Just alter the framing and it could actually be made into a better story, too. The reylows are already in denial that tlj trolled them, imagine what a novelization could do 😂
“Tears come to her eyes as she lifts him, holds his lifeless
body in her arms. Snow flurries around them as she cries,
holding this boy who she just met, who she already adores.
They are left here to die – nearby MORE TREES DROP as the
planet continues to COLLAPSE. And just as it seems like all
is lost… Her wet eyes look up to see:” –
“Finn met her gaze and noticed that she was quite pretty when she wasn’t hitting him with her staff. He wanted to be honest with her, but what would she think of him if she knew that he had been a stormtrooper?”
Morality, Trust, and the Force–toward a new model of Force instruction
What went so fatally wrong with the Jedi Order?
It’s a recurring and fundamental question. Through the prequel, original, and now sequel trilogies we’ve watched the Jedi Order fall, rise, and then fall again. Unless they can end this cycle the end of Episode IX won’t be an end, but rather a prelude to a new tragedy.
I believe the old Jedi Order’s reliance on inborn Force power became warped into blood worship in Luke’s new Jedi Order, and Kylo Ren was a product of this repugnant and ahistorical belief. To overcome the mistakes of the old and new Orders, a new model of Force instruction must arise: One that does not rely on inborn talent and certainly not on the nonsensical idea that a lineage confers a special destiny or rights. Rather the new model must recognize and nurture the Force powers inherent in everyone, and instruction itself should be a horizontal process where the students teach each other.
Below I will lay out these ideas in more detail. First I will explain the progression from the old Jedi Order to the new one, and how discontinuity in history led to Luke’s mistakes and Kylo Ren. Then I will lay out the new model that I believe must take the Jedi’s place in order to prevent new Kylo Rens from arising, or at least minimize their damage, while also avoiding the mistakes of the old Jedi Order.
The TLJ novelization seems to validate part of what I said here about Luke’s role. From Snoke’s point of view:
Luke, in other words, knew that the Jedi were flawed and he needed to turn to sources older than the Jedi to understand the Force and perhaps seek other ways to organize around it. Snoke saw this path Luke was on as such a threat that he used his knowledge and a young Ben Solo to manipulate Luke into rebuilding the Jedi.
Much like the history of the Jedi itself, Luke’s attempt to rebuild the Order was defined by fear and temptation, not faith–fear of his nephew falling to the Dark Side, and the lure of power. In doing so Luke seems to have abandoned his earlier attempts to seek the origins of the Force faith that Snoke found so threatening. History repeated itself, and the Jedi came down again in blood and fire.
Luke did take another apprentice, however, who received barely any instruction from him other than the basics of the Force, the roots that Luke had been seeking before Snoke’s interference and sought out again when Kylo Ren destroyed his fledgling Academy. In addition to these basics, Rey also has the first Jedi texts which Finn discovered in the Millennium Falcon. It seems the stage is set to realize Luke’s original vision for a new/old way of Force instruction, the one he was groping toward before Snoke distracted him.
Baze squeezed his trigger, held it and let his generator scream and his weapon writhe and buck. He alternated swift bursts and raging, aimless streams with precision killings. He advanced on the men and women who had taken his past, his home, his friend, his hope, his faith; but he did not stray far from Chirrut.
He had nowhere to go. He would not leave Chirrut now.
I know I haven’t talked about TLJ much recently – because I’ve kind of lost interest in Star Wars a little bit tbh – but I’m stillmad about how Rian handled Finn’s back injury.
Rian literally went from one extreme to the other in regards to how his injury from Kylo was handled. Rian initially wanted Finn to stay in a coma for the entire movie. All of it. The whole film. If that had happened Finn would have gotten virtually no screen time, no development, no chance to help with anything at all, no chance to shine. Which I think is what Rian was going for because Finn did get much less screen time and development anyway. He wanted Finn in a coma because he didn’t want to deal with Finn and so he could focus on other characters *cough*Kylo Ren*cough*
Rian only changed that plan because he was forced to. I have no doubt that he would have kept Finn in a coma if he could’ve gotten away with it.
So instead of Finn’s back injury causing him to be comatose, how was the injury handled? It wasn’t. At all.
There was no mention of it what so ever after the whole “Finn naked leaking bag” scene, which was just down right awful. You mean to tell me not one single person stopped to help Finn when he woke up? No one helped him until Poe and BB8 noticed? And the scene is shot in a way that makes it seem like Finn is incompetent about the bacta suit leaking. You mean to tell me Finn himself couldn’t change out of the suit and put on clothes?
He was seriously injured and the scene makes fun of him for being injured. Why did Rian feel the need to make Finn look incompetent? Finn is not incompetent. There was no reason to make him walk around in a leaking bacta suit other than to make a joke, which is super shitty because he could have died from that lightsaber wound.
What makes it even worse than it already is is the amount of time and attention given to Kylo’s wound. A wound that was much less severe. Finn’s back was cut open:
Kylo got a cut down his face:
What time was given to show Finn’s recovery? Nothing but a humiliating joke. What time was given to show Kylo’s recovery? A whole scene of him getting stitches and having Conflicted Emotions.
I just hate how much more care, time, and attention was shown to the villain receiving treatment and healing over the hero receiving it. And that really shows where Rian’s priorities were.
I’m not entirely sure if RJ truly intended to keep Finn in a coma or if it was just a horrible joke on his part, but I do think it’s not unlikely that Finn maybe was in coma longer in some versions of the script and those rewrites that were apparently done to include Finn and Poe more resulted into him waking up directly. This however doesn’t change that Rian didn’t give a damn about Finn’s injury and forgot it as soon as he couldn’t make stupid jokes about it anymore.
Logically Finn and Kylo should’ve been shown recovering at the same time, in parallel scenes. This would’ve shown their status as opposites both narratively and when it comes to their roles in the film. But RJ didn’t take the hero seriously but related to the villain and it shows.
It is, if possible, even worse than OP stated. Finn woke up in a storeroom.
In the novelization this is what he sees on waking up:
[He was surrounded by white, but it wasn’t snow–it was the walls and ceiling of a room. He was lying on a gurney, with a transparent medical cocoon above his head. Around him were crates and equipment, scattered haphazardly.
And there was no sign of Rey.]
This is, horrifically enough, borne out by the movie if you look closely at the scene.
Just as described in the novelization, medical equipment and crates are scattered around the room and it really does have the look of a storeroom, not an orderly medbay.
This is confirmed again when Finn recalls his awakening:
[Finn realized he felt guilty. He’d known what the Resistance hadn’t: that the Supremacy was out there somewhere, lurking in the Unknown Regions of the galaxy. Just as he’d known about so many other things he’d seen in his years of First Order service.
He knew it was ridiculous to blame himself–when he’d arrived on D’Qar there’d been no time for a thorough debriefing. There’d barely been time for him to tell General Organa and her officers about Starkiller Base before he’d left with Han and Chewbacca aboard the Falcon. And afterward…well, there hadn’t been an afterward. He’d woken up in a bacta suit, stashed in a storeroom aboard a ship that was being hunted.]
(And yes, the novelization totally does heap undeserved guilt on Finn for not warning the Resistance about the Supremacy and everything else. It has him wondering uneasily in another passage whether he would have warned them even if he did have the chance because he was so preoccupied with Rey. But if I start thinking too much about that I’ll put my fist through the screen, so let’s get back to the subject at hand.)
The idea that the Resistance would put a gravely wounded man in a storage space, that RJ contrived it this way, makes me want to throw up. Are you seriously telling me a ship as large as the Raddus didn’t have a medbay, including a secluded room for intensive care if one was needed? Yes, the evacuation was very rushed. That doesn’t mean Finn couldn’t be put in medbay, especially when he was already placed with the medical equipment necessary for him. If there was some manufactured reason we were never given why he couldn’t be put in medbay, at the very least a medic could be put on duty to watch him the… storeroom (barf).
This is just one of many reasonsTLJdoesn’t isn’t just bad but actively malicious, with the transparent intention to downplay Finn’s injury to a fucking unfunny joke. I hate, hate, hate this piece of shit and I wish nothing but bad things for RJ in life.
Here are snippets from the TLJ novelization discussing Rose’s development of the baffler, a device that hides energy signatures to make ships harder to detect, and its role in Holdo’s plan with the transports.
The novelization follows up from Cobalt Squadron by Elizabeth Wein, the book that goes into much more detail about Rose and Paige’s time with the titular bomber squadron and how Rose used the baffler in action. In Rose’s last conversation with Paige, it is revealed that Rose has been tapped to help other mechanics adapt the technology she built so it can be deployed across the Resistance.
This is the reason Rose and Paige were separated and why Rose, who was previously the flight engineer on the bomber Cobalt Hammer, was not on board with Paige when it was destroyed in the dreadnought run. Actually I’m not sure why Rose couldn’t still board Cobalt Hammer. She wasn’t replaced as Hammer’s flight engineer as far as I can tell. Did they not need a flight engineer for the bombing run?
I’m calling bullshit on Rose no longer being needed on the Ninka after the techs learned from her. If Rose was not needed on Hammer anyway, why couldn’t she stay on Ninka to help adapt the technology? In Cobalt Squadron Rose and the entire team of bomber flight engineers were forever sweating to get the baffler, a very new and finicky technology, working right under intensive conditions. The bugs were getting ironed out during Cobalt Squadron, but it doesn’t seem plausible that everything was ready to go within a few hours on adapting this new tech outside its original setting. New and untried tech doesn’t… work like that. There’s always something to trip you up.
So instead of staying on to help the deployment of the technology she built, Rose is transferred back to the Raddus where she is just in time to witness her sister’s death and where she has so little to do that she’s relegated to “doing droidwork.”
Let me get this straight, they’re so busy that they didn’t have a job for an experienced mechanic? How does that even make sense? And then, of course, there’s the setup for Rose and Finn’s meet-electrocute where they insult her skills still farther by handing her a taser and the order to stun deserters.
Remember, this order HAS to have come from Holdo or someone under her command because the Raddus’s senior officers are dead, Leia is in a coma, and Holdo has taken over.
To summarize so far: Holdo requested Rose come aboard the Ninka to teach her techs the baffler technology, then decides that a few hours in hyperspace are more than enough to figure out and adapt this new tech and its creator is no longer necessary. Holdo then takes command of the Raddus but doesn’t do shit to make use of Rose again because evidently there’s no point in making sure the baffler technology runs perfectly, guided by the person who made it.
I mean, why would Holdo want Rose to supervise the technology she built? It’s not like Holdo was using the baffler for any vital plan that was central to saving the Resistance or anything-
OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE. Holdo used Rose’s baffler tech for the shuttles that the entire surviving Resistance’s LIVES depended on. And yet the inventor of that technology, who was on THAT VERY SHIP, was never called to help fine-tune the technology and didn’t even KNOW of the plan, so that she inadvertently worked at cross-purposes with it.
WHY would Holdo not tap Rose to make sure the bafflers would work correctly? Rose knew that tech inside out. She had supervised and taught engineers to deploy the baffler technology. She got anxiety from the possibility that the tech might not work correctly and cost lives, and worked like hell to make sure it worked. You leave someone like that out of your plan? Leaving this precious resource untapped just so you can keep your cards close to your chest for no fucking reason?
Holdo stans have defended her refusal to tell Poe or anyone about the plan, saying she didn’t owe anyone an explanation. Sure seems like shitty leadership, but let’s say for the sake of argument that she didn’t have to tell them. What’s the reason for leaving out Rose, the technician who invented the technology the whole plan depended on? Does this look like the actions of a leader who cares about maximizing the chances of success and giving everyone the best chance at survival?
No, Holdo shows a consistent pattern of keeping secrets to the detriment of the mission, sowing fear and distrust among her crew, not even caring enough to tap the right person to make sure the crucial piece of technology for her plan is foolproof. Again, the baffler was a new technology that had been adapted out of its original setting within a day ago. The person who knew it better than anyone was right on board the ship Holdo commanded, but Holdo didn’t give a shit.
Holdo should have been all over Rose’s ass to make sure nothing could go wrong with the bafflers. She should have been inspiring and reassuring her crew by letting them know exactly what she was going to do and putting all their efforts behind it, giving them hope that they would survive and light the spark of resistance across the galaxy. Instead she turned people against her by demanding they take her on faith alone, and set adrift without a sense of purpose or control some of her best people ended up unknowingly sabotaging her plan.
People whose names she didn’t even know, by the way.
Rose’s history with the baffler and Holdo is yet more confirmation that Holdo didn’t actually care about the mission. She cared about gaining a sense of power by disempowering people in her command, and she cared about her false sheen of modesty. This is terrible leadership on every level, and the narrative of TLJ is disingenuous in demanding that we see her as a heroic figure who was right about everything.
L.J.'s Obsessions 