Star Wars: The Black Series Death Trooper

Here we are again, all of this familiar territory. It is December. The semester is ending. A new Star Wars movie is coming in three short weeks – Rogue One, the first of the standalone, anthology movies – which means that while my students are frantically trying to appeal to me with harrowing tales of why they were slacking for the first fifteen weeks of a sixteen week semester and thus, deserve some mercy, my mind is drifting ahead to a new adventure in a galaxy far, far away. Toys for Rogue One began showing up over a month ago, and I made a preliminary foray into writing about them, but decided to hold off with the rest until December came and the movie was closer at hand. That way, I’d get to spend some time right before the movie releases focusing my hype attention on the new movie. 

Rogue One is set before A New Hope, and so for the first time in forever we have a generally known quantity going in. We know that this will be a story of the Empire vs. the Rebellion, and that means one very important thing: new Stormtroopers.

The Death Trooper has largely been the face of the marketing for Rogue One, much in the way that Captain Phasma was for The Force Awakens: the striking, visually exciting figure that graces the upper corner of packaging and shows up in every trailer and poster and promotional still we’ve had so far. Unlike Phasma however, the Death Trooper is ‘just’ a military unit, and not a standalone character. It is a Stormtrooper in black armor, with a different helmet design. 

But closer looks at the Death Trooper revel that it is not simply a black Stormtrooper; leave that for the Shadow Squad Stormtrooper from a few years back. Perhaps from a distance, or at a fast glance, this is just a black Trooper, but no, this is totally new Trooper, with the entire body being new and different from the Original Trilogy and First Order Troopers. 

The Death Trooper buck is slender, thinner than the FirstOrder Trooper, and slighter than that of the Original Trooper as well, at a quick look. Upon closer inspection, the Death Trooper body is not that much thinner than the standard Imperial Stormtrooper, but appears to be mainly due to the difference in the chest plate. The First Order Trooper has a very rounded, barrel chest design. The Original Stormtrooper has a more pronounced chest plate, which the Death Trooper does not share: now, after spending some time with a couple Rogue One Troopers, I can say that the new Trooper body wears something more like a vest than the big chest armor of the Original. This may be a matter of functionality, as we know that standard Stormtroopers will appear in the movie, and that the Death Troopers and the Shore Troopers, the other totally new Trooper unit for the film, are more specialized soldiers, and thus the larger, bulkier Stormtrooper armor may not be mission appropriate.

And because it is the time of the semester that it is, and I am mentally in the state that I am as a result, I feel that that statement was the most quality analysis I’ve made in several months. 

Anyway, the Death Trooper is a more streamlined unit, in line with the description of them being some special forces-type unit. The most obvious different between it and the standard version aside from the color scheme is the helmet. The Death Trooper has a totally new helmet design with a slanting faceplate, different from the more round and blunted standard Trooper design. It changes the overall silhouette of the head to a more jutting, protruding and invasive one. We know from the packaging that the Death Troopers are attached to the film’s apparent main antagonist, Imperial weapons designer Oren Krennic, as his personal troops. While we may not know that much about Krennic just yet, he gives that kind of mad scientist vibe, and in that vein, a scary, intrusive looking soldier compliments very well. The eyes of the helmet are painted with a light metallic almost-greenish color, making them stand out from the rest of the helmet well. 

The figure comes with two accessories: a rifle and a blaster pistol, both of which are new. Excellent. The standard Imperial weapons are getting a little stale by now, so a new set of weapons is certainly a welcome idea. The weapons both look cool enough, the pistol being one of the ones found in the Battlefront video game, and the rifle having something of a grenade launcher look. It’s a fairly cylindrical piece, so it seems like it would be some kind of large bore firing weapon; it’s almost certainly a regular laser rifle, but for now, without confirmation, I suppose it can be whatever I want it to be. On the right hip is a flexible loop that will accommodate either of the weapons, but seems designed for the pistol which is logical and everything. 

Poseability wise, the Death Trooper has the standard Black Series range of motion, but is unencumbered by shoulder pads or hanging armor the way that some Troopers occasionally are. So, a good and useable range of motion, capable of a number of military action poses. The overall body is pretty detailed, as the Death Trooper contains a lot of sculpting that standard Stormtroopers don’t. While the standard Stormtrooper is basically a guy wearing a big, bulky armor shirt, the Death Trooper is wearing an armor vest of sorts, complete with what look to be clasps or buckles at the collar. It is a vest that shares much with the standard Imperial upper body wear, like that square part on the back that every Trooper has, but it is a nice new armor. Even the grieves and bracers, the leg and arm guards for you plebs, are new and have new details. The left bracer looks like a standard Stormtrooper bracer; but the left one looks like it has tubes or vials or something added to it. What they are, no one yet knows. There are a lot of sculpted details that regular Stormtroopers don’t have, as the Death Trooper armor would seem to be produced in smaller numbers, better befitting a unit of elite, Special Forces type soldiers rather than the mass produced and swarming Stormtrooper. None of this is official yet, and honestly, it all comes from my looking at the figure a bit and letting my imagination wash over it. It may be that none of this stuff is true, but for now, with the movie still a few days away, we can all hypothesize to our hearts’ content.

 

And on that note . . . 

This may sound kind of wild, but since we are still a few weeks away from Rogue One, all theories are still on the table at this time. The exceptionally cool K2-SO and the Death Trooper were the first two figures from the movie that I obtained, and I noticed how slender the torso on the Death Trooper was. I Tweeted this out a few months ago at this point, but having the two figures standing next to each other on my desk, a thought occurred to me: what if Death Troopers are so slender because they are droids? The full theory goes something like this:

Rogue One is set between Episodes III and IV, closer to IV than III. In the prequel trilogy, the Separatists made use of a droid army; one positive of this approach is the availability and expendability of droids is greater than living beings, like Clones. The Battle of Geonosis, one of the few bright moments of the prequel movies, begins in an arena, with line after line after line of droids swarming the Jedi, being cut down and almost immediately replaced by another one. Episode IV would exist in a time where the Imperial military would probably still have some Clone War-veteran Clones in it, alongside the more recently conscripted Stormtroopers. But the Death Troopers are like a special forces squad, and are, according to the scant package bio, directly under the supervision of Krennic. Krennic is a higher up in Imperial weapons R & D. What if Krennic either develops or is given a number of droids, either based on or taken from the old Separatist ranks or designs, to serve as his own personal soldiers? The Clone Wars series introduced droid types beyond the stupidly skeletal battle droid and comical Super Battle Droids, so it is basically a matter of canon that there are other types of droids that the Separatists used. Spoiler alert, I guess, but we know Emperor Palpatine was playing both the Republic and Separatists against each other, and had dealings with the Separatists, so he could feasibly have gotten access to droids or droid technology or designs. 

What if the Death Troopers are droids? Would it not make some kind of sense that the guy who is super high up in the Imperial Weapons Division would have command of a group of way-advanced and efficient droids? This kind of unit, typically, is made up of a small number of individuals that can act rapidly and with expert coordination. They often develop a mystique of being a bottomless trove of fighters as well: the idea that if one is killed or lost, another quickly takes its place so as to not diminish the strength and effectiveness of the group. Real military legends are made of this type of thing: the squad that never seemed to grow smaller, regardless of casualties; the “ghost unit” that appears and vanishes with little or no warning; the unit that never grows weaker regardless of losses.

If these guys really are super elite soldiers, how many would the Empire be willing to divert to serve as one guys’ personal army? Sure, the Imperial military is a gigantic group, but how many of its members can be true ‘elite’ level soldiers? It seems like every one of them is, but why would you take the best of the best of the best and have them be the personal guard of an engineer? If the Death Troopers were droids, then they could function with expert coordination and tactics, and be as ruthless as necessary, and be easily and quickly replaced in the event that one was killed, thus giving the appearance that regardless of casualties the numbers never markedly decrease. 

This idea came to me while looking at the Death Trooper and K2-S0, whose bio lists him as a reprogrammed Imperial Security droid. He is clearly designed to be menacing; the Death Troopers are clearly intended to be menacing in all regards. We know that the Separatist battle droids were supposed to be menacing in both skeletal appearance and swarming numbers, before they were totally neutered by horrible writing. Sure, I’m trying to connect a lot of disparate points here, but that’s sometimes what speculation is all about. I could be absolutely wrong: Rogue One could be a two hour movie of the Death Troopers sitting in the locker room with their helmets off, trading stories about their families back home. We will just have to wait and see.

In the long run, the Death Trooper is a good looking addition to the Imperial lineup. This is always a good thing in my mind, as an Imperial collector who doesn’t want several of the same soldier. I prefer to army build by putting together a group of different troops, rather than a shelf full of the same one. But that may be a consideration for another day. 

A brief shot of one appeared in the very first Rogue One teaser, and my first thought was “When are we getting figures of that new Trooper?” The answer, my friends, is now.