TIE Pilot?  What happened to the “fighter”?  Well I don’t know about any of this.

Black Squadron is the designation for the doomed group of pilots who flew alongside Darth Vader during the Battle of Yavin.  As this figure is sourced from A New Hope, I couldn’t in good conscious photograph it with the Episode VI based TIE Interceptor.  This is despite the fact that I’m not sure there are any pilot costuming differences between the two films.  In fact, I’m not even sure there is any new TIE Pilot footage in Jedi.  I think it was all clipped from Episode IV. Maybe.  Anyway, this forced me to free my large wing TIE Fighter from is tightly confined display space.  In the process, I wiped out my Hoth display and the involuntary recoil from that mishap caused me to topple most of my Death Star display.  And now you know why I hate this not-job.

This particular TIE Pilot figure is distinguished by having the Imperial symbol on one half of its helmet.  I could have sworn that we had seen this before in one of the previous releases of this figure which began life in 2009’s Imperial Pilot Legacy Evolutions set.  I also could have sworn that there was on screen evidence of this particular helmet configuration.  I searched for exactly thirty seconds to find evidence of either, but couldn’t so I quit.  Sufficed to say, it may well exist.  The world may never know.

In addition to the helmet decoration, this figure comes with a Nien Nunb “pilot” blaster in addition to the BlasTech SE-14C (aka Dr. Evazan blaster) that previous releases saw.  The pilot blaster fits much better in the holster than the larger SE-14C.  One thing that irks me is that both included blasters have a sculpted trigger guard, but the figure doesn’t have an independent trigger finger.  This means that the blaster either needs to sit up too high in the hand or the blaster is turned inward in the hand.  The latter is something that’s irked me going back to the vintage days.  If you’ve read enough of my reviews, you know that a figure not interacting with its accessories really chaps my heinie. I had to Google the correct spelling of “heinie” and was subjected to several Google image previews of bum bums.  Between toppling my display and getting e-mooned, this isn’t going great.

This figure lacks articulated ankles.  I know the thinking is that as a pilot, the figure only needs enough articulation to sit.  As such the articulated knees are sufficient.  But sometimes I like to pose my pilot figures outside of their ships and engaging in some ground combat.  The lack of ankles limits the number of realistically achievable poses.  You may be able to bend the knees and find a point where the figure balances on the tip of the back foot, but if you’re a lummox who wrecks his displays when trying to get a ship off a shelf, that’s not practical. 

On the plus side I can’t complain about the detailing of this figure.  I’ll admit that I don’t know the intricacies of the TIE Pilot uniform, but it looks the part to me.  It’s the decent looks of this figure that keep me from lowering the grade too far.  7 out of 10.

At the time of this review, the full Legacy Collection set is still available directly from Amazon

7/10 Bantha Skulls