It’s time for the Dark Lord of the Sith’s kill-crazy robots to get their own comics or TV show. Something, anything. They’re just too damn great.
The Darth Vader comics series sports one of the best new additions to Star Wars lore, Triple Zero and BT-1, the malevolent automaton doppelgangers to C-3PO and R2D2. Revived by Vader’s aide-de-camp Dr. Aphra, the ancient droids are all about ending the lives of humans as enthusiastically as possible. They’ve been stealing the show in the latest arc of the Vader series, which has seen the title character embroiled in a war on a mining planet.
Spoilers follow.
In last month’s issue #18, it looked like the combined forces led by Vader and the new queen might be outnumbered. Triple Zero then comes up with a plan that only he could dream up: draining the blood of human enemies into a droid army so the Force might flow through them.
Vader slaps down that blasphemous suggestion despite Triple Zero’s impassioned reasoning. However, when last week’s chapter came out, it appeared as if the bots were disobeying orders when Triple Zero rallied his mechanical brethren:
Just when it seems a comeuppance is at hand after Vader catches wind of Triple Zero’s actions, the droid reveals it was all a mind game meant to spook the enemy troops.
It’s a clever bit of scripting that tantalizes with the possibility that it might create a drastic shift in human/robot relations. Seems like the only thing keeping Star Wars’ robots from going all Skynet—in this iteration of the lore, anyway—is a little bit of blood.