Jango Fett

Still smarting from his humiliation at Naboo, the Separatist leader Nute Gunray hired Jango Fett to kill Padmé Amidala. Jango contracted the job out to the shapeshifting assassin Zam Wesell. But Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi foiled Wesell’s attempt on Padmé’s life, and caught up with her in a busy Coruscant cantina. Jango silenced his partner by firing a toxic saberdart into her neck, then activated his jetpack and rocketed away.

Jango returned to the remote waterworld of Kamino, where he’d provided his genetic material for an army of clones – and where he was raising his “son” Boba, who was actually a clone of Jango with no genetic or behavioral modifications. Obi-Wan tracked Jango to Kamino, discovered the clone army and was brought to meet the hunter. Jango deflected the Jedi’s questions, but he knew it was time to go, and ordered Boba to pack his things.

Jango and Boba prepared to depart in their battered starship Slave I, but the Jedi tried to capture them. The bounty hunter attacked Obi-Wan with everything in his formidable arsenal of weapons, and thought he’d disposed of the Jedi by dumping him into Kamino’s storm-tossed seas. But Kenobi survived – and hurled a tracker onto the side of the Fetts’ starship.

Jango and Boba headed for Geonosis, where Count Dooku was meeting with Gunray and the other Separatist leaders. But Obi-Wan followed them through hyperspace in his Jedi starfighter. While young Boba shouted encouragement, Jango pursued Obi-Wan through Geonosis’s rings, battering his Jedi starfighter with laser blasts and seismic charges. Jango then descended to the planet’s barren surface, convinced this time the pesky Jedi had been destroyed.

Obi-Wan wasn’t dead, though Separatist destroyer droids quickly captured him. But Jango had a new fight on his hands – Anakin and Padmé had responded to Obi-Wan’s distress signal. The two escaped death in a Geonosian droid foundry, but Skywalker lost his lightsaber – and was forced to surrender to Jango.

When the Jedi raided Geonosis to save their comrades, Jango defended Dooku, gunning down Coleman Trebor before the hulking Jedi could attack the Separatist leader. Jango then rocketed into the arena to battle the invaders. But the bounty hunter found himself in over his head – he was nearly trampled by a rampaging reek, then confronted by Mace Windu. As Boba watched in horror, Windu calmly deflected Jango’s blaster shots and severed the hunter’s helmeted head with one slash of his lightsaber. Jango’s storied career was over.

Jango was dead, but his legacy lived on. Boba Fett became a precocious young bounty hunter, rising through the underworld ranks and seeking to avenge his father’s death by stalking Windu in Slave I. His attempts to kill the Jedi proved unsuccessful, but his reputation would eventually surpass that of the man who had taught him the family trade.

Meanwhile, Jango’s clones became the Grand Army of the Republic, waging war against the Separatists’ droid armies on countless worlds. The Republic came to rely on its army of identical soldiers, unaware that they had been conditioned for absolute loyalty to the Supreme Chancellor – or that the Clone Wars were a carefully engineered Sith plot. On orders from Chancellor Palpatine, the clones turned their guns on their Jedi generals, extinguishing the Order. Jango had his revenge.