Um… he’d sent Rose and Finn off to recruit a codebreaker and infiltrate the enemy. (Against direct orders) Then with no regard for information security he blabbed about the plan to them on a transmission into the enemy fleet. When they had no need to know about the plan.
I am pretty sure that one is on him.
Who is we? There are many who are affected by whole holds power.
But the residents of East Buttpipe, if they could just keep going about their day, may not have.
Incidentally, that sort of highlights another side issue: what was the plan?
Well, the plan was to get the other guy. You know, the James Bond In Space guy: not some criminal who predictably betrays them, but the guy that Maz recommended and vouched for. They got within seconds of introducing themselves to him, but then they were busted for a parking violation and wound up behind bars.
So that’s maybe the crucial turning point? Like, if they hadn’t needed to settle for the other guy, then maybe the dropships secretly make it to that abandoned base; and maybe Luke Skywalker survives going into IX; and so on and so forth.
So shouldn’t they have shown us why Rose and Finn parked like that? Sure, it’s a little thing; but it’s arguably the little thing.
Which wouldn’t have happened if Admiral Purple Hair had told him the plan.
Well, first of all, it’s worth pointing out that none of what you’re saying is a plot hole in Star Wars (ANH). Because all of what you’re talking about only becomes clear as the series progresses. It’s a bit apples-to-oranges to compare that to, say, the bizarre rules of the slow-speed space chase. In any case, though, if your question is, what was the plan, from Yoda and Obi-Wan’s perspective, well, to the extent that we have any reason to believe there WAS a plan, specifically, it might have been something like “I, Yoda, have looked deep into the force, and I can see that the balance will be restored by the son of skywalker. But he must learn to make his own way in life, make his own choices. You should keep an eye on him, but only from a very great distance. In time, he will come to you for help” or something like that. My point being, what type of “plan” does and does not make sense, and is and is not a plot hole, is very different in a universe in which magic is real and can be used to predict things.
Or maybe they didn’t have a plan. Or maybe they had an incredibly complex plan where they force-chatted each other up frequently, and Ben would say “hey, he learned to fly starships a few months earlier than we predicted” and then Yoda would say “understood. OK, let’s discard options 17a 17b and 17d, and lower our probability expectation for 17c to 13%… I’ll email you an updated flow chard in a few days” or something. We just don’t know. But that doesn’t make it a plot hole.
(That said, I can’t see any reason for Luke to grow up with the last name “Skywalker”. But, again, that’s only revealed to be a “plot hole” of any sort movies later…)
Right, I completely forgot about that, thanks!
Still, even with cloaking technology being a known quantity, Holdo’s plan pretty much just relied on nobody of the First Order thinking about setting the ‘ScanForCloakedShips’-option, until DJ told them to. Which seems a bit of a gamble to stake the entire rebellion on—it doesn’t seem too far-fetched an idea that somebody might, just might try to escape the doomed fleet without being detected.
In the end, the cloaking is just a lazy plot device: it fools the First Order until it doesn’t.
That’s a reasonably consistent explanation for almost everything… I just don’t see any reason to think that that’s what’s actually being portrayed on screen. In other words, that’s a truly excellent fanwank… but still a fanwank.
(That said, two quibbles: (a) she certainly could have told Poe “of course there’s a plan, but it’s a secret” instead of acting like she was a bumbling moron, and (b) Poe has been described as the greatest pilot in the resistance, and was crucially involved in defeating StarKiller Base just days earlier. I assume that when German officers showed up to take command of an air base in WWI and one of the pilots there was Manfred “The Red Baron” von Richtofen, they didn’t immediately start out by actively treating him with distrust. Again, not an obstacle that can not be overcome, but something that should be acknowledged on film.)
I’ve seen that complaint before but…isn’t he being raised by his uncle? Who is also named Skywalker?
Wookiepedia provides an explanation for the possibility of the hyperjump attack I haven’t seen put forward so far:
This would at least make for a plausible explanation as to why we’ve not seen anything similar, and why we won’t see it again—the shields the First Order uses have as a design flaw that they allow FTL objects through (which I think was explicitly mentioned in TFA for Starkiller Base), which maybe Imperial shields didn’t have, and which will presumably be corrected in the future.
Of course, a line or two to that effect would have been kind of nice in the actual movie (carelessness again)—I’m not entirely clear on where the info on Wookiepedia comes from.
Which she probably would have done if he hadn’t just violated orders, gotten a huge chunk of his allies massacred, gotten demoted, and then strutted onto the command deck and started demanding answers as though the Admiral answered to him, not vice versa.
He was in the doghouse for very good reason.
I vaguely think he is referred to as “Owen Lars” in the prequels… fairly sure he’s just called “Uncle Owen” in ANH itself.
Probably a little more complicated than a checkbox - tuning it may very well have been something that the codebreaker himself had to do, which makes paying him a bit more sensible.
My guess is Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Incredible Cross-Sections which is cited elsewhere in the article and is one of those “schematics and details about all the ships in the movie” style books for die-hard fans.
I saw the movie on Friday, and have finally gotten caught up with this thread. I don’t think I saw this point brought up:
The argument that Poe’s plan was a disaster is certainly valid and justified. But, it also led to the light-speed ramming of Snoke’s ship, which severely damaged and/or destroyed several other ships as well. If Poe hadn’t gone through with his plan, then the ramming wouldn’t have taken place. More of the Resistance would have survived, but they would have had nothing but a bunch of transports, while the First Order fleet would still be in tip-top shape.
Perhaps we’ll learn later that this is the silver lining, that in the end, the odds swung slightly more towards the Resistance due to Poe’s failed plan. That the First Order fleet was crippled to the point that they can’t go after the remaining Resistance immediately, which gives both of them some time to build their forces back up.
Another plot hole I just thought of… it’s ridiculous that Finn and Rose immediately (correctly?) deduce that the First Order has developed light speed tracking. “They tracked us through light speed… they must have invented a previously-believed-impossible technology”. What they should instead have immediately assumed is that there was a tracking device planted somewhere in the fleet, like the one planted on the Millenium Falcon back in ANH.
That’s like “hey, the government has a transcript of this conversation we had that should have been secret… THEY MUST HAVE TELEPATHS” as opposed to “… THEY MUST HAVE PLANTED A BUG”.
That’s a beautifully Shakespearean tragedy… she is upset at him, so she is more curt in her interactions with him than she otherwise would have been. He then thinks there is no plan at all, so screws everything up. Their weaknesses amplify each other to nearly destroy the resistance.
Trouble is… I just don’t think that’s what we saw on screen. Laura Dern is a fantastic actress. If she were trying to convey “of course there’s a plan, but I’m so angry with you that I’m letting that anger get the better of me and shutting you down”, I think she could have done it. Instead, her character at that point just seems like “generic faceless bureaucrat who keeps him in the dark purely because that’s what the plot demands”.
But… this is probably just a YMMV issue at this point.
Well, in the context of SW films (and many similar type films), in which hotheaded young men who buck authority always save the day, it might seem more narratively effective in many ways to let it seem like the hotheaded young man is going to save the day by bucking authority… and then revealing that he didn’t.
Not really. Those bombers were so slow (not to mention ridiculous), they’d have been massacred just as easily running away as going ahead with the mission.
Speaking of the First Order fleet, where’d those new-fangled AT-ATs and stuff come from to harass the rebel base? I don’t think that Ren & Hux’s vehicle was large enough to hold them, was it? Did they dropship them down a mile or two away and make them walk the rest of the way to the base for dramatic effect?
Probably because it’d be boring but they never really get into what the Empire or First Order means to the average Joe. Are there layers upon layers of hierarchy to the point where the mayor of Desert Dirt Farmville is a FO loyalist selected by the district bureaucrat who was selected by the regional administrator selected by the planetary head who was empowered by the solar system leader who reports to Snoke (or whoever)? Or is it just that planetary government has to pay tithes/taxes to the First Order and provide resources/manpower when directed but is otherwise largely doing its own thing? I mean, everyone everywhere largely wants to raise the kids and pay the mortgage regardless of who is in charge but doing so harder when some spaceship arrives and says they’re going to turn your town into a mineral mine and, by the way, you’re all First Order mineral miners now getting paid 15¢ an hour. Your opinion on who is in charge suddenly changes at that point.
Well, if so, then again it should have been on screen—you can fanwank basically anything, but having to do so already means that the film’s not showing what it ought to be showing.
Also, why should the codebreaker have any special abilities/knowledge in that regard? All he knows is that there’s a bunch of cloaked ships headed for the planet—that doesn’t really put him above any Imperial tech in terms of knowledge of how to discover them. Alternatively, he could just be Special, capable of whatever tech wizardry the plot deems necessary—which then would undermine the movie’s theme that Special people really aren’t all that special after all.