Lando Calrissian is a human gambler, smuggler and later Baron Administrator of Cloud City, introduced in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and played by Billy Dee Williams. He commands the Millennium Falcon at the Battle of Endor and is one of the two people who blow up the second Death Star.
The betrayal is the point
The films give him the trilogy's only real political dilemma. Lando runs a small, deniable, unaligned operation, and when the Empire arrives he discovers what "unaligned" is worth. He sells out Han Solo to keep twelve thousand people employed, realises within the hour that the deal is worthless, and spends the rest of the saga trying to be the sort of person who would not have taken it.
In print
He has a long publishing history in both continuities. In Legends, L. Neil Smith's Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (Del Rey, 1983) is an early attempt to build a solo adventure line around him. In canon, Daniel José Older's Last Shot (Del Rey, 2018) runs him and Han across two timelines, and he returns in the Aftermath trilogy as a man with a city to get back.
Why he lasts
Because he is the only major character in the original trilogy whose job is negotiation. Everyone else in the cast solves problems by flying at them.
