That said, if they did start out as humans, dark troopers would obviously not be the first characters in Star Wars to see most of their organic bodies replaced by machine parts. The ones on the show appear to be droids that have been built from the ground up as killing machines. It’s unclear how much the dark troopers in The Mandalorian are meant to resemble the cyborg-clone hybrids from Dark Forces, but it’s unlikely these new ones have any connection to the Force, since they don’t seem to have any organic parts. With some help from the Valley of the Jedi, the site of an ancient battle between the Jedi and the Sith that became a nexus of immense Force energy, Desann turned regular stormtroopers into Dark Jedi hybrids and used them to attack Luke’s Jedi academy on Yavin 4. This time serving the Empire Reborn, an Imperial insurgency led by a dark Jedi named Lord Hethrir, the shadow troopers were created by an acolyte named Desann, a former student of Luke Skywalker’s who fell to the dark side. While certainly a major threat to the galaxy, these dark troopers only appeared in three issues of the Dark Empire storyline, but they did also inspire the shadow troopers, the lightsaber-wielding dark side stormtroopers that popped up two years later in the Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast game. They participated in Operation Shadow Hand, a military campaign that Palpatine hoped would give him back control of the galaxy in the early days of the New Republic. Deployed by the Dark Empire, which was led by a resurgent Emperor in a clone body (sound familiar?) six years after Return of the Jedi, these elite stormtroopers were trained in the dark side of the Force and used their powers to unleash terror on an unsuspecting galaxy. Force-sensitive dark troopers were introduced in Dark Empire a month before Dark Forces, even though the comic series takes place about a decade after the events of the video game. They were deadly and easily controlled by the Empire during the Galactic Civil War.īut those dark troopers were only the first step in the Empire’s scheme to create a new kind of soldier.

A series of grisly surgeries turned these veterans into half-man half-machine infantry units, their limbs and organs replaced with cybernetic parts. While the dark troopers are the result of Moff Gideon‘s work to rebuild the Empire on the show, the Dark Trooper Project of Legends was spearheaded by Imperial General Rom Mohc, who developed the program as a way to reintegrate Clone Wars soldiers into the ranks of the Empire.

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