As Harbringer Zero notes, spoilers for the Trooper’s Ord Mantell story.
In your mind, I want you to conjure up the plot of Die Hard 2.
Now imagine that, for whatever reason, John McClane isn’t at the airport to save the day; for the purposes of this thought experiment, his car isn’t towed away, but rather stolen by hooligans, and he has to go get it back.1 Without our perpetually-luckless cop, Colonel Stuart and his rogue special ops unit pull off their dastardly scheme, rescue General Esperanza, and then — we’re imagining here — go on to cause havoc and mayhem by joining a resurgent Soviet Union.
But now — remember that luckless new guy in the Special Force’s unit, the one that didn’t realize Major Grant’s team was also going rogue? (His name is Corporal Telford, by the way.) Imagine that Cpl. Telford doesn’t get his throat slit ingloriously, but rather escapes. And imagine that, as the sole remaining loyalist in an otherwise completely defunct spec ops unit, Telford is charged with bringing each and every traitor to justice. And then, imagine that Die Hard 3 isn’t the trash that was, but is instead the story of our new hero Telford traveling the world, from Timbuktu to Phnom Penh to St. Petersburg, hunting down these fugitives using whatever badass means that he wants to.
That is the story of The Old Republic‘s trooper.
And it only gets better! Apparently, my trooper is a Paragon fem!Shepard turned Orion Slave girl turned Republic loyalist. She and her sexy, brooding catman go around cosplaying as stormtroopers and shooting Republic traitors with gattling guns.
Yippee-ki-yay motherfucker, indeed.
1 This would make John McClane SW:TOR‘s smuggler, and… I’m really okay with that.
The Self-Aware Colony 
May want to put a spoiler tag at the top of your post for storyline. I’ve played through the starter world, and it was the best story of all of them, in my opinion. But if someone had revealed that twist and I had not gotten to have that OMG moment, I would have probably slit *their* throat…
That’s a fair point; I’ve added the tag.
But yeah, the Trooper story has been really solid so far! My opinion is colored, though, by my trooper’s general survivability; though I love my smuggler, I’m really tired of dying and/or resting all of the time.
I think you’re playing my Trooper! Mirialan females, FTW!