10 Minor Star Wars Characters Whose Stories Must Be Told

Both Rogue One and A New Hope showcase the first Death Star's awesome destructive capability. While it is a senior Imperial officer who gives the order both times, it is a single crewman who presses the button to fire the battle station's world-shafting uberweapon. Behind the glossy black helmet is a human being whose job it becomes to condemn lives without number to a sudden, shocking, laser-based oblivion.

What horrors haunt this man's dreams? The screams of all those he annihilated with a button press? Faces from the lives cut short? Perhaps he fosters hatred for the higher-ups who ordered him to do it, too cowardly to throw the switch themselves. Or maybe, most appallingly of all, he feels nothing.

This genocidal flunky's tale illustrates a terrible truth about the Galactic Empire. It needs men and women to perform its atrocities on its behalf. Its military machine is based on the process by which it turns its soldiers into willing lever-pullers and button-pushers, breaking down their sense of right and wrong and rebuilding them into what the Empire requires. It's a story as old as real-world history, told through the lens of Star Wars as a cautionary and powerful tale.