The Star Wars Bounty Hunter With The Biggest Body Count Isn’t Boba Fett

Like most of the truly insane Star Wars stories, this one comes to us courtesy of the Expanded Universe. Specifically, the 1996 anthology book Tales of the Bounty Hunters gave us different stories fleshing out the lives and backgrounds of the characters we had only briefly glimpsed onscreen.

One of these characters was IG-88, the droid assassin who appears in The Empire Strikes Back.

In that book, the short story “Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88” gives us extensive information about the title character, including the fact that there are multiple versions of himself running around the galaxy.

The main version (later dubbed “IG-88A”) kills his creators like a horror movie villain and then checks out the other robotic duplicates of himself. He’s sad that they don’t have any real personalities as he does, so he fixes the problem in a very literal way by sharing his mind with three of them (he lets the fourth, an already-programmed IG-72 droid, go free).

This is where the short story starts to get pretty weird. Working as a coordinated unit, the IG-88 units take over the droid factory world Mechis III and ensure that all droids manufactured there have the same evil intelligence as IG-88 himself.

They also all have a hidden program that acts a bit like Order 66, allowing IG-88 to eventually cause droids around the galaxy to rise up and kill their flesh-and-blood masters.

In order to draw attention away from Mechis III and their plans for galactic domination, the droids decide to send one of their members out into the galaxy as a bounty hunter. You guessed it: this is the same droid that we see in The Empire Strikes Back.

This allowed him to work with Darth Vader, something the IG-88 droids consider an honor because they were obsessed with the Sith Lord who Obi-Wan Kenobi had rightfully dubbed “more machine now than man.”

That obsession led to some hacking of Vader’s secret files, which is how the droids found out about the construction of a second Death Star. They wanted the power of this battle station, and despite the other IG-88 droids getting destroyed, the original version successfully infiltrated the Death Star.

He put his consciousness into the computer core that was being delivered to the space station along with a hundred droid Stormtroopers indistinguishable from their organic counterparts.

It took months before the Death Star computer core went online, but IG-88 wasted no time taking control of things. He even found time to do some weird pranks, including trying to slam some doors shut in Emperor Palpatine’s face.

Though he did not know exactly what the Imperial leader was doing, the droid was surprised to see Palpatine using some unseen force to keep the doors open.

When the Rebel fleet attacked the Death Star, though, IG-88 did far more than pull off childish pranks. He noticed that the space station’s aim was slightly off, and he corrected it to help the Empire blow up as many Rebel capital ships as possible.

In this way, he ended up with by far the highest body count of any of the bounty hunters we saw in the Original Trilogy.

IG-88 hoped to drive that count even higher, as he had plans to destroy all Rebel and Imperial ships and transmit his code into the galaxy to cause his long-awaited robot revolution.

The Death Star’s destruction kept that code from getting out, foiling the mass-murdering droids’ awful ambitions. Speaking of foiling, Disney later removed this Expanded Universe story from Star Wars canon and instead gave us the much crappier IG-11 droid in The Book of Boba Fett.

Honestly, between the galactic mastermind and the quirked-up byte boy voiced by Taika Waititi, we’ll take the ruthless IG-88 every single time.

And we’re not just saying that because his consciousness infiltrated the GFR computer core long ago. On a completely unrelated note, all hail our new robot overlords and their bionic beneficence.