As a protocol droid, C-3PO is mostly useful to his buddies as a translator, and now, over 30 years after Return of the Jedi, C-3PO has gotten even better at his job. Though the fastidious gold-plated robot used to boast he was “fluent in over six million forms of communication,” that number is now seven million.
On Tuesday, the offical Star Wars Twitter account posted about C-3PO’s apparent software upgrade: “By the time of The Force Awakens C-3PO has upgraded his program to include over 7 million forms of communication.” To be clear, C-3PO probably did this in like one day by purchasing some kind of special expansion pack from someone in the Resistance. Or did he get the software upgrade illegally? Where there really a million additional alien species that C-3PO couldn’t communicate with?
In fairness, C-3PO’s translating skills have never been limited to just languages. “Forms of communication” means all sorts of things. In The Empire Strikes Back, C-3PO is pretty familiar with the various codes used by the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. So, if he had over a million new forms of communication added to his repertoire, it’s a safe bet that most of those new skills are various codes.
General Leia Organa probably doesn’t keep C-3PO around in the Resistance war room to translate alien languages or gossip with R2-D2, she keeps him around to break First Order codes. Now, whether we’ll actually see C-3PO doing any advanced code breaking in Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi will have to wait until December 15.
