I still don’t get what this Seven Seconds negative anon (link) was talking about. Maybe it’s because I’m not Black and don’t have the same perspective, but I thought the show was very good overall and I loved KJ’s character to the end. The whole show has ungodly amounts of pain and heartbreak, that is true, given its subject matter. It is not an easy watch. I cried a lot through it, especially during Latrice’s and Isaiah’s scenes, and hugged and kissed my child throughout. It may well be unwatchable and retraumatizing for many members of the U.S. Black audience, which is why I hope nonblack and international audiences will support it all the more.
That said, unless I’m given more insight I’m going to stand by my stance that “torture porn” is a deeply unfair characterization. The ending of Season 1 was actually more hopeful and healing than I’d been dreading, though the journey of grief is never a straightforward one and I hope there will be a Season 2 and beyond for more complexities to emerge even as the characters progress. There is unbelievable pain, yes, but the show doesn’t wallow in it and portrays the characters worst affected as dignified and resilient while also showing them to be messy and human.
As for KJ, follow me below the cut so I can fistfight anon with spoilers.
Why wouldn’t I like KJ after watching the whole thing? She is and remains an amazing character! Yes, she is not the best lawyer as she herself admitted, and she probably did a lot of damage to an already difficult case by humiliating herself in court, getting her bad moments on film, and being removed from court just before closing. She’s a highly flawed character, that’s been established from her very first appearance.
And you know what? I loved that about her. She didn’t give up. No matter how many times she got knocked down, no matter how many mistakes she made, she just got up and kept punching and punching until she eked out a kind of underwhelming victory, legally speaking, but still a victory. She wrecked her career to do the right thing, as did Fish. If she hadn’t gotten Teresa to blurt out the location of the grill Jablonski would have walked scott free.
Arguably her biggest victories were out of court, though. She talked Latrice into cooperating instead of trying kill Jablonski, a quest that would have destroyed Latrice and her family. Though the sentence was underwhelming (and, though I may have missed something, contradictory–I thought the automobile manslaughter conviction came with a mandatory 5-10 sentence?), having the truth come out in court was still healing for Latrice. Both Teresa and Marie ditched their demon cop men. The cop gang showed their hand and killed a young white girl. These developments will have important implications for Season 2 and beyond (please let there be a Season 2).
Was I supposed to dislike KJ because of the children who starved to death after KJ arrested their brother? Again, I might not be impacted the same way as Black audiences, and I understand if people hate her. Nobody hated her for it more than KJ herself. Fish, who had always been sympathetic to her or at least amused by her antics, was horrified and called her out on feeling sorry for herself. He couldn’t even bear to be in the same car with her, and I might have reacted the same. It also put KJ’s behavior in so much more persective, though I can see if some people see it as excessive.
That said, I find it believable that it happened without any malice on her part given how deeply fucked up the legal system and the associated social services are. It wasn’t the assistant attorney’s job to check up on any dependants a defendant might have. The arrested youg man probably told someone or tried to tell someone and it got dropped, or no one heard him out in the first place. Handling situations like this requires clear lines of information and cooperation across different parts of bureacracy, and that clearly broke down in this case.
KJ was, in other words, taking on the guilt of a broken and racist system because no one else would. Could she have checked? Yes, and maybe the children would have lived. But the thing was, it’s like trying to stop a broken dam with your own body. One person’s diligence can’t make up for a system that is meant to work with thousands of people working together.
This scene, furthermore, was meant to be in clear contrast with Jablonski and DiAngelo’s earlier scene where DiAngelo told Jablonski he was a good man and that trying to keep that self-image of himself was breaking him. (The closing statement, of course, shows that Jablonski was anything but.) Here we have two men who won’t even accept the consequences of their own action, and on the other hand we have KJ who hates herself for not having gone above and beyond. The episode is asking, who’s the actual good person? What does being a good person or a bad person even mean?
So no, I don’t hate KJ, though I don’t blame others if they do. I love her, flaws and all, and I want to give her a hug. She owned up to her mistakes, she came back and back and back in the face of humilitaion and knockdown and tragedy, and she won a profound and difficult victory that may seem piteous at too high a cost but is a part of something bigger.
Spoilers for Seven Seconds, Episode 8.
What are they doing hiring one lawyer for four co-defendants?! Is this how they go with cop cases? There are such serious conflict of interest issues with one attorney representing two or more co-defendants who may at any point want to testify against each other or strike a separate deal with the D.A.
I understand that cops in the U.S. are practically unprosecutable and that’s why they have the confidence to do this, especially when the case concerns the death of a Black boy they’re demonizing as a gangster. But does the New Jersey Bar Association have any Thoughts about clients being pressured to waive their objections to the conflict, potentially sacrificing more advantageous plea deals?
I guess not. Because again, they’re cops, and as long as they don’t turn on each other they’re bulletproof. I bet they’re plenty happy customers too. Now I think Latrice had the right idea and Jablonski at least should have been made to pay with a bullet between the eyes. It looks like the only way anyone can get justice against police in the U.S.
If it’s true that the Force belongs to everyone, then why not have the other main heroes in addition to Rey–Finn, Poe, Rose, and “Caro”–Force-sensitive as well? They can be Rey’s first pupils (though it’s more a mutual teaching/study group situation) and, going off the books Rey got from the Jedi Temple, develop their own theory and practice of the Force. Here’s how I envision their respective specialties and powers.
Rey
Summary: The generalist Jedi and melee combat specialist
Description: Rey has the most obvious and familiar, seemingly supernatural Jedi powers. She has impressive Force telekinesis, Force telepathy, has had Force visions and dreams, and the mind trick. She is a force, or should we say Force, in melee combat. She is the tank of the party and all-purpose Force powerhouse, not to mention a potent symbol to revive hope when the Jedi seemed all lost or fallen.
Rey still has limitations, however. While her abilities are very strong, they are generally obvious and one-off in nature. She can use the Force mind trick to get a Stormtrooper to take her shackles off her, but trying to use the mind trick in negotiation, for instance, would be noticeable and end up breeding distrust. Similarly, she can be a whirlwind of destruction in combat but can’t turn the tide of a large-scale battle on her own. She needs a team, and having trusted friends can in turn help her resist the lure of the Dark Side, which can be strong for a Force user as powerful as she is.
Finn
Summary: Empath, death sense, Battle Meditation
Description: A Force user on par with Rey, Finn has the ability to sense life and, less pleasantly, the ending of life. We saw him go into a panic attack at Slip’s death, seemingly sensing him die. We saw this ability again on a larger scale with the destruction of the Hosnia system, when he sensed the mass deaths much like Obi-Wan did. Highly trained and talented at both long-distance and melee combat, he has probably been unconsciously powering his military prowess with the Force all his life. He knows how to read a situation and people instantly and use this knowledge to great effect. Particularly skilled in small unit combat, he is the undisputed tactician of their group.
His tactical genius and empath abilities intersect for devastating effect in the form of Battle Meditation. He senses the battlefield and the combatants and, with a mental nudge here and a tug there aided by his own extensive strategic training, shapes the battle like a sculpture or a Rubix cube. The Resistance/Rebellion pulls off victories out of all proportion with their resources this way, especially with Finn’s extensive knowledge of the enemy. His strong empathy can be a liability as well as an asset, however, and sensing the deaths of so many people could result in trauma and burnout. He needs emotional support from a caring network of people, and fortunately he is no longer alone.
Poe Dameron
Summary: Force-aided instinct and reflex, micro-visions, inspiration
Description: A young leader of the Rebellion and Leia’s chosen successor, Poe has been using the Force unconsciously for his piloting much like Anakin and Luke Skywalker did. Sensing events in the split second before they happened gave him uncanny reflexes and saved his life in many a tight spot. Further developing these abilities gave him an edge not only in his reflexes but in planning and leadership as well. Sensing danger in advance helped him avoid costly mistakes and, conversely, being able to sense payoffs for risks enabled him to take risks in a calculating, advantageous way.
As Leia pointed out, though, he has to be more than the pilot or kickass spy he’s used to being; he also has to be a leader. With his deep roots from his parents in antifascist resistance, you might say rebellion is in his blood. He inspires others with this conviction, and being in the same room with him or even watching a holo of him speak can electrify audiences despite–or perhaps because of–his simple, down-to-earth style. It is one of the many qualities that his enemy General Hux, known for his bombastic rhetoric, scorns about him.
Description: Loving droid owners like Poe have always known that there was more to their companions than gears and electricity, and Rose’s awakening Force power confirms this. She can sense and communicate through the Force with droids and computers, including ships that are equipped with droid brains. The Force is the connection between living beings, after all, and sentient machines are just as alive as organics if in a different sense. Rose’s exploration into this side of the Force endlessly fascinates Rey and Chewbacca, both enthusiastic mechanics, and Rose’s insights into the needs of the cranky old droid brains that run the Millennium Falcon have done much to place her in its good graces.
Rose also has the Force ability of shatterpoint, rare and once thought lost. She can sense pivotal points where a single outcome may change the course of events. In this she takes after legendary Force master Mace Windu, and some have speculated that she may have family ties to Ghôsh Windu, Master Windu’s clan which nearly died out with him. When Rose risked her own life to save Finn’s on Crait she sensed a shatterpoint, convinced he had to survive that moment no matter what. It was more important than her life or the lives of the entire remaining Resistance. Subsequent events proved her right, and fortunately the grim payoff did not come to pass thanks to the intervention of Luke Skywalker.
On the flip side of Finn who is a strong empath, Rose is strong in broadcasting her emotions, particularly negative emotions such as fear and pain. Some of her occasionally unhealthy interactions with Finn may have resulted from their respective abilities going in a feedback spiral. Now that she is aware of the effect she has on others, Rose works hard to modulate her emotions and is particularly careful around Finn. Her friendship with mechanical sentients, who are less moody than organics, helps in this regard and she can frequently be found meditating in hangars and repair rooms while curious droids look on.
Caro*
Summary: Force echoes, life powers, shadow friends
Description: Caro thrives on the balance of all things, passion and peace, anger and compassion, life and death. Rey admires how she not only understands but lives the concepts that Rey herself has only begun to grasp. Rey, Finn, and the others to different degrees can talk to the spirits of powerful Jedi masters who live on in the Force, like Luke Skywalker, but Caro goes farther. She is not only more effective at communing with these spirits, she also hears echoes in the Force itself from every being who has ever been in the Force. Not all at once, of course, which would overwhelm any mortal, but she can sense snatches that she seeks or that simply come to her. She can attempt to get more information through concentration and meditation, and this was how she found Finn: Through the memories of people living and dead who had crossed his path. Slip remembered him kindly, Caro told Finn, though he still thought him an awful showoff. Due to her powers she frequently seems to know people before she meets them, which some find unsettling.
As befitting a Jedi who is a master of the Balance, Caro has deep connection to life as well as death. She is a healer of great skill like Barriss Offee before her, and has saved many lives. An expert at integrating medical technology with her powers, she has worked with Rose to pool their strengths for better medical care in the Resistance. Though Caro is more accepting of death as a part of the Force than Barriss was and has proven more resilient to the trauma of losing patients, she can be saddened by the mounting losses. Finn and the others take care to draw her gently from her solitude where the events of her life and her unique powers sometimes lead her to take solace. She is particularly loved by defected Stormtroopers who have never experienced such caring, and quite a few are open about being willing to fight and die for her more than the Resistance. She has found a loving partner in one of them and their companionship brings her much joy.
Through great concentration and focus Caro can cause these “echoes” in the Force to take temporary physical form. They can help with set tasks and even go into battle with her, although the effort can be taxing for her and their actions can be unpredictable. Such is the nature of the Force, and she accepts that. It is key to the peace and balance she keeps with the Force.
* Caro’s powers are purely speculative at this point, of course. We don’t even know her name, to say nothing of her abilities or relationships with the other characters. But it’s fun to imagine and there was no way I was going to leave her out of this post, okay?
It still bothers me that Kylo Ren never used the Force against Finn. I mean, we’re talking about the guy who’s been shown doing this
and this
and this
also this
and so much more to his enemies and even people who just kind of annoyed him in the moment. The dude has oodles of Force power and is not at all shy about throwing it around. Other Force users are not immune, as shown with Rey who is even more powerful than he is.
So why, in his fight against Finn at the end of TFA, did Ren never even try to use the Force? Finn went running to an unconscious Rey after Ren knocked her out. Finn had even thrown his blaster aside, not that blasters work against Ren as Poe found out at the start of the movie. Why didn’t Ren throw Finn against a tree, too, or lift him into the air and choke him? That’s more like the guy’s usual MO.
Instead Ren not only dueled Finn but even resorted to punching him after disarming him, which had viewers commenting that his animosity against Finn seemed very raw and personal. It is true that Ren seems to have a personal beef against Finn (link), but again, the new Supreme Leader of the First Order has never been hesitant to use Force power against people regardless of how well he knew them or how strongly he felt about them. He revels in making people, from total strangers to hated rivals, helpless with his power. So why not Finn?
My hypothesis is that there’s another layer to Ren’s animosity against Finn beyond the usually-discussed ones of Finn defecting and making the opposite choices he did, and Ren’s hatred being the manifestation of his regrets. That’s a valid point and I have argued it myself (link), but what if there’s something more immediate and visceral going on?
Let’s go back to that moment in the village near the beginning of TFA, when Ren stared for a long moment at Finn before he turned away. He then unfreezes Poe’s blaster beam to strike a pole Finn was standing near, startling him and showering him with sparks.
What exactly prompted the staring and the intimidation here? There have been many speculations, from his realizing that Finn had not fired at the villagers to sensing Finn’s Force sensitivity. These are sound possibilities, but what if there’s something else? What if this scene is key to their interactions throughout the movie, and ties into the abovementioned duel scene at the end?
Let me propose an alternate scenario: Kylo Ren, having ordered the slaughter of unarmed prisoners, senses a disturbance in the Force–or rather, a lack of disturbance where there should be one. Remember what Chirrut said in Rogue One: “The Force moves darkly around a creature that is about to kill.” Given that the Force is the connection between living beings, I can imagine that this dark movement of the Force would persist for at least a little while afterward.
So let’s say Kylo Ren senses that there is no dark movement of the Force around Finn that indicates he had killed or intended to kill someone. He turns and stares directly at that point of light amid the darkened swirls in the Force.
Now, this alone could be enough to annoy him and he might find it reason enough to bully Finn. But what if his stare was about more than sensing the Force around Finn and realizing this Trooper had not obeyed his orders? Wouldn’t you be at least a little curious at such an anomaly, maybe try and see if the Trooper had simply lost his nerve or if something more was going on?
What if the intensity of Kylo Ren’s stare indicated that he was trying to skim the surface of Finn’s mind, something the target might not even feel unlike a full mind probe? Just enough to tell what thoughts and emotions were going through the Trooper’s mind?
What if it didn’t work?
Imagine the turmoil, even embarrassment Kylo Ren would have felt in this scenario. His entire life was defined for better and for worse by being a powerful Force user. It was the source of his self-worth, the reason for his perceived superiority, the means by which he dominated others. Then to have something so simple as a mind scan fail to work on a lowly Stormtrooper, as though he had been walled off? Imagine his astonishment, then fury.
At this point it is entirely in character for Ren to unfreeze the blaster beam in a pique, intimidating Finn and reasserting control over the situation in his own mind. It was a reassurance to himself that his Force powers were still as potent as ever–the blaster beam hovering obediently in the air was proof enough!–and still worked on even the aberrant Stormtrooper, if not directly. Ren would have soothed himself with the thought that he could have killed the Trooper if he had wanted. He was still in control. Still powerful. Still Kylo Ren.
He could tell no one. He couldn’t even kill the Trooper, at least not outright, because it would raise too many questions. He had to figure out what had happened, who that Trooper was, and fix this situation before Snoke or Hux had any clue of what had happened.
A lot of Ren’s fixations with Finn start to make sense under this scenario. When Hux said they were searching the registers for the Stormtrooper that had sprung the Resistance pilot and escaped, Ren’s mind immediately went to Finn. Why? Because he had been reading that particular Trooper’s file himself, combing it for clues. He thought this Trooper could very well have run away to preserve whatever his secret was.
Even Ren’s mention of the clone program to Hux takes on a new meaning in this light. He may have realized in a panic that it might not be just Finn–the entire Stormtrooper program might be a danger. All those multitudes of humans taken in and trained with no idea of their Force potential. How many others like that escaped Trooper were out there, right in the Order’s ranks? How could he prevent it from ever happening again?
To him, the clones would have seemed a promise of full control. With a single, known template he would know exactly what he was getting. Obviously there’s no saying that whatever made Finn special was genetic in nature, but to someone like Kylo Ren, who believes so strongly in the supremacy of his heritage, that would have seemed the paramount factor.
As the movie progresses Ren certainly gains more and more reasons to hate Finn. But the hatred he has for Finn seems different from what he feels for the many others who oppose him, as though Finn touched on his rawest nerves and his very existence is an insult. Again, there are other perfectly valid explanations for this hatred. But then we return to the first question: why not use the Force on Finn? Not during combat, and not even when he finally has Finn helpless and under his power?
This may have been another reason for Ren’s interest in Rey. His cover was that the scavenger could give him the map to Luke Skywalker just like the droid could, but another key point about her was that she had traveled with Finn and might be able to provide information about him that a droid could not. Ren must have had a wealth of information from mechanical scans of Finn, which likely revealed nothing, but what he didn’t have was the impression of an organic being who had cared enough to interact on a personal level with him and so provide vital clues.
Besides, it wasn’t like he could conduct in-depth interviews of First Order personnel without drawing suspicion, not that he trusted any of them in the first place. The scavenger on the other hand was a prisoner from whom he could, as he put it, take whatever he wanted. It would also explain why he would take her as his personal prisoner and interrogated her himself from the start rather than leave her to Stormtroopers and droids. The information about Luke Skywalker he might share with the First Order, but he could not afford to let anyone else know about Finn’s mysterious qualities should the prisoner give up any salient details. The discovery of Rey’s Force abilities and her ability to push him out of her mind would have thrown a wrench in the works, obviously.
The next time Kylo Ren sees Finn it’s at the oscillator on Starkiller Base after Han’s death, and he is enraged for so many different reasons at this point. Is there also some fear behind that anger, though? Is there a reason he’s focused so specifically on Finn over Rey, whose Force powers have proven even greater than Ren’s? If Finn represents a vulnerability for Ren that not even Rey does, the idea that Ren’s power itself might have holes and might not work, that would go a long way toward explaining the intensity of his reaction.
When Finn and Rey escape, Ren tracks them down personally despite his injury and is waiting for them. “We’re not done yet.” Of course he’s not done with Rey, he wants her on his side and is under orders to take her to Snoke, but what if he’s also addressing Finn? Finn is still a riddle he has to solve, and if that is not possible a threat to eliminate.
Now let’s go into the leadup to Finn and Ren’s duel. One point I found interesting is that Finn and Rey were standing very close together, within what looks like 4-5 inches apart, when Ren knocked Rey into a tree. They were standing close together in the first place, having instinctively closed ranks on seeing Ren.
See how Finn’s left shoulder and Rey’s right actually overlap while she calls Ren a monster:
So my question is: Why was only Rey pushed, and not Finn? We know it’s possible to Force
push several opponents at once if they’re close to each other, it
happened frequently in The Clone Wars for instance. See, for instance, Asajj Vetress pushing two mooks at once (all Clone Wars gifs are from a Force push compilation on YouTube, and have been very slightly slowed down):
Or two Force users in close quarters being pushed away together:
Jedi get this treatment, too.
So do droids.
Compare the above to Finn and Rey in the woods when Ren used the Force push:
Does this seem incongruent to you as well? Finn and Rey were standing as close to each other as any of the Force pushees in The Clone Wars examples, likely closer together than any of them in fact, yet only Rey is blown back and Finn is not affected at all.
Sure, maybe Ren was immediately
focused on Rey because she was the more immediate threat with the
blaster, and maybe he wanted to concentrate the push to send her particularly
far. If these other examples are any indication, though, it seems at the very least unusual for someone who was standing so close to the intended target to be so entirely unaffected by even a byblow.
And speaking of focusing on Rey, there’s another thing about the Force push that always bothered me. Anti reylos have pointed out, correctly, that throwing Rey that high against a tree could have killed her. Yet, to me, that doesn’t fit what Ren was trying to achieve. He was intrigued by this girl’s powers and was thinking about recruiting her, why would he try to kill her? Throw off her blaster beam, sure. Gain an advantage in the fight with the aim of capturing her, yes. But throw her so high and hard he ran the risk of killing her? That doesn’t make sense, not because he’s any less evil but because it’s not in his self-interest.
Unless… what if he didn’t mean to push her that high? What if he had been aiming at both Finn and Rey and had meant to achieve something much like the Clone Wars examples above, pushing them both to distract them and throw them off? Except the Force push, having met an immovable object in Finn, channeled around to hit Rey and Rey alone, hitting her with far more power than Ren intended?
If it’s true that Ren was aiming at both Finn and Rey, or at least pushed in a way that would normally have affected both, he would have gained yet more confirmation that Finn was, as Phasma put it in a different context, a “bug in the system.” Beyond being his opposite in every way Finn was something that shouldn’t exist, that reminded Ren that he could not control everyone and everything.
Finn is far from invulnerable, of course, as Ren himself took great lengths to prove. Yet he did so entirely by physical means, in contrast to his usual style of throwing his Force powers around especially on people who can’t defend themselves. Viewers interpret this as a choice on Ren’s part, a physical expression of his grudge against Finn. What if he had no choice because physical means were the only ones that worked?
And what does Ren do once he has wounded and incapacitated Finn? Instead of finishing off his enemy he reaches immediately for Anakin’s lightsaber, calling to it through the Force. It’s like he has something to prove, especially after the sight of Finn holding it and using it against him.
In sum, I think there’s a case for saying that Ren never used the Force against Finn because it doesn’t work against him, and that this discovery early in TFA was the driver behind his and Finn’s tension throughout the movie. This means that Finn has a unique Force power, something Ren finds more threatening than even a powerful Force user like Rey. Such a reveal would have tremendous implications for the ongoing story and the nature of the Force itself.
Of course, it’s also possible the whole thing was simply an oversight on the filmmakers’ part, but if so I find it an interesting speculation to fill the gap.
star wars episode i: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
star wars episode ii: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
star wars episode iii: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders; also, beware angsty white boys”
rogue one: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
star wars episode iv: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
star wars episode v: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
star wars episode vi: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
star wars episode vii: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders; also, we fucking warned you about angsty white boys”
star wars episode viii: “um, doing anything besides following direct orders is in fact the true evil? (unless those direct orders were to an angsty white boy to commit genocide in which case let’s spend two hours finding shades of gray.) but anyone else? how dare??? you not follow direct orders??? don’t you know star wars has always been about rigidly adhering to regimes???”
UPDATE
solo, a star wars story:
star wars episode vi: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”
so we’re 9 for 10 on this, for everyone keeping score. and the only person fandom-at-large decided to court martial and send to a penal colony for ten years was NOT, as might be logical, either of the angsty white boys who committed fucking genocide. no, it was the brown guy who, by the rules of every other star wars movie, would be (aka, IS) an unquestioned valiant hero.
thank you for coming to my ted talk, we’ll reconvene with more stats after episode ix.
As someone who was actually in the military, who knew pilots irl and who identifies with Poe… Leia and Holdo were fucking idiots, sort of. It’s complicated.
The message of Episode 8 is weird and kinda obscured by the whole “follow our orders without question” subplot.
The lesson is supposed to be “people matter, individual lives matter, MORE than the mission”.
Poe violets the order to withdraw at the start of the movie because he believes taking down the Dreadnaught ship is more important than human lives. The thing is, this blow means very little to the Order. They can build more ships; you can’t resurrect a life. So the lesson Poe was meant to learn is “don’t sacrifice lives”.
However, this gets all twisted up into “don’t violate orders” when Leia and Holdo – for absolutely no reason whatsoever – decide not to tell Poe about their plans. There is no reason given for this in the movie. It COULD have been justified with “we think the Order is listening to our conversation so we can’t tell you anything”, but no reasoning is given. Leia and Holdo hold back the information purely out of pettiness, that’s the only reason I can see.
So Poe does exactly what he was raised to do, AND to uphold the lesson he’d been taught earlier: he violates orders to save lives. He thinks they’re hopelessly running away with no chance of survival, so he throws chance to the wind in an attempt to save everyone. He was taught in the first act of the movie “lives matter”, so of course he gets Finn and Rose off the ship.
In extended (but no less real) canon, he goes up against the Dreadnought as a solo suicude mission. He has no command over the bomber squadron and, anyway, thought they were across the Galaxy on another mission. The only order POE defied was his OWN return.
Tallie (the actual officer of authority over the bomber squadron) and the other bombadiers were who were unauthorized for the Dreadnought mission. We just saw Leia slap him and not Tallie Lintra bc slapping a brown guy was “funny” but slapping a white woman would have betrayed Rilo Jon’s fauxminism.
Plus, Rilo really wanted to kill a bunch of women in silent non-speaking roles and holding Poe accountable for Tallie’s actions (including Paige’s death, natch) cleared the way for his masturbatory killing-off-silent-women-in-the-name-of-equality-shut-up orgasm.
I actually really like your interpretation of the link between the Dreadnought mission (which I really wish wider fandom would acknowledge he HAD authorization for!!! Also, why didn’t Leia, the General, recall the bombadiers when she outranked both Poe and Tallie?? So many questions, so much deus ex machina to the writing…) and the later mutiny and plot with Finn and Rose! That makes so much more sense than the loosey-goosey tangent that comes across in the movie.
I know reincarnation theories tend to favour finn as padmé but you know what? I think it’s anakin as finn. anakin as a child was such a kind and gentle soul who wanted to free the slaves. it’s not that big of a stretch that his wish would be fulfilled in his next life as finn, who frees the stormtroopers from the first order after breaking away from slavery himself.
Imagine living in a world where you thought this asshole and his merry band of assholes were the good guys?
I’m not saying Reylow is abuse culture…but it’s actually abuse, racist, and fascist apologist culture.
If you were disappointed by the Resistance mutiny plot in Star Wars: The Last Jedi I highly recommend you check out Crimson Tide, a 1995 movie which I may or may not have seen 18 times starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. Other than the incongruity of Washington playing a character named “Ronald” it is so much more interesting a military drama than TLJ.
For one thing, Crimson Tide takes care to establish the fundamental worldview differences between Hackman’s Captain Ramsey and Washington’s Commander Hunter, even though the two meet and talk for the first time under an incredibly urgent national security situation. Ramsey is Navy salt through and through, an effective and seasoned sailor who only knows the military and orders. Hunter is educated, erudite, philosophical, and sees the bigger picture in world events.
See how the mirrors behind Ramsey catch his senior staff so that their reflections are watching Hunter along with Ramsey. All the senior staff know each other well and are highly loyal to Ramsey, while Hunter as Ramsey’s new second-in-command is comparatively unknown other than having his friend Blond Aragorn on board with him. Ramsey and his senior officers want to see what kind of person Hunter is, whether he was the right choice in this extremely high-stakes mission. This underlying distrust will have important implications later on.
And just in case we missed the point, the movie drives Ramsey and Hunter’s contrasts home again in a later scene where Ramsey is a raging asshole and Hunter just barely manages to hold onto his temper. Blond Aragorn then explains their contrasting worldviews to Hunter and the audience yet again.
It’s a little heavy-handed but it’s Hollywood, we’re not looking for subtlety here, and it’s one of the movie’s strengths that it errs on the side of clarity over cleverness every time. You can agree or disagree with the movie’s developments but no one who actually watched it could ever say, “errr, what was that about?”
Therefore, when circumstances pit Hunter and Ramsey against each other the conflict is about something meaningful, not “um why can’t you just talk to each other like grown-ass professionals.” Ramsey, for all his faults, doesn’t hide his plan from Hunter for no reason like a spiteful ninny. Hunter and Ramsey are both eminently clear to each other and the entire ship about exactly what they mean to do. This makes the conflict more meaningful, in addition to simply making real-world sense. I mean, how are you going to execute your plan if your crew doesn’t know it? No, the conflict isn’t over some stupid miscommunication. Rather it is over Hunter and Ramsey’s fundamental and strenuous disagreement over their core values, a disagreement that has implications not only for their mission but the fate of the world.
The conflict is all the more believable because, though the sympathy of the narrative lies with Hunter, he and Ramsey are both somewhat right and somewhat wrong as the military tribunal tells them at the end. Again, we return to their opposing worldviews. Hunter is looking at the bigger picture of world affairs and acting fully within military regulations when he relieves Ramsey of command. On the other hand, Ramsey isn’t wrong to assume for the sake of caution that their ship, the Alabama, might be the only submarine left to fire the nukes, and his adherance to their last known orders is procedurally correct. This is a conflict between two mature professionals who each fully believes himselfself to be in the right for pretty good reasons. That’s what makes it interesting. Though one of them took things way too far, he did so out of a conviction that he was lauded for in other situations and that he based his whole life on.
What makes the movie really shine is that it’s fundamentally about relationships. There is the central conflict between Hunter and Ramsey, but the other characters on board, Ramsey’s loyal senior staff and the young enlisted men who are frightened by the conflict between their two top leaders, have the chance to show their reactions and play a crucial role in the plot. Crammed into a can of tinned air strapped with nukes, hundreds of feet underwater with even communications cut off for much of the movie, all the crew have are each other. In this isolated state they are each other’s only allies, friends, recourse, and enemies. The choices they make under this extreme pressure–in every sense–are varied, nuanced, and believable. This intricacy is ultimately what makes the movie work as a layered drama instead of just two assholes screaming at each other. Two assholes screaming, by the way, becomes a damned near operatic performance in the hands of Hackman and Washington.
There are sacrifices and tough calls in Crimson Tide, too, and their portrayal is effective in a way most of TLJ’s death scenes were not. When Hunter orders a hatch sealed with three men caught on the other side because otherwise the entire ship would be lost, it is the saddest and most wrenching moment in the film. We actuallywatchthese men try to stay afloat while they are drowning with no way out. We watch Hunter’s conflict, the grief and trauma of the man who is ordered by Hunter to seal the bay. There is a wise economy of words–no one goes on about the dilemma of the few and the many or how the situation makes them feel, there’s just desperation and resolve and the cold, hard facts of submarine depth and water pressure.
The narrative doesn’t demonize Hunter for this decision which was absolutely the right call, nor does it glorify him. It was an impossibly hard decision made under brutal circumstances, and the scene lets the event and its consequences stand on their own without any need to tell the audience what to think. That is how you do a scene about decisions made under impossible pressure, not have this weird doubletalk where it was necessary but also somehow bad and the character should feel bad.
Like TLJ Crimson Tide has a scene of officer-on-officer violence, and unlike TLJ actually puts it in the proper perspective. When an increasingly unhinged Ramsey punches Hunter in the face near the end of the movie, this is a sign of how far Ramsey has fallen from the standards of professionalism and decorum, and how badly the situation on board has deteriorated.
For my money, punching Hunter is a clearer sign of Ramsey’s fall than an earlier scene when he literally pulled a gun on his subordinates. At least when he threatened to kill a (white) petty officer his hand was shaking so hard the gun rattled against the threatened man’s glasses, which was a great touch. In contrast Ramsey is all leering superiority when he punishes Hunter and seems to enjoy deliberately hurting his executive officer. This scene also lends credence to my theory that Ramsey was racist the whole time toward Hunter and that his animosity–which began long before their command disagreements surfaced–had a lot to do with Hunter being so highly educated, thoughtful, well-spoken, and independent. I believe the word is “uppity.” I mean, the name of the sub isliterally “The Alabama.“ Again, this is not a subtle movie.
In contrast Hunter is in control the entire time, unlike in their earlier clashes when Ramsey was needling Hunter and Hunter was understandably in a rage. Hunter has grown as a person and an officer, surer of himself and more in control than ever, while Ramsey has regressed and shown the true ugliness that he had been barely holding in check. There could potentially be a valid debate over having character development for a Black man consist of not fighting back while a white dude whales on him, but that is not a conversation I am a part of. The intention at any rate was to show that Hunter had grown beyond Ramsey, and was truer to the best traditions of the Navy and the decorum of his rank than Ramsey could ever claim to be. Even Ramsey admits it at the end.
Seeing a movie like Crimson Tide really brings home how shoddy the mutiny plot in TLJ was, how shallow and unbelievable the conflict, how juvenile the treatment of serious issues. 23 years later Crimson Tide still sets a high standard for mutiny movies, and TLJ failed in every regard.
[I actually love Ezri Dax and found her to be interesting/relatable. But the one thing that bugged me? The lack of emphasis on how gross Bashir and Quark drooling over Ezri was – to the point of making Bashir her endgame love interest. For both Quark and Bashir, their early drooling over *Jadzia* – however limited – had felt smarmy to me (each in his own way), and the way they seemed to see Ezri as a second chance with Cute Dax #2 felt that much creepier. Bashir/Ezri actually hooking up? Yuck! ]
Seriously. Wasn’t there an entire early episode about how immature and self-serving Julian’s crush on Jadzia was, and how they’re so much better as friends? It also seemed like a loophole in the “no dating prior hosts’ partners“ rule, which they did another entire episode about (the first time they did a same-sex relationship in DS9, possibly Trek itself, and it put two women in a forbidden and tragic romance that was an echo of prior feelings from a male-female marriage. I get limitations of the times and all, but I still hated it). I mean the rule seems to be based on either the new host’s consent being suspect or the symbiont moving on to new experiences rather than be stuck in the past, and hooking up with the (retconned) “second choice” seems bad either way. Ezri and Whorf’s attraction to each other was at least revealed to be unhealthy, but somehow Ezri and Julian are perfectly okay and healthy? Right.
It would have been so much better, SO much, if Jadzia would never have considered Julian as a romantic or sexual prospect–which I truly believe was true until the Season 7 retcon–and Julian and Ezri had been a true friends-to-lovers deal based on Ezri’s attraction, not some lingering regret from Jadzia for what might have been. Now that would be the Dax symbiont actually exploring new ground and Ezri becoming her own person outside of Jadzia’s shadow. That would have been actual character growth after the whole mess with Whorf. Instead we are told Ezri and Julian were basically Ezri and Whorf 2.0 which uh… is not a good thing.
If anything Ezri’s “romantic” plotlines seem perfectly designed to mess her up long-term, and I felt so sorry for her because she chose to save the Dax symbiont out of compassion despite having no training or preparation for joining and she paid the price in so many ways.
L.J.'s Obsessions 