TK-421

TK-421 was the operating number of a human male who was an Imperial stormtrooper during the Galactic Civil War. After a posting on Lasan, a planet that was besieged by the Empire, he was stationed on the Death Star battle station and worked in the Maintenance Unit of Sector AA-345. The MSE-6 series repair droid MSE-6-G735Y, which he called "G7," assisted him by delivering supplies and equipment to different sectors of the station. TK-421 considered G7 the fastest mouse droid in the Imperial fleet and promised G7 that if his transfer was approved, they would go together and enter the racing circuit on Coruscant, the galactic capital planet and seat of the Empire. Although he appreciated the aesthetic aspects of the Death Star, he felt trapped there by the rigorous routines, the lack of downtime, and his armor, especially his helmet.

On one occasion in 0 BBY, he complained to the droid about the helmet's effects on his complexion, such as giving him a pimple on his chin that he compared in size to a Kowakian monkey-lizard. When he told G7 to look at his skin, he inadvertently issued an order to activate its holorecorder. The droid thus recorded the stormtrooper with his helmet off and face on display, which was against regulations.

Not long afterward, TK-421 sent MSE-6-G735Y to deliver a HypnoHypodermal Injector Needle C-7R to an IT-O interrogator droid in Detention Block AA-23; after being prepared by an Imperial officer, Lieutenant Blagg, the interrogator droid would be used by the Sith Lord Darth Vader in his torture of the imprisoned Princess Leia Organa. The commander of the Death Star, Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin, was en route to review Blagg's preparations when G7 made the delivery, and Tarkin's impending arrival caused Blagg to panic and order the droid to depart. In G7's haste to leave, it collided with Tarkin, whom the droid recognized as having security level Alpha One but could not identify by name. The collision injured Tarkin and damaged G7's holorecorder matrix, causing it to inadvertently display the holorecording of TK-421. After admiring the stormtrooper's appearance, Tarkin told G7 to play back the entire message, which the droid was obliged to obey as an Alpha-One-level clearance superseded all of its known commands and subroutines. However, G7's damage rendered it unable to comply and in need of maintenance. Tarkin told Blagg that he would personally deal with the trooper responsible for the droid and then ordered G7 to report to his officer's quarters in Sector GM1-A and enter into sleep mode.

After Tarkin repaired G7, he sent the MSE-6 unit back to TK-421 with a holomessage that indicated his interest in the stormtrooper as well as an invitation to visit his quarters to repair his aqualeisure unit. TK-421 felt flattered that he had caught someone's eye, telling G7 that, if he played the situation right, he could get them a transfer to Coruscant or anything else they wanted. Recognizing he was dealing with an officer who had Imperial Academy experience, TK-421 affected naivete and a backwater accent as he recorded his response, saying he would report to Tarkin's quarters after he showered with the antibacterial nanofoam Tarkin had sent him. He sent G7 ahead to deliver his message.

Upon arriving at Tarkin's quarters, TK-421 thanked him for repairing G7. Tarkin invited him inside but required him to first remove his armor to avoid tracking grease or other residue on the new carpet, which TK-421 recognized as Coruscant fiberweave and complimented. Tarkin pointed out a chair made with veermok hide; he had extensive experience hunting veermoks on his homeworld, Eriadu. He then told TK-421 to go about his business in the aqualeisure unit while he prepared for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, and reminded G7 to execute Imperial Protocol Alpha One to delete all records regarding the encounter.

Several cycles later, the Death Star remained in the Alderaan system after Tarkin had ordered the destruction of the Rebel Alliance–affiliated planet Alderaan, Princess Organa's homeworld, as a display of the Empire's power. During that cycle, TK-421 awakened G7 and told the droid not to worry about its memory gaps. He confided in the droid that they needed to maintain secrecy because everything occurring on the battle station relied upon Tarkin, whom he described as having an icy exterior with other people that was dropped when they were alone together. TK-421 said he made Tarkin laugh when they were together and that G7 was better off not witnessing certain events or keeping them in its memory. With his security level raised from Lambda to Beta and his transfer to a comfortable position in station security on the 300 level, TK-421 had hopes that he and G7 would continue their advancement to an assignment in Tarkin's personal detail; after that, they would move to Coruscant, where G7 would enter the droid racing circuit and TK-421 would live in Tarkin's penthouse overlooking the Imperial Palace.

TK-421 was stopped from speaking further when he received a transmission via his helmet's built-in comlink ordering him to guard a captured light freighter, the YT-1300 light freighter known as the Millennium Falcon, which had been captured with a tractor beam when it arrived in the star system. He sent G7 to Tarkin's quarters while he reported for his first assignment on guard duty in Docking Bay 327.

TK-421 was ordered to guard the starship while a scanning crew determined if anyone was aboard. He stood to the left of the entry ramp while fellow stormtrooper TK-710 was on its right. The stormtroopers noticed the scanning crew's difficulty with maneuvering the equipment as they entered the ship. Once aboard, the crew members were ambushed by the ship's Wookiee co-pilot, Chewbacca, and its captain, Han Solo, who stunned them with his blaster. Although the stormtroopers both heard a thump from inside the ship, they only briefly turned their heads before again facing away; the sound was not surprising and they assumed the crew had dropped the equipment. One of Solo's passengers, Luke Skywalker, then joined Solo in setting a trap for the stormtroopers. Solo pretended to be one of the crew members by calling out for aid. TK-421 moved to the foot of the ramp and peered up it before nodding for TK-710 to follow behind him. As soon as they reached the top of the ramp and reached for their weapons, they were outdrawn and had no idea what hit them when Solo downed them with two blaster shots.

Skywalker then joined Solo in removing the troopers' sets of armor to use as disguises; Skywalker wore TK-421's armor. Lieutenant Treidum, who was stationed in the docking bay control room, noticed that TK-421 was missing. When Treidum attempted to contact the stormtrooper and asked why he was not at his post, Skywalker emerged from the ship in TK-421's armor and pretended the helmet had a malfunction that interfered with the transmission. Along with Chewbacca, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the droids C-3PO and R2-D2, Solo and Skywalker infiltrated the station. They initially only planned to deactivate the tractor beam trapping them but subsequently discovered and rescued Princess Leia Organa from her imprisonment.

Imperials found TK-421's dead body in a crawl space and removed it from the Millennium Falcon, along with the bodies of TK-710 and the scanning crew, while R2-D2 and C-3PO observed from a hiding place. After learning of TK-421's fate, the stormtrooper TD-110 privately observed that, while they had not known each other well, TK-421 had been strong and had not deserved death. After the Battle of Yavin commenced, G7 was awakened from sleep mode by Tarkin, who informed the droid that rebels had murdered TK-421 and admitted that he had envisioned plans for them together. He vowed that he would soon avenge TK-421 by annihilating the last of the Rebellion with the battle station's destructive power. He invited G7 to join him on the command bridge to witness the imminent destruction of the Rebel Alliance's base on the moon Yavin 4, but the droid did not arrive due to being caught in an explosion. Seconds afterward, the entire Death Star was blown up by Luke Skywalker, killing Tarkin and destroying MSE-6-G735Y.

TK-421 was a human male who was 1.847 meters in height. According to stormtrooper TK-450, it was obvious that TK-421 had personally programmed MSE-6-G735Y because the droid stopped recording TK-450 while he was still talking, a behavior that TK-450 compared to TK-421 ignoring what he did not want to hear. TK-450 also thought the other trooper spent more time talking to droids than other beings. TK-421 was indeed fond of G7 and frequently confided in it about his feelings and his wishes for a future where he would paint racing stripes on the droid and enter it into a racing circuit. Although he was not eloquent, he talked at length to the droid. In his discussions with G7, he spoke of them as a pair advancing together. TK-450 mistakenly believed that TK-421 would be unable to stand up to the intimidating attention of someone like Grand General Cassio Tagge, Darth Vader, or Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin.

TK-421 appreciated the aesthetics and engineering of the Death Star, particularly its distinctive lighting that was installed in the walls rather than overhead. He preferred the Death Star to his previous station on Lasan, where the overhead lighting made everything look depressingly sallow. One of his plans for life on Coruscant involved installing lighting of the same style as the Death Star's. His recognition of the craftmanship of Tarkin's Coruscant fiberweave carpeting caused him to temporarily drop his feigned accent.

Tarkin described TK-421 as beautiful. According to Luke Skywalker, TK-421's uniform smelled like the Death Star had served a spicy lunch that day. TK-421's aesthetic concerns included his personal appearance and the image he projected of himself. After receiving his short-lived promotion to station security, TK-421 told G7 that the benefits included ordering people around and carrying a blaster rifle. He described it as "very butch," a characteristic that he thought he did not possess but should display when he responded to Tarkin's initial holomessage. Although TK-421 pretended to be less experienced and knowledgeable in their encounters, Tarkin considered it a game between them and noticed TK-421's cleverness. They were each envisioning a future together before their deaths.

Based on a single holomessage, TK-421 successfully calculated behaviors that would appeal to Tarkin in order to secure advancements in his station that the Grand Moff had the power to grant. That included adopting a persona characterized by TK-421 as a "backwater, rough-around-the-edges military grunt" along with an associated style of speech; his natural voice lacked that accent and had a higher pitch.

TK-421 wore white plastoid stormtrooper armor over a black body glove and carried an E-11 medium blaster rifle while on duty in Docking Bay 327, a weapon that was not ordinarily assigned to him. He hated how the requirement to always wear his helmet had negatively affected his complexion. Although he did not carry a thermal detonator on his utility belt, he was equipped with a tool kit, blaster power cell containers, and a grappling hook attached to a fibercord reel, the latter of which proved useful to Skywalker when he and Organa needed to swing across a chasm.

TK-421 first appeared in the 1977 original trilogy film, Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. Although not credited in the film itself, some stormtrooper extras such as Stephen Bayley have since been acknowledged, with Bayley attending fan conventions as TK-421's performer.

The idea of using a stormtrooper's armor as a disguise in the Death Star began with the draft character Annikin Starkiller in The Star Wars: Rough Draft, which George Lucas completed in May 1974. In the third draft from August 1975, The Star Wars: From The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker both wear the disguises. In A New Hope, TK-421 goes off-camera when he enters the Millennium Falcon, with his fate implied by sound effects. The sounds were originally scripted as a "quick round of gunfire" in the fourth draft, changed to a "large crashing sound" in the revised fourth draft, and became two blaster shots in the film.

During the production of A New Hope, then called simply Star Wars, the Death Star hangar set was built on sound stage 3 of Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, England. The scene that TK-421 appeared in, scene number 81, was filmed sometime between May 19 and June 1, 1976. According to Bayley, he was selected on the day of filming when extras were needed to portray the two stormtroopers guarding the Millennium Falcon.

The stormtrooper whose armor Luke wore had the designation "TX-four-one-two" in the fourth draft dated January 15, 1976, and "TX-421" in the revised fourth draft shooting script dated March 15. The stormtrooper's designation changed again to "THX 1138" in the November 12 novelization by Alan Dean Foster as a reference to George Lucas and Walter Murch's 1971 film, THX 1138. In the French dub of A New Hope and the September 9, 2015 junior novelization A New Hope - The Film Novel by Lucile Galliot, his designation is instead T.K.F. 821.

The "TK-421" designation inspired the naming conventions used by the 501st Legion fan costuming organization that was founded in April 1997. Artist Chris Trevas painted "The Folly of TK-421," which was featured and sold as a print at Celebration Anaheim, an official Star Wars convention held on April 16–19, 2015. It depicts Solo pressing his blaster to TK-421's unarmored armpit aboard the Millennium Falcon while Chewbacca disarms and grapples with TK-710 and Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi observe the scene. Trevas said of his painting, "It's a scene we only hear but never see in A New Hope. Luckily for Luke, TK-421 was well prepared with a belt comlink and grappling hook."

The precise details regarding TK-421's fall vary across canon narratives and reference materials. Episode IV: A New Hope Read-Along Storybook and CD by Randy Thornton, which was released on February 10, 2015, erroneously describes Skywalker, Solo, and Chewbacca as agreeing to rescue Organa before deciding to knock out the stormtrooper guards and steal their uniforms, contradicting the order of events in the film A New Hope. Published on October 7, 2014, the adaptation The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight by Tony DiTerlizzi depicts stormtroopers remaining aboard to guard the ship after it has been searched and then getting knocked out, whereas the film shows them posted outside the ship before they are tricked into entering. In the October 1, 2019 storybook The Skywalker Saga by Delilah S. Dawson, the stormtroopers believe the ship is empty when they board it unlike in the film where they watch a scanning crew enter it. This article has treated details that contradict the film's sequence of events as errors.

Two blaster shots immediately follow TK-421's boarding of the Millennium Falcon in the film, but multiple young-reader books omit any mention of the rebels using blasters. The number becomes "three muffled shots" rather than two in the heavily stylized The Odyssey of Star Wars: An Epic Poem, published September 28, 2021 and written by Jack Mitchell. Star Wars: Stormtroopers: Beyond the Armor, a reference book co-written by Ryder Windham and Adam Bray and published on October 24, 2017, states that the image "The Folly of TK-421" depicts "the offscreen moment that Han Solo and Chewbacca kill the inept storm-troopers" and that it "restores a little of the 'scoundrel' persona in Han Solo." However, the image shows TK-421 firing his blaster while Solo prepares to shoot him, contradicting the two blaster shots fired only by Solo in two junior novelizations: A New Hope: The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy, written by Alexandra Bracken and published on September 22, 2015, and Star Wars: A New Hope, written by Ryder Windham and published on May 4, 2017. The Odyssey of Star Wars also says that Chewbacca removed the stormtroopers' equipment, while Bracken's novelization has an extended scene of Solo and Skywalker doing so and discussing the condition of the armor. This article assumes that the junior novelizations are correct regarding the number of shots, who fired them, and who removed the stormtroopers' armor.

While some books specify that TK-421 and TK-710 were rendered unconscious rather than killed upon boarding the Falcon, Windham's Star Wars: A New Hope describes a later group of stormtroopers exiting the Falcon while "carrying the bodies of the scanning crew and the two troopers who'd unwittingly donated their armour to Luke and Han." The short stories "Of MSE-6 and Men" by Glen Weldon and "Bump" by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker, which were published on October 3 in the 2017 anthology From a Certain Point of View, also place TK-421's death prior to the Death Star's destruction, and "Of MSE-6 and Men" says that his body was stuffed in a crawl space by the rebels. Due to insufficient information regarding the moment of TK-421's death, this article has not stated when it occurred.

The Star Wars LINE Webtoon by Hong Jac Ga has several contradictions regarding TK-421 when he appears in Chapter 7, which was released in Korean on May 5, 2015. It depicts TK-421 and a stormtrooper designated TX-4120 searching the ship rather than guarding it, Solo grabbing one of their legs from his hiding place in a smuggling compartment instead of shooting them, and Kenobi activating his lightsaber. Pol Treidum's aide then attempts to contact both stormtroopers via comms and fails, rather than Treidum himself seeing Skywalker disguised as TK-421. As the discrepancies in this adaptation cannot be resolved with the film, this article does not incorporate them.

First aired on September 7, 2015, the third episode of the non-canon LEGO Star Wars mini-series LEGO Star Wars: Droid Tales included TK-421 through a flashback in a story told by C-3PO to a group of droids in Mos Eisley on the world Tatooine. As ordered by Darth Vader, TK-421 and TK-710 guard the boarding ramp of the Millennium Falcon while C-3PO, R2-D2, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Obi-Wan Kenobi crowd together at the top of it. When Luke insists they must save Princess Leia, Han protests that they will never get past the stormtroopers. Obi-Wan says he will use a Jedi mind trick on them—he tricks the pair with a "look over there" so they will turn their heads, then hits their helmets with a wrench. The group leaves the stormtroopers tied up inside the ship. The LEGO versions of TK-421 and TK-710 both wear pink shorts and have light skin and black hair, one with large curls and the other with a short haircut, but the episode does not identify who has which hair.

In the 2022 non-canon video game LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, TK-421 and TK-710 appear in a cutscene that adapts the film's events. While Darth Vader speaks to Imperial officer Edmos Khurgee and ponders how he has sensed a presence, a shocked Khurgee stays put while Vader is too distracted to notice blaster fire and other sounds of struggle within the Millennium Falcon, along with one of the troopers falling onto the boarding ramp and being dragged back inside by Chewbacca. The oblivious Vader and the confused Khurgee leave as the disguised rebels sneak out of the ship. Skywalker comments during the subsequent mission that both sets of armor have thermal detonators, unlike TK-421's armor in the film.

• LEGO Star Wars: Droid Tales — "Mission to Mos Eisley"
• LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

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