Having read a lot of the arguments on this subject, I realised there had to be a separation of the military angle and the character management as plot device in the movie to make any sense of it. The Last Jedi tries to uproot too many well-honed myths in one go which makes it a bit of a mumbo-jumbo to many. Star Wars fans are entrenched in their myths and don’t like change, at least not in this amount. Perhaps a little bit less would have been better for a more concise story.
We are introduced to Vice Admiral Holdo after we see the top brass of Resistance wiped out by Kylo Ren and his squadron. Holdo gets some credit and awe from Poe for past military accomplishments so despite her character being thrown at us out of the blue, we know that she’s intelligent and a capable military decision maker. Immediately this is questioned by Poe throwing a tantrum. He had just been demoted from commander to captain for having destroyed the entire bomber fleet during a daring mission where he ignored the General’s orders to withdraw.
During the exchange of words, Poe is being a flyboy and Holdo is a bit snotty. This results in a stupid tit-for-tat in which Holdo rightfully keeps her plans secret from Poe and Poe, rightfully in his mind, keeps his plans from her. The end result is of course further disaster. Many opinions have been voiced both about the exchange and its implications. Let us have a look at them as there are a few things that work and don’t work well for the story and it’s one of the many tensions that has put people off the movie. For my part, I enjoyed the movie enough on the first outing and subsequent viewings improved upon this impression and have a positive view of both characters that are subject of this article.
Military decision making
In military decision making tactical and strategic command is separated for a good reason.
Poe, as a squadron leader is responsible for the efficient running of his squadron. That means he receives orders from the strategic command and needs to implement and execute them. He needs to make sure the fighters are in good order, that the pilots are capable of discharging their duty, that they know how to respond to his commands. Moving from one formation to another takes practice however good you are at what you do. Supervising people and their equipment is a lot of responsibility. In effect, Poe has a lot on his hands just running his squadron. He has direct contact with the pilots, the engineers, other squadron leaders, ground staff, etc. I’m only laying this out to illustrate the fact that while Holdo could have done better at getting his buy-in, Poe is still a very much respected leader whose role is influential in the decisions made by the strategists. His decisions and advice aren’t dealt with dismissively, which is why both Leia and Holdo are justly pissed off with him.
That leads us to my next point of the military chain of command and the need-to-know basis. Poe gets knocked down a peg when he’s told he doesn’t need to know the details of the greater plan and in turn he decides to not tell of his plan to anyone, again, in pursuit of glory. Everything that can go wrong with Rose and Finn’s mission does go horribly wrong. Had they ‘got the right guy’; they wouldn’t have been sold out to the First Order by DJ. DJ ratting out the cloaked escape attempt to the First Order jeopardised the transport ships, resulting in further heavy losses. It is slightly unclear how many people started off The Last Jedi with the Resistance but we know they had about 400 left after the suicidal bomber run and ended the movie with about 20. Strength is in numbers and this is not what a commander aims for at the end of a battle.
On an emotional level we agree with Poe about the good of withholding his plan from the successors of the leadership, however one of the cornerstones of a successful battle is communication. Feeding up all communication and intelligence is by far more important to a successful outcome than feeding all communication down to everyone. Operational security is a thing and hyperspace tracking is a new technology as far as everyone is concerned. Holdo has every reason to suspect there maybe a traitor on the ship and Poe withholding the details of how the tracking works keeps Holdo in the dark and reduces her to less efficient decisions. So Poe is at first annoyed he doesn’t get all the info but in return doesn’t give all the info out either. Again, not the sign of a good leader he so aspires to become. Trust is a big thing in a battle and both have failed at it massively.
There has been a lot of justification on the ‘success’ of his bomber run stating the bombers would have been doomed anyway at the next step during Kylo’s attack. Or that he had the right to the mutiny because if only he’d been told of The Plan – which he liked – he would have cooperated. Hindsight is 20/20. Poe is a great pilot and a great squadron leader. However, there is no guarantee that the bombers would have been destroyed. You don’t sacrifice your troops unless you have to. You don’t sacrifice valuable equipment unless you have to. There are necessary losses in a battle but these aren’t your first resort. There is a saying that goes, ‘there are old climbers and there are bold climbers but there are no old, bold climbers’. I have seen a few variations of it but the essence is the same. Poe destroys the dreadnought through bold action and with heavy losses. Holdo destroys Snoke’s ship with the loss of only one ship and one life, her own.
In the last battle on Crait we see Poe learning the lessons he needs to learn. When Finn disobeys the abortion order of the attack run and nearly commits suicide it’s a clear sign to Poe that he did the same with terrible consequence. He now understands. In the cave he learns to shut up and listen, literally, which gives him the right kind of intelligence to make a decision. Had it not been for Rey, it would have been a bad decision but the Poe at the beginning of the movie would have made a stand and fought right there in the mouth of the cave. Or been forced to give the remainder of the Resistance forces up for execution. What an end that would have been.
Character management
There is a lot of emotional attachment to Poe’s character which is what stories are about: the viewer has to be invested in them for the story to work. That attachment makes Holdo’s character seen as more negative than it is and provides the tension the story needs. As mentioned, we see Poe go through major character development. He starts the movie off as the typical, glorified flyboy we are used to in Star Wars movies and ends it as a burgeoning leader who thinks about his plan, has good reasons for doing it – vs. ‘jumping into the cockpit to blow something up’. At the beginning he is dismissed by Leia and by the end approved by her. It is a nice arc indeed. Leia wants him to become more than just an ace pilot. Maybe she sees him as the son she and Han could have had. Both Leia and Holdo have an appreciation for tactics of good instinct; after all improvisation is a tool in their Leader’s Manual.
Poe himself wants the same, albeit he doesn’t consciously understand. Just like Anakin and Luke didn’t understand why their masters wanted them to be patient and concentrate on the present, Poe fails the very same lesson from those he looks up to. So he walks into the same inflexible wall of authority that all students of crafts do. That wall of authority has been widely criticised by many, saying that if Holdo hadn’t been condescending to him throughout their initial exchange she might have been able to buy his cooperation for her plan.
After the feat of Kylo wiping out all fighters, Poe doesn’t have anything to command, therefore as far as command is concerned, he no longer has a place in it. He can’t just jump into a ship to ‘go and blow something up’ anymore. He has a hard time of coming to terms with this and the fact that Holdo is nothing like he expected and as Leia stated aptly, he can’t get his head out of his cockpit. It is pretty much expected that he won’t back down from a fight with the new leader. He wants to go blow something up because that’s what he’s always been like and it’s very hard to leave the security of who you are and change. I’ve seen it many times in life and is a mistake I made numerous times as well. The internet is littered with opinions and advice by people who think that having only a part of the picture enables them to understand things better than those who see more. It is so common in fact that people are not aware they fall into this trap. For this reason, Poe’s impassioned know-it-all attitude against Holdo’s frosty, detached demeanour is an excellent plot device. It drives the story forward, moves Poe to make one bad decision after another until he learns. He needs to understand that his decisions cost lives and he can see the results of it for himself in the Crait cave.
It has a parallel to Yoda’s message about failure: it is through that which we learn, not just about being shown what’s right but also what’s wrong. That’s how we grow, if only we can understand our own mistakes and those of others’.
Admittedly, the script could have been written a lot better at highlighting these tensions, using some of the length to go more in-depth about these characters. Many, including Vice Admiral Holdo deserved a more thorough treatment and with a lot more attention to their background. It’s a saving grace Laura Dern is such an amazing actress that she has been able to portray so much in such little time. Holdo is one of my favourite characters from the movie and has been added to the group of people who were just too great to have so little said about them, right next to Snoke.
ansteall 