If nothing else, that ending stinger REALLY helps recontextualize the entire prison arc. Seems a LOT of people were left wondering about the whole work prison thing to begin with, but the end products’ use DOES explain much of it:
If you are building a major project in secret, you want as few people as possible to be even tangentially aware of its existence. The Empire COULD have built a full manufacturing facility with droid stations…but that would mean having people build the facility. People to install and program the droids. People to maintain the droids. Imperial assets to protect the facility. Documentation of the existence of the plant and record of its input and output. That’s tens of thousands of people to build, operate, and protect a plant that has a paper trail.
But in Andor? It’s a prison, designed to be secure and keep people in. The design lends itself to requiring a relatively small number of staff to operate. As a labor facility, the average intelligence of the workers are likely to be low enough not to be able to grasp what they are building (and are kept working enough so as not to think about it). Coming from a prison labor camp, the paper trail is easier to “fudge” to keep its product(s) a secret. The labor force is basically expendable, either dying by “natural causes” or though some other means of their choosing for the paperwork. The workers can’t communicate to the outside, and the “flexible” sentencing means they never have to let anyone go, just work them to death. If a fuss is raised? Wipe out the floor. And the Empire’s increasingly restrictive laws and lackadaisical legal system ensures a steady supply of bodies to keep the process running.
If you are building a major project in secret, you want as few people as possible to be even tangentially aware of its existence. The Empire COULD have built a full manufacturing facility with droid stations…but that would mean having people build the facility. People to install and program the droids. People to maintain the droids. Imperial assets to protect the facility. Documentation of the existence of the plant and record of its input and output. That’s tens of thousands of people to build, operate, and protect a plant that has a paper trail.
But in Andor? It’s a prison, designed to be secure and keep people in. The design lends itself to requiring a relatively small number of staff to operate. As a labor facility, the average intelligence of the workers are likely to be low enough not to be able to grasp what they are building (and are kept working enough so as not to think about it). Coming from a prison labor camp, the paper trail is easier to “fudge” to keep its product(s) a secret. The labor force is basically expendable, either dying by “natural causes” or though some other means of their choosing for the paperwork. The workers can’t communicate to the outside, and the “flexible” sentencing means they never have to let anyone go, just work them to death. If a fuss is raised? Wipe out the floor. And the Empire’s increasingly restrictive laws and lackadaisical legal system ensures a steady supply of bodies to keep the process running.
