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.