TK-421

TK-421 was the identification number for a male human who served as an Imperial stormtrooper during the Galactic Civil War. Following a tour of duty on Lasan, a planet under siege by the Empire, he was assigned to the Death Star space station and worked within the Maintenance Unit of Sector AA-345. The MSE-6 series repair droid, known as MSE-6-G735Y or "G7," assisted him by transporting supplies and equipment to various sections of the station. TK-421 considered G7 the fastest mouse droid in the Imperial fleet and promised that if his transfer request was approved, they would both go to Coruscant, the galactic capital planet and the Empire's headquarters, to compete in the racing circuit. While he appreciated the design of the Death Star, he felt confined by the strict routines, lack of free time, and his armor, particularly his helmet.

On one occasion in 0 BBY, he voiced his complaints to the droid about the helmet's impact on his complexion, specifically mentioning a pimple on his chin that he likened to the size of a Kowakian monkey-lizard. When he asked G7 to examine his skin, he inadvertently triggered its holorecorder, resulting in the droid recording the stormtrooper without his helmet, a violation of regulations.

Shortly afterward, TK-421 dispatched MSE-6-G735Y to deliver a HypnoHypodermal Injector Needle C-7R to an IT-O interrogator droid located in Detention Block AA-23. This droid, prepared by an Imperial officer, Lieutenant Blagg, was intended for use by the Sith Lord Darth Vader in the torture of the imprisoned Princess Leia Organa. Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin, the commander of the Death Star, was on his way to inspect Blagg's preparations when G7 arrived with the delivery. Tarkin's imminent arrival caused Blagg to panic and order the droid to leave immediately. In its haste, G7 collided with Tarkin, whom the droid recognized as having Alpha One security clearance but could not identify by name. The collision caused injury to Tarkin and damaged G7's holorecorder matrix, inadvertently displaying the holorecording of TK-421. After admiring the stormtrooper's appearance, Tarkin instructed G7 to replay the entire message, which the droid was compelled to obey as an Alpha-One clearance superseded all of its known commands and subroutines. However, G7's damage prevented it from complying and required maintenance. Tarkin informed Blagg that he would personally address the trooper responsible for the droid and then ordered G7 to report to his officer's quarters in Sector GM1-A and enter sleep mode.

After repairing G7, Tarkin sent the MSE-6 unit back to TK-421 with a holomessage indicating his interest in the stormtrooper and an invitation to visit his quarters to repair his aqualeisure unit. TK-421 was flattered to have caught someone's eye, telling G7 that if he played his cards right, he could secure them a transfer to Coruscant or anything else they desired. Recognizing that he was dealing with an officer who had Imperial Academy experience, TK-421 feigned naivete and adopted a backwater accent while recording his response, stating that he would report to Tarkin's quarters after showering with the antibacterial nanofoam Tarkin had sent him. He sent G7 ahead to deliver his message.

Upon arriving at Tarkin's quarters, TK-421 expressed his gratitude for repairing G7. Tarkin invited him inside but requested that he 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 crafted from veermok hide, mentioning his extensive experience hunting veermoks on his homeworld, Eriadu. He then instructed TK-421 to attend to the aqualeisure unit while he prepared for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, and reminded G7 to execute Imperial Protocol Alpha One to erase all records of the encounter.

Several cycles later, the Death Star remained in the Alderaan system after Tarkin had ordered the destruction of Alderaan, Princess Organa's homeworld and a planet affiliated with the Rebel Alliance, as a demonstration of the Empire's power. During that cycle, TK-421 awakened G7 and reassured the droid about its memory gaps. He confided in the droid that they needed to maintain secrecy because everything on the battle station depended on Tarkin, whom he described as having an icy exterior with others that dissolved when they were alone. TK-421 said he made Tarkin laugh when they were together and that G7 was better off not witnessing certain events or retaining them in its memory. With his security level elevated from Lambda to Beta and his transfer to a comfortable position in station security on the 300 level, TK-421 hoped that he and G7 would continue their ascent to an assignment in Tarkin's personal detail, followed by a move to Coruscant, where G7 would participate in the droid racing circuit and TK-421 would reside in Tarkin's penthouse overlooking the Imperial Palace.

TK-421 was interrupted 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 upon its arrival 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 received orders to guard the starship while a scanning crew determined if anyone was on board. He positioned himself to the left of the entry ramp, with fellow stormtrooper TK-710 on its right. The stormtroopers observed the scanning crew's difficulty maneuvering the equipment as they entered the ship. Once inside, 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 heard a thud from within the ship, they only briefly glanced before turning away, assuming the crew had dropped the equipment. Luke Skywalker, one of Solo's passengers, then joined Solo in setting a trap for the stormtroopers. Solo pretended to be a crew member by calling for help. TK-421 approached the base of the ramp and peered up before signaling TK-710 to follow him. As soon as they reached the top of the ramp and reached for their weapons, they were outdrawn and quickly incapacitated by Solo's blaster fire.

Skywalker then assisted Solo in removing the troopers' armor for use as disguises, with Skywalker donning TK-421's armor. Lieutenant Treidum, stationed in the docking bay control room, noticed TK-421's absence. When Treidum attempted to contact the stormtrooper and inquire about his absence from his post, Skywalker emerged from the ship in TK-421's armor and feigned a helmet 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. Their initial plan was to deactivate the tractor beam, but they subsequently discovered and rescued Princess Leia Organa from her imprisonment.

Imperial forces discovered 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. Upon learning of TK-421's fate, the stormtrooper TD-110 privately remarked that, although they were not close, TK-421 had been strong and did not deserve to die. After the Battle of Yavin began, Tarkin awakened G7 from sleep mode and informed the droid that rebels had murdered TK-421, admitting that he had envisioned a future for them together. He vowed to avenge TK-421 by destroying 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 impending destruction of the Rebel Alliance's base on the moon Yavin 4, but the droid was caught in an explosion and unable to arrive. Seconds later, the entire Death Star was destroyed by Luke Skywalker, killing Tarkin and destroying MSE-6-G735Y.

TK-421 was a human male with a height of 1.847 meters. According to stormtrooper TK-450, it was evident that TK-421 had personally programmed MSE-6-G735Y because the droid stopped recording TK-450 while he was still speaking, a behavior that TK-450 likened to TK-421 ignoring what he did not want to hear. TK-450 also believed that the other trooper spent more time interacting with droids than with other beings. TK-421 was indeed fond of G7 and frequently confided in it about his feelings and his aspirations 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 often engaged in lengthy conversations with the droid, speaking of them as a team advancing together. TK-450 mistakenly believed that TK-421 would be unable to withstand the intimidating presence of figures such as 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 integrated into the walls rather than overhead. He preferred the Death Star to his previous assignment on Lasan, where the overhead lighting made everything appear depressingly sallow. One of his plans for life on Coruscant involved installing lighting in the same style as the Death Star's. His recognition of the craftsmanship of Tarkin's Coruscant fiberweave carpeting caused him to momentarily abandon his feigned accent.

Tarkin described TK-421 as beautiful. According to Luke Skywalker, TK-421's uniform smelled as if 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 his brief promotion to station security, TK-421 told G7 that the benefits included giving orders and carrying a blaster rifle. He described it as "very butch," a characteristic that he felt he lacked but should display when responding 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 recognized 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 made his first appearance in the 1977 original trilogy film, Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. Although uncredited in the film, some stormtrooper extras, such as Stephen Bayley, have since received recognition, with Bayley attending fan conventions as the performer of TK-421.

The concept of using a stormtrooper's armor as a disguise on the Death Star originated 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, titled The Star Wars: From The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, both Han Solo and Luke Skywalker wear the disguises. In A New Hope, TK-421 goes off-camera upon entering the Millennium Falcon, with his fate implied by sound effects. The sounds were initially scripted as a "quick round of gunfire" in the fourth draft, changed to a "large crashing sound" in the revised fourth draft, and ultimately became two blaster shots in the film.

During the production of A New Hope, then simply called Star Wars, the Death Star hangar set was constructed on sound stage 3 of Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, England. The scene featuring TK-421, 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 was designated "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 was 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 German dub of A New Hope has the trooper's designation as TK-241.

The "TK-421" designation served as inspiration for the naming conventions adopted by the 501st Legion fan costuming organization, which was founded in April 1997. Artist Chris Trevas created "The Folly of TK-421," which was featured and sold as a print at Celebration Anaheim, an official Star Wars convention held from April 16–19, 2015. The painting 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 commented on his painting, stating, "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 specifics surrounding the demise of TK-421 are inconsistent when examining various canon stories and related reference sources. Released on February 10, 2015, Randy Thornton's A New Hope Read-Along Storybook and CD incorrectly portrays Skywalker, Solo, and Chewbacca agreeing to rescue Organa before they decide to incapacitate the stormtrooper guards and take their uniforms, which is contrary to the sequence of events presented in the movie A New Hope. Tony DiTerlizzi's adaptation, The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, which was published on October 7, 2014, depicts stormtroopers remaining on board to guard the ship after a search, only to then be knocked out. This contrasts with the film, which shows them stationed outside the ship before being tricked into entering. In Delilah S. Dawson's storybook The Skywalker Saga, released October 1, 2019, the stormtroopers mistakenly believe the ship is empty when they board, a detail that differs from the film's portrayal of them watching a scanning crew enter. This article considers details that clash with the film's sequence of events to be inaccuracies.

In the movie, two blaster shots are heard immediately after TK-421 boards the Millennium Falcon, but a number of books aimed at younger readers omit any mention of the rebels utilizing blasters. In Jack Mitchell's heavily stylized The Odyssey of Star Wars: An Epic Poem, published September 28, 2021, the number of shots is changed to "three muffled shots" instead of two. Ryder Windham and Adam Bray's reference book, Star Wars: Stormtroopers: Beyond the Armor, which was published on October 24, 2017, claims that "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 as Solo prepares to shoot him, which contradicts the two junior novelizations: Alexandra Bracken's A New Hope: The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy, published September 22, 2015, and Ryder Windham's Star Wars: A New Hope, published May 4, 2017, both of which state that Solo fired both shots. The Odyssey of Star Wars also states that Chewbacca removed the stormtroopers' equipment, whereas Bracken's novelization includes an extended scene where Solo and Skywalker do so and discuss the armor's condition. This article assumes that the junior novelizations accurately depict the number of shots fired, 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 armor 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 a lack of definitive information regarding the precise moment of TK-421's death, this article refrains from specifying when it occurred.

The Star Wars LINE Webtoon by Hong Jac Ga presents several inconsistencies concerning TK-421 in Chapter 7, which was released in Korean on May 5, 2015. It shows TK-421 and a stormtrooper designated TX-4120 searching the ship instead of 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. Instead of Treidum himself seeing Skywalker disguised as TK-421, Pol Treidum's aide attempts to contact both stormtroopers via comms but fails. Given that the discrepancies in this adaptation cannot be reconciled with the film, this article excludes them.

The third episode of the non-canon LEGO Star Wars mini-series LEGO Star Wars: Droid Tales, which first aired on September 7, 2015, featured TK-421 in a flashback within a story told by C-3PO to a group of droids in Mos Eisley on Tatooine. Under Darth Vader's orders, TK-421 and TK-710 guard the Millennium Falcon's boarding ramp as C-3PO, R2-D2, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Obi-Wan Kenobi huddle at the top. When Luke insists they must rescue Princess Leia, Han objects, stating they will never get past the stormtroopers. Obi-Wan declares he will use a Jedi mind trick on them, tricking the pair with a "look over there" to make them turn their heads, then hitting their helmets with a wrench. The group then leaves the stormtroopers tied up inside the ship. The LEGO versions of TK-421 and TK-710 are depicted wearing pink shorts and having fair skin and black hair, one with large curls and the other with a short haircut, although the episode does not specify which hair style belongs to which trooper.

In the non-canon video game LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, released in 2022, TK-421 and TK-710 appear in a cutscene adapting the events of the film. As Darth Vader speaks to Imperial officer Edmos Khurgee, pondering a sensed presence, a shocked Khurgee remains still while Vader is too preoccupied to notice blaster fire and sounds of a struggle from within the Millennium Falcon, as well as one of the troopers falling onto the boarding ramp and being dragged back inside by Chewbacca. Oblivious, Vader and the confused Khurgee depart as the disguised rebels sneak out of the ship. During the subsequent mission, Skywalker remarks that both sets of armor contain thermal detonators, unlike TK-421's armor in the film.