It’s in brackets in your changelist, but I’m not sure why you’d remove the shot of the droid alerting the resistance. Are you considering it for the sake of making the X-Wing/Poe reveal a bit more surprising?
If it were up to me, I’d keep that in. Both the First Order and Resistance get messaged, both send in the cavalry- that makes sense to me. I think having one and not the other only risks raising the question for a viewer, when we’re already wondering how Poe survived. I don’t think the excitement of an unexpected heroic rescue outweighs what you lose.
Yeah, you may be right, I will reconsider this. The idea was to give more suspense to the First Order spy discovering them and keep the Resistance bit secret.
I thought that might be the case. I forget which order the two spies notify their masters in, but if it goes FO>R then probably changing it to R>FO would have your intended effect. That way it’d be Resistance hope > First Order threat > First Order arrive first and get the drop on us > Resistance arrive just in time. But it might already be that. Alternatively, for a similar effect to increase the threat of FO and minimise hope for the Resistance, how about changing the droid’s subtitles to imply the Resistance may not get the message? “If anybody is picking this up, please notify the Resistance that I’ve found the droid!” or similar. Maybe even as explicit as “The First Order have a spy here! They’re coming for the droid!”
Edit: Or, to put it another way, the risk of the Resistance not making it in time can be as tense as us not expecting them to show up at all.