How Andor Creator Tony Gilroy Decided Dedra Meero's Fate

Spoilers for "Andor" follow.

The premise of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" offered a chance to see the POV of the "little people" of the "Star Wars" universe. Rebel soldiers like Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) are the people who help make history happen but wind up, in the long run, forgotten by it. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) lands the lucky shot to destroy the Death Star, but "Rogue One" recontextualizes how he only got there due to the struggles and sacrifices of many others.

"Rogue One" zoomed out from the villains' centers of power, too. Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) may be head of the Death Star construction project, but he's a middle manager next to Darth Vader (James Earl Jones & David Prowse/Spencer Wilding) and Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing/Guy Henry). 

The freshly-wrapped "Rogue One" prequel series "Andor" extends this POV by going even further down the totem pole. "Andor" offers the best look yet at the workings of the Imperial bureaucracy, even though Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is nowhere in sight. It's like the Death Star conference room scene in the original "Star Wars," where Darth Vader says he finds Admiral Motti's (Richard LeParmentier) lack of faith in the Force disturbing. Only this time, there's no Dark Lord of the Sith around to break up the political talk. 

Our eye into this story is Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an intelligence officer at the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB). Ambitious and ruthless, she's out to make herself the rising star to her superior Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser). 

If you take a quick glance at Dedra's situation and don't account for context, she seems like the kind of character you could root for. She's an underdog at the office and a woman in a man's galaxy. "Andor" smartly indicts the audience's impulse to root for her and then stamps it out. Dedra's not misguided or naive to the reality of the Empire. She's a true believer fascist and a key piece in the planning of horrible evil, such as the Ghorman genocide.

That's why it's so satisfying that, in "Andor" series finale "Jedha, Kyber, Erso," Dedra's fate is being imprisoned by the very Empire to which she dedicated herself. "Andor" creator Tony Gilroy told Vanity Fair that Dedra going to prison is "worse than death" — especially since, back in "Andor" season 1, viewers got a bitter taste of what imperial prisons are like.

In season 1 of "Andor," Dedra is hunting the rebel Axis, aka Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). She finally finds him in season 2 episode 10, "Make It Stop," having done so by "scavenging" and reading Imperial files that went beyond her clearance level (including reports about the Death Star). From there, she completely bungles the operation. Luthen's ISB inside agent Lonni Jung (Robert Emms) hacks into Dedra's computer and finds the Death Star files, passing the information about the weapon onto Luthen who passes them onto his assistant Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau). Dedra, not realizing the security breach she's allowed, confronts Luthen alone and gives him the opportunity to stab himself while she's preoccupied with gloating.

Dedra is arrested and Krennic shows up personally to castigate her. "If you're not a rebel spy, you've missed your calling," he spews with venom. As we know from "Rogue One," Krennic is ultimately a paper tiger next to the big players. That he is able to impose himself so fiercely on Dedra, the way Vader or Tarkin do to Krennic himself, shows how out of her depth she is.

In the series' closing montage, Dedra is sitting in a cell, looking haunted but empty. When the lights go out she collapses her face into her hands. Dedra's cell might look familiar, because it is literally a piece of the set from the Narkina 5 prison back in "Andor" season 1. Gilroy had saved a piece of the set because he thought it might be useful for later story developments. As he told Vanity Fair:

"We don't save a lot of sets. They're very carnivorous over there. They destroy everything. So I remember telling Luke Hull, the show's production designer, 'Oh man, save a piece of Narkina. Save me a shot of that cell, because I think we'll probably use it.'"

Gilroy and the "Andor" team did indeed find a way to use it, a choice that Gilroy called a "fitting result of [Dedra's] monkey business." Speaking to Decider, Gilroy reiterated that being in a prison like Narkina is "worse than death," and mused: "I think once we got our hands on the Narkina prison system, [Dedra's] fate was sealed."

In "Andor" season 1, episode 7, "The Announcement," Cassian was sentenced to the Narkina 5 prison for six years. Not for any of his criminal activities or taking part in a rebel heist — he just looked at a Stormtrooper the wrong way. At Narkina 5, the prisoners are used as slave labor for backbreaking 12 hour shifts. Divided into groups of seven, they compete against each others' productivity. To prevent escape, the floors of the prison are electrified, making it possible to fry prisoners with the press of a button.

Cassian and his fellow inmates eventually discover a grim reality: when their sentences are up, they're only moved to another prison. So they plot and execute an escape, overcoming the Empire's attempts to divide them by coming together to find "One Way Out." It's the most anti-carceral story I've ever seen in popular fiction, not to mention one of the highest of the many highs in "Andor."

"Having been through Narkina, and having written through it and lived through it and sort of inhabited it imaginatively — yeah, it's worse [than death]," Gilroy said to Vanity Fair, because it's a slow death that only comes after years and years of dehumanization. Now, even though the show reused the Narkina set, it's not clear if Dedra is in the exact same prison that Cassian was. She's in a women's prison, of course, but the uniforms and architecture suggest it at least operates like Narkina did.

Denise Gough said back during "Andor" season 1 that she didn't want redemption for Dedra. Recently speaking to Yahoo UK, Gough said that she found Dedra's ending "righteous" and "a gift to the audience" — a gift that built on the "profound" episodes showing Narkina 5 back in season 1.

"I think to have that, such a tiny image of Dedra at the end in the place where we saw what — like it's all set up in season 1 what she's going to have to go through now in there."

Dedra Meero will be carrying out her oath to serve the Empire until the very end, but all the reward she'll receive is being worked to death.

"Andor" is streaming on Disney+.