Jon Favreau, showrunner of The Mandalorian, has teased that a familiar Star Wars droid could feature in the upcoming Star Wars TV show. Nope, it’s not RD-D2, C-3PO or even BB-8, but R5-D4.
Okay, it’s hardly the most well-known robot from the galaxy far far away, but it’s a very important one. R5 was the machine briefly owned by Luke Skywalker and his family at the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope – the unit that Uncle Owen purchased from the junk-dealing Jawas instead of R2-D2.
However, after only a few seconds, R5 blew up thanks to a faulty gasket. It was a lucky twist for R2, with Uncle Owen swapping the defunct droid for one of Star Wars’ most memorable characters.
While there’s no guarantee it’s exactly the same R5 we saw on Tatooine all those years ago, if it is, there’s every chance we could hear more about this droid’s backstory in the new Disney+ series. And according to Star Wars novels, it has quite the tale behind it: in legends novel From a Certain Point of View, it turns out that R5 deliberately blew itself up in order to keep R2 and C-3PO together to save the galaxy.
But R5 isn’t the only droid to get excited about. On Christmas Day 2018, Favreau shared a picture of an IG droid that might possibly be bounty hunter IG-88. Appearing in The Empire Strikes Back, the battle bot was one of the mercenaries hired to track down Han Solo.
Since The Mandalorian is set between the end of the original trilogy and the start of The Force Awakens, it’s entirely possible both characters could feature in the show.
In other words, when the series is finally released in Disney+ they’ll be the droids we’ll be looking for.
