The Mandalorian Just Salvaged One Of The Original Star Wars Droids

gamespot.com:

Given that Tatooine is a remote backwater planet on the Outer Rim of the galaxy, it's not exactly a convenient place to visit. You can't really swing by on the way to some other place, you know? So when our hero Din Djarin once again pops into Peli Motto's (Amy Sedaris) garage at the beginning of Chapter 18 of The Mandalorian, it initially felt like a bit of a stretch.

Warning. This article contains very light spoilers for Season 3, Episode 2 of The Mandalorian, Chapter 18.

But it turned out that the writers and Powers That Be on The Mandalorian had another reason for bringing the titular Mando back to Tatooine for yet another quick, casual visit. While the quest to bring back IG-11 ended here, Motto sold Mando on a different droid she had lying around: an astromech unit named R5-D4 that would prove immediately useful in this episode--and who will very likely remain on the series as the astromech unit for Din Djarin's old Naboo starfighter.

But R5-D4 isn't just some anonymous droid we've never heard of before. No, this guy is a Star Wars OG who previously had only a single claim to fame: he was the droid that Uncle Owen initially tried to buy from the Jawas instead of R2-D2 at the beginning of A New Hope. But after Uncle Owen told the Jawas he wanted R5, R5 blew a gasket (or something) and Uncle Owen ended up with R2 instead--and the rest is history.

In the current Star Wars canon, R5 has already gotten a little bit of love in the form of a previous (very brief) appearance on The Mandalorian and as the hero of a short story in the anthology collection From a Certain Point of View. That story, The Red One by Rae Carson, retcons R5's story in A New Hope to make him a bit more heroic. In the story, R5 and R2 talk to each