanwhile, the prisoners remained barefoot and as such susceptible to tunqstoid shocks, which had three intensity levels ranging from severely painful to lethal. The result of the minimum security and the constant threat of being shocked resulted in extreme obedience among the prisoners, who were trained to stand "on program" whenever instructed—hands on the head, eyes front, feet on the floor. This however also led to the prison being understaffed, with no more than eighty-four guards staffing each cylinder's factory levels, with twelve guards per floor.

Each prison cylinder was powered by hydroelectric energy generated from seven massive wells that formed around it, collecting water from the surrounding lake and using it to power the floors, lights, and doors; as noted by inmate Birnok, every fixed item on the prison was continuously powered and able to be electrified at a moment's notice. The HydroGen assembly would take months to start up again when fully deactivated but could be turned off in seconds via large gates that sealed and waterproofed the shafts around the cylinders, although there was also a backup power supply that was turned on in the event of generator shutdown and kept the facility lights on. The massive buildings severely polluted the moon's waters and resulted in the decline of the native squigglies' populations, frustrating fishers who traveled to the world in hopes of catching them.

The prison command center was located on the topmost level of the cylinder, Level 8, which lacked work and cell rings and instead featured multiple prison barge landing bays and intake facilities. It was staffed by the prison commander and two technicians, each of whom had access to specific functions of the prison which they could control from three white duty posts. The most critical functions of the prison, including the hydroelectric generator control panel and the public address system, were restricted to the commander's post and could only be accessed by them. Apart from the duty posts the command center also included a number of wall screens displaying critical information, including the location of prisoners within the complex superimposed on detailed blueprints of the facility, as well as active and inactive floor sections and level specific critical alarms. The sensors tracking the prisoners' locations were so precise that they could be used to de-electrify parts of the floor as the prisoners walked on them while keeping the rest fully active, thereby creating a narrow path they would have to follow to get to wherever prison staff needed them to.

Each prison cylinder had a sterilized labor work ring area which was separated in seven levels comprised of seven rooms per level and seven tables per room. Work rooms, described by guards as the "factory floor," consisted of a large, brightly lit white-colored area that was kept starkly clean by prison staff and constantly observed by security teams from two observation windows overlooking the chamber. Work rooms also had an adjacent open-sided water closet with a toilet and a sink built into a wall recess, directly connected to the room's main water stand pipe.

Every work room was assigned to two floor managers—one for the day shift, one for the night shift—selected from among the prisoners, who were tasked with instructing newcomers on their responsibilities and keeping the order among the prisoners. Tables were manned from a seven man crew who worked in the same twelve hour shifts and slept in the same areas, encouraging familiarity and teamwork among the tablemates and improving their productivity. Inmates used heavy equipment including drilling and riveting tools as well as laser solder guns and air hoses suspended above an automated production hub to assemble complex mechanical devices secretly part of the DS-1 Death Star Mobile Battle Station's superlaser array. While they figured it was important, prisoners were not informed what exactly it was they were building. Upon completion of their devices, inmates placed them on racks which, when filled, were loaded on a storage compartment on the wall opposite the observation windows; from there, the finished components were automatically lowered to a storage facility and eventually loaded to Eta-class supply barges for transport to the planet Scarif. Once delivered, the parts were integrated in the top secret Project Stardust, specifically the DS-1's superlaser.

Evaluation was constant and at the end of each shift the least productive table in every room was punished with a low level tunqstoid shock delivered in the box at the center of the room for all the prisoners to see. The most productive table of the shift was rewarded with flavor on their food.

Each room was assigned to a specific dormitory, separated from the work ring by a transparent white-windowed skybridge. At the beginning and end of each shift, the shift's workers were arranged for inspection in the skybridge before being allowed to continue to the work and cell rings; to pass from the cell to the work rings, inmates would strip naked and enter a cramped shared shower which would seal from both sides. The shower was equipped with ceiling-mounted cleansing mist sprays which sprayed from special slats to sterilize them before their entry to their workroom. After being cleaned, the inmates were released from the shower's front door and stepped into an antechamber where their clean uniforms were stored in cubbies to proceed to their daily shift.

The dormitories were comprised of a long, steel-floored sterile corridor surrounded by 50 cells for two prisoners each. The cells were open, lacking a door or a lock; prisoners were forced to remain inside for fear of a lethal shock from the floor which remained active—indicated by red floor running lights—for the duration of the prisoners' rest time. Each cell was equipped with two bunk beds, a night light, fold-out toilet seat, a plate, a spoon and a shaver placed on the cell wall. There were also personal food and water tubes; prisoners were free to eat and drink as much as they wanted to stay strong and healthy enough for the day's work, although the food was flavorless and only the most productive table from each room would receive flavor as a reward. There was also a screen next to the toilet seat indicating how many days remained in the prisoners' sentence and sensors on the floor ensuring there was only a single occupant present in each cell. The illuminated perimeter of each cell's entryway acted as a faint nightlight, and the cell blocks themselves were cleaned everyday, keeping in line with the prison's strict standards.

The prison was mostly unknown to the galaxy at large, and by 5 BBY it worked at full capacity, delivering its completed widgets to the top secret Project Stardust on the planet Scarif via Eta-class supply barges to assemble the DS-1 "Death Star" Mobile Battle Station. During that same year, a group of operators affiliated with the rebel Luthen Rael's Axis network infiltrated and robbed the headquarters of the Imperial presence on the planet Aldhani, killing Commandant Jayhold Beehaz in the process. This unprecedented security incident gave Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine a pretext to introduce the Public Order Resentencing Directive to the Imperial Senate; the bill, which was passed immediately, focused on increasing the powers of Imperial Security Bureau personnel as well as the sentences of convicts for anti-Imperial crimes.

As a result, prison conditions worsened dramatically. By the time Axis network thief Cassian Andor was incarcerated following his arrest on the planet Niamos while under the alias "Keef Girgo," nobody was allowed to leave the prison following the end of their term as inmates were simply sent to another facility to continue working there. Some prisoners, including Veemoss, killed themselves to escape their torment, a behavior which barely caused any concern among their cellmates other than the corpse's smell. Thirty days after Andor was first incarcerated for anti-Imperial activity, word of the fake releases got out in one of the cylinders when an inmate from Level 4 revealed his resentencing to his fellow inmates of Level 2, Room 5. During a shift change, a riot broke out, and prison staff activated the Tunqstoid floors in the skybridge between Unit Two-Five's work ring and cell ring, killing all 100 men there.

Although the uprising was suppressed, word got out to the other levels of the cylinder through floor managers, including Level 5 shift managers Kino Loy and Zinska and resulted in fear and distrust among the prison population. The incident inspired Andor and fellow inmates Ruescott Melshi and Birnok to accelerate the escape they were already planning by cutting the water pipes on a panel next to their work room toilet, as they suspected that something was changing in the prison. The stress of the incident, combined with age and exhaustion caused prisoner Ulaf to suffer a massive stroke. The doctor that was called, Rhasiv, was unable to help and instead euthanized them. Following this, Rhasiv confirmed the prisoners' suspicions to Andor and his floor manager Kino Loy, prompting Loy to reveal the number of guards on their floor to the latter to facilitate his escape attempt. Following their return to the shift dormitory, Loy shared what the doctor had revealed to everyone, prompting shocked reactions and plans of retaliation. By the very next day, the plan Andor and Melshi had been preparing had been shared with everyone in the room and all prisoners were ready to enact their escape.

During their passage from the bridge, prisoners were instructed to remain completely silent, preventing day shift prisoners from informing the night shift about their plan. During the morning work, inmates stashed away various small parts and tools in preparation for their escape attempt, to be used as weapons and projectiles against the guards. Meanwhile, Andor continued cutting the water supply tube to the work area with his makeshift knife, with the tolerance of Loy. By the time a replacement for Ulaf had arrived, the cable was completely severed and dislodged and water had started pouring out into the work area. This however went undetected by the guards who began the inmate introduction routine as usual, placing him in the work ring with an escort and two armed flanking box guard sentries.

The prisoners' plan was kickstarted when two inmates—Xaul and Ham—staged a "brawl" with each other while the lift was descending, distracting the armed sentries into pointing their weapons to them and allowing Andor to lodge his tool in between the lift and the wall, blocking its movement. Panicking, the escort guard zapped the new inmate with their zaprod, but Birnok immediately climbed the lift and knocked them out allowing the new inmate to zap his escort and knock him down as well. The left sentry guard reacted by shooting the new prisoner, and calling for immediate activation of the floors in the workroom. By that time, the water from the pipe had covered almost the entire floor, and the prisoners had started to collectively throw their gear and tools at the guards, hurting and disorienting them. The control room finally activated the floors but water from the burst pipe successfully short-circuited them and the prisoners remained unharmed. Realizing that the prison's main weapon was deactivated, the entirety of Day shift 5 stormed the lift, with Andor stealing the left sentry's weapon and using it to kill both sentries. The prisoners then captured their workroom's command center, collecting weapons and zaprods from the armory.

At this point, inmates were split up into three groups. A group led by the prisoner Jemboc and including their tablemate Taga moved around the floor and liberated the day shifts of level 5 one by one by taking out the limited guards and knocking out others. Others made their way to Levels 4 and 3 and started engaging the guards there. Finally, Loy and Andor, using a service ladder, made their way to Level 8 where the Command Center was located, preventing the activation of a level-wide floor activation and killing one of the three control technicians. They ordered the prison commander to deactivate the power into the entire prison to which he reluctantly complied, and Loy made a site-wide announcement through the public address system instructing the prisoners to fight back against their captors and revealing the façade of the "release system."

By this point, the riot had turned into a full-blown uprising, as prisoners from all levels took advantage of the deactivated floors and unlocked doors and upon listening to Loy's announcement began fighting back against Imperial guards, one by one making their way to level 8 where they joined Loy and Andor. The guards left alive, including the intake warden had long since locked themselves in a maintenance closet, keeping quiet and avoiding engaging the prisoners, who were leaving the cylinder by jumping to the water from the prison barge landing bay. By night, several prisoners had reached the shore, from where they escaped on foot as the first Imperial aerial reinforcements started to arrive. Although patrols including TIE reaper attack landers started searching the area surrounding the facility, at least two inmates, Andor and Melshi, escaped aboard squigglie fishers Dewi and Freedi Pamular's quadjumper. The two escapees managed to reach the planet Niamos, where they parted ways to maximize their chance to tell anyone they could of the prison conditions, with Melshi noting that they might well be the only people in the galaxy aware of its secret.

The prison was manned by wardens, most of whom were equipped with zap-rods, though a few were armed with normal DH-17 blaster pistols and led by a prison commander and two command techs stationed at the top of the facility in Level 8. The prison also had an intake warden, who welcomed newcomers and demonstrated the tunqstoid floors to intimidate them. The staff were separated from the prisoners as they remained outside the work and cell rings, only going in to collect the dead and to bring in new prisoners. As such they were rarely seen and their sudden appearance was thought to be a bad sign for prisoners.

For their uniforms, prison guards wore black boilersuits with white striping down the left side and along the left arm. The suits featured a small metal panel with several buttons on the right wrist, and a variant of the Imperial crest on the right shoulder. The uniform was worn with a black kepi cap and specialized orange boots that insulated the guards from the tunqstoid steel floors. Technicians working in the command center of the complex, including the prison commander, wore gray boilersuits with the same striping and gray caps.

Apart from Imperial security personnel, some prisoners were selected among the lot and promoted to floor managers and medical technicians. Floor managers were responsible for each shift of a specific room and were rewarded if their room's productivity surpassed that of the others in the floor. The combination of managers' and prisoners' incentives was thought to increase productivity and decrease the threat of insurgency. Medical technicians on the other hand were given a blue-colored suit denoting their special status as well as a suitcase of medical equipment. They were considered a lower rank than the guards, being also subject to "on program" treatment. Despite that, they were allowed to visit different shifts and levels than theirs, acting as messengers among the inmates who had otherwise little contact with each other.

Inmates wore paper-thin white scrubs with orange striping down the left side and along the left arm, in the same patterns as on the guard's boilersuits. The scrubs of room managers had the striping continue onto the right shoulder. To denote their role as doctors, medical technicians wore scrubs with light blue striping.

The Imperial Prison Complex was first depicted in the teaser trailer for the first season of the live-action Disney+ television series Andor. Its first appearance was in "Narkina 5," the eighth episode of Andor Season One which aired on October 26, 2022; in the episode, the complex was referred to as an "Imperial Factory Facility" but it was officially identified as the "Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex" in the official Walt Disney Company Getty images release for the episode on October 25, 2022. It was later identified as the "Narkina 5 detention facility" in the 2023 reference book Star Wars: Dawn of Rebellion: The Visual Guide, written by Pablo Hidalgo and Emily Shkoukani.

The prison was designed in the first writers' room session by showrunner and director Tony Gilroy and writer Beau Willimon. According to Gilroy, the main focus of the weeks-long development process was to design a "different" prison with a unique feature; the writers' team was prepared to scrap the entire prison story arc if they couldn't come up with a new and fresh take as they didn't want to fall into the comfortable trappings of the common prison movie clichés. According to Willimon, they intentionally tried to subvert almost all basic genre tropes, having a brightly lit clean prison instead of of a dark and dirty one.

Once the idea for the electrified tunqstoid floor was adopted the entire prison story arc was based on it, with an early draft having Cassian's crew attempting to steal rubber boots from the guards to escape the electrified prison. Gilroy said that the key to the escape sequence was when Birnok jumped onto the railing and broke it, which was a realistic scene acting as the hook to get him involved. Although Gilroy loved the idea, he also mentioned that he was afraid of the possibility that it could be used in a real-world penitentiary. The idea of the prison building widgets for the Death Star was explored very early in the production, as Gilroy liked Cassian's proximity and involvement to important galactic events without him actually realizing it; he also found the fact that Cassian contributed to the construction of the weapon that led to his demise poetic. According to Gilroy, the Death Star's construction was building "the spine of season two."

With the setting determined, a scaled replica of the prison floors was constructed to prepare for the filming process as Tony Gilroy was uncomfortable directing action scenes without a clear physical environment for them to take place in. According to production designer Luke Hull the work rooms were designed to be a mix between a laboratory and an asylum, with the prisoners being confined in large windowless spaces until they cross from the cells to the work rooms, the skybridge being the only glimpse of the outside world they would get. The sets were designed to evoke a sickly, hospital atmosphere to which end both the walls and the lights were white or ivory colored.

Although the final look of the prison bears a striking resemblance to the one from THX 1138, Star Wars creator George Lucas's first feature film, both Willimon and Gilroy denied having been directly influenced by it, with Willimon noting that they realized it only after filming had already begun, at which point they did incorporate certain references to it as a nod to Lucas' work. Fans have suggested that the "seven levels with seven rooms per level and seven tables per room" is a reference to THX's budget: $777,777; this however has not been confirmed by the cast or crew.

Costume designer Michael Wilkinson wanted the prison uniforms to have a memorable quality. His team wanted the uniforms to almost feel disposable to give the impression that they would be worn for one day, hosed down, and then replaced with a new, fresh uniform the next day. Wilkinson came up with the orange symbols that were meant to be a branding of the prison, and his team made the uniforms using a fabric and papery material they found. The different shapes and sizes of the prisoners unified with the uniform.

The Narkina 5 sets were physically built in London Pinewood Studios, in contrast with previous Disney+ shows which made extensive use of StageCraft wrap-around CGI technology. According to Gilroy, Hull and the crew spent about a day building the prison. Director Toby Haynes claimed that the sets were some of the biggest in-door sets he had ever seen, and he said the huge amounts of scaffolding holding up the sets gave the prison an industrial feeling. The work room tables and the instruments suspended above them were designed by Industrial Light & Magic supervisors Mohen Leo and TJ Falls to be fully functional. The machine parts and process of assembling the pieces were thoroughly worked out, and the design ended up working with the choreography of the process, resulting in the actors having to learn how to use the complex machinery to actually assemble the Stardust widgets.

The combination of the detailed, pristine sets and the daunting repetition of their building tasks caused some actors to feel uncomfortable, with Andy Serkis, the actor who played Kino Loy, remarking that the massive work rooms made him claustrophobic. Serkis also noted that most of the aspects of the prison were reflected in the sets as well: the metal floors were not heated and the actors were made to stand barefoot on them until their lunch breaks and the Level 8 landing bays were elevated with the escapees actually jumping from them to their "freedom" below.

According to producer Sanne Wohlenberg, the prison scenes were the last to be shot before the wrap of Season One, and when Cassian Andor's actor, Diego Luna, and other prisoners arrived at the set the actors choreographed their convulsions from the scene when they arrive in prison to occur while the lights were being changed. The skybridge sequences were filmed almost identical to their on screen depiction as well, with the actors having to stay literally locked in the test-tube like sets while standing in queues, as the doors in the long prison tubes were sealed at each end resulting in what Serkis called a "desensitization effect" which however helped them better portray their roles. He also said that the set, costume design, and prison outfits would work on the actors psychologically and take away their sense of identity. The set was a sterile environment with no private space, so the actors would have to stand between takes.