ND- 5 from Star Wars Outlaws

Okay look, I’m no Star Wars lore expert—for that, we’d need Zack, but he’s not here today, so you’re stuck with me instead. As a casual fan of Star Wars and someone who really enjoyed Outlaws, I found ND-5 to be one of the most distinctive and memorable droids I’ve had the pleasure of encountering. Droids in Star Wars, in my opinion, often kind of fall into this uncomfortable space. On one hand, the franchise sees them as unfairly discriminated against, but on the other, it’s long been wary of reckoning with whether or not droids actually are sentient—should we care if a droid is forced to do slave labor or has its memory wiped, or are they actually just robots that may put on a show of having real thoughts and feelings but remain just disposable machines?

Increasingly in recent years, however, it’s seemed to me that Star Wars no longer wants to treat the sentience of droids with any ambiguity, and ND-5 is one of the best examples yet of a droid whose inner life is clearly as rich and complex as that of any other living being. You can see the ways in which he’s torn between old loyalties and his desire to be a faithful friend to Kay Vess. In other words, he’s a terrific supporting character for a story set in the criminal underworld of Star Wars, one who illuminates all the shades of doubt and conflict that come with existing in that world, and the uneasy way that he and Kay work their way toward a kind of understanding and partnership helps make those elements feel personal. Here’s hoping we haven’t seen the last of these two. I really want to see where their adventures take them next. —Carolyn Petit