Anyway, I was out doing Christmas shopping and I was thinking a little bit about Poe's storyline in the movie and the reason why I like it.
First, to get this out of the way, regarding the issue of it being a political statement, I'll just say that it doesn't make a great deal of sense in universe for Poe reasons for Holdo not being what he expected to be about gender. Poe works with Leia, who is a woman. Why would he be surprised that another military leader he never met turn out to be female? The interpretation of that line as being about sexism doesn't really make sense for the particular character, because he's used to working with a female general.
Ok, now on to the meat of my defense of the Poe Holdo storyline. There's this trope in American popular culture of a character ignoring the orders of superiors and ending up saving the day and getting praised by everyone for it. At least half the time, it turns out that the superior is corrupt or outright working for the bad guys, as though anyone who disagrees with the totally awesome hero must be evil even if the superior makes more sense than the hero. Especially in cases like that, I tend to find the hero annoying.
Here, though, Poe appears to be doing this trope, but Poe turns out to be wrong. Holdo actually isn't a traitor and actually had the better the plan (whether her reasons for not divulging made sense or not is something that perhaps could be discussed elsewhere... personally it's something I find I can roll with, but other people can roll with things about these movies I can't, so it's just a personal preference). By being a loose cannon who didn't play by the rules, all Poe did was get a bunch of people killed. Poe's storyline is not about trying to be "woke" for me, but about turning tired cliches of blockbuster filmmaking that I personally find annoying on their head.
It's also interesting to note that even though the OT is about rebellion vs. authority, the tired old trope doesn't actually surface once. There's no single case of somebody in the OT disobeying an order and saving the day
because they disobeyed the order. You don't even see Solo do this, even though he says "I take orders from just one person."
Now, the PT has Qui-Gon Jinn, but that kind of goes what I was referring to earlier with the intention behind the character being modeled. The thing is, from the point of view of the films, the Jedi Council appears to be right to not have trained Anakin. I guess the intention is that if a Jedi like Qui-gon had trained Anakin instead of the more severe (which is kind of a retcon, but whatever) , less compassionate, and less experienced Obi-wan, Anakin wouldn't have turned, but I don't think the films really establish this successfully. It could have maybe worked to set this up if they'd shown more scene of Obi-Wan interacting with Anakin in TPM so that we could directly see a contrast to Qui-Gon, but I suppose Jar-Jar was "they key to all this" so that was not important.
I suppose if the Qui-Gon stuff were better done, and a sort of strained, more formal (or stricter) relationship with Obi-Wan was well established while Qui-Gon was still around to contrast it with, it would show why "playing by your own rules" was justified in this case, and thus, it would be a successful and well-done example of this trope. Instead we get something that (unintentionally, I suspect) reads as a subversion, since Qui-Gon's insistence on Anakin's training gets all the Jedi killed.
I think the trope bothers me because the authority figures the hero is totally awesome for disobeying usually make more sense than the hero. Like, the stories seem to be saying: Isn't it totally terrible when people with a lot of responsibility expect people under them to do things that make sense in high-stakes situations? Much of the time, it boils down to the suggestion that the expecting people to act rationally rather than encouraging them to act stupidly and impulsively is actively
evil.
So, in summary, I like Poe's story because I see it as about deconstructing and subverting something I usually hate, rather than trying to insert a political "hot topic" where it doesn't actually belong.
But yeah, each film was like a "closeout" on the old. So they didn't really plan to have Luke around after this, the torch needed to be passed -- that's the entire theme of the trilogy anyway.
