The movies of Star Wars are full of secrets that are revealed only upon closer inspection. How a strong bounty hunter fared can easily be missed.
Which bounty hunter are we talking about? IG-88B is the prototype of an assassin droid series built by Holowan Mechanics. These droids are technologically advanced and have, for this reason, even developed a consciousness.
Of all the prototypes, IG-88B was given a special honor. He was summoned by Darth Vader himself to hunt a certain smuggler and his spaceship. We’re of course talking about Han Solo.
However, the story did not end well for IG-88B. How the bounty hunter met his end is not explained in the film. Only those who look closely will learn of it.
Don’t mess with Boba!
What happened to IG-88B? In a scene in “The Empire Strikes Back,” that is the fifth episode, the droid can be seen. Darth Vader gathers a handful of bounty hunters and gives them the task of finding Han Solo and the fast Millennium Falcon for the Empire.
In the aforementioned scene, Boba Fett appears, who had his first appearance shortly before in the terrible Holiday Special and who will play an even greater role. IG-88B fares differently. He only appears once more in the film, and that too only in the background. If you stop the film at minute 1:26:38, the remains of IG-88B can be seen.
Chewbacca enters a room full of junk and debris on Bespin to find the destroyed C-3PO. In the background, the discarded bounty hunter IG-88B can be seen lying. You can see the scene on YouTube (from minute 0:27).
How did it come to this? The ignoble end of the character is thanks to Boba Fett. After Vader had given the bounty hunters the task of searching for Han Solo, IG-88B placed tracking devices on all the ships of his competitors.
This allowed him to track Boba Fett to Bespin, where Han Solo had reportedly arrived. There, an ambush occurred. Boba Fett managed to incapacitate the droid with an ion blaster and then destroy him with grenades.
His remains ended up in the trash. However, he managed to transmit a backup of himself beforehand.
Later, the droid was reassembled and made a comeback. Among other things, he was tasked with killing his former employer Darth Vader. However, IG-88B did not fare well there either. All of this is not addressed in the film, of course. Now you know how things ended for droids in Bespin. For Marco Risch from the channel Nerdkultur, it’s time to slowly send the most famous bounty hunter from Star Wars into retirement: Why Boba Fett must disappear from Star Wars
