What’s the issue with the “for just minutes” line?? I think it’s pretty straightforward:
The original plan is to disable the tower on the ground, when they reach Exegol Pride switches the signal to the command ship, so the plan changes to disable the tower on the ship, they succeed in disabling it, which leaves the ships stuck “for just minutes” (Poe reiterates this by saying “Nav signal’s down, but not for long!”), but Finn decides to take the whole ship down, which leaves the fleet stuck for good.
Of course there’s still the tower on the ground someone could fire back up, but at that point there’s a whole galaxy of ships attacking the Sith Fleet on their bright red weak point so it’s safe to say “they’re toast”. The whole fleet is destoryed, and the people who built it are crushed by rocks, so it’s all taken care of. The whole thing is kinda dumb, but if we removed all the dumb things in this movie we’d be left with nothing. In this case removing the line would turn the plan into a “we do this one thing and we win, period.” wich would massively lower the stakes of the Exegol assault. Instead the plan is to stall the ships from leaving Exegol long enough for Lando to rile up ‘the galaxy’ to come and take them down.
Disabling the navigation systems is not the main goal or the win condition, the plan was always to temporairly delay the Final Order. In fact their “victory” in disabling the tower happens during the ‘lowest point’ in the battle, since “no one is coming to help them”.
That doesn’t make sense though. You’re saying that the entire Sith Fleet is stuck for good because “Finn decides to take the whole [command] ship down.” When was it established that knocking out the command ship would cause a chain reaction and blow up the entire 10,000+ ship fleet? If knocking out the command ship will cripple the entire fleet, why do they even care about the nav tower? Why don’t they go after the command ship in the first place? It’s not like the nav tower is actually a shield generator that’s protecting the command ship, because they establish that “shields don’t work in Exegol’s atmosphere.” And how would that chain reaction work out logistically anyway? Is every ship connected directly to the command ship’s computer? And if so, what do they need the damn nav tower for??
The film makes it very clear that there’s only thing that unites the Sith Fleet - the nav tower signal. You take that out, the ships can’t leave the planet. The command ship isn’t even mentioned - not in the pre-mission briefing when they’re expositing all of this nonsense, not when they arrive on the planet - until it becomes the source of the navigation signal.
And if we ignore all of that and stick with the “command ship” theory anyway, that means we’re trying to do the entire battle sequence without setting up the plan, the goal, the plot, or the stakes. Hal, that’s not “subtlety”; that’s just sloppy writing. We can avoid all of this confusion if we just cut four words from the script. Four words!
It’s not a “theory”, I’m literally just laying out what happens in the movie. I’ve been mostly agreeing with everything you comment on this thread Sherlock, but I think you’re misunderstanding this whole plot point.
When was it established that knocking out the command ship would cause a chain reaction and blow up the entire 10,000+ ship fleet?
That’s not what I’m saying, the fleet is stuck there because they lose the nav signal from the command ship, the ships are blown up by hitting the underbelly cannons, it’s all set up in the pre-mission briefing. It’s not about the ship or the tower, it’s about the nav signal itself. They can’t leave without it.
“Nav signal’s down, but not for long!” is a direct call back to the fact the plan was always to temporairly disable their navigational systems, that’s why soon after Poe says “I don’t know R2, maybe nobody else is coming” and “we’ll have to take them ourselves”, because he thinks they’re losing their ‘window’ to attack the ships while they’re stuck. Otherwise, why not just take down the nav signal and leave until they get the resources to take down the ships? There would be no urgency at all. That’s why it’s important to set up that the ships will only be stuck there temporairly, taking out those four words makes everything worse, we’re left with lower stakes, no urgency, and an even more implausible setup.
Later on in the fight Poe still believes the fleet is only momentairly disabled, which is why he says “This is our last chance, we’ve got to hit those cannons now!”, he doesn’t know Finn is trying to take the command ship down, and so it’s not until he sees the ship blowing up that he realizes “The fleet is stuck here! They’re toast, come on!”. So the whole dynamic of the Exegol assault won’t make sense if you take out those four words.
Oh god, every time I think about any scene in this movie, it gets more and more confusing lol.
Okay, so, here’s the thing. Yes, they establish that hitting the underbelly canons will destroy the ships. Yes, they say they want to disable the Nav beacon. And yes, I agree that the mission is “about the nav signal itself.”
But, like, they don’t need to “temporarily disable” the Nav signal in order to destroy the underbelly canons. The underbelly canons are a weak spot because “Shields don’t work in atmosphere” or whatever. And if - as we agree - “[the ships] can’t leave without [the nav signal],” why is their plan to disable it temporarily instead of permanently? How does that make any sense? And if they are trying to disable it permanently…why don’t we let Poe’s mission briefing establish that?
Also, after Poe says “They’re stuck here! They’re toast!” J.J. kindly cuts to a wide shot of the Sith Fleet:
And in the background of that wide shot, we can see roughly 4200 Super-Duper-Death-Star-Star-Destroyers (classic SDDSSDs) still hovering perfectly in formation, completely unopposed, completed un-blown up. Yet Poe isn’t screaming “Hurry! The Nav Signal is destroyed and they can’t leave the planet! We have to blow them all up before they don’t leave the planet!” He’s just like, “Nah man, they’re stuck.” And they get outta there without exploding any more ships.
So, given that they unconcernedly leave a whole bunch of ships behind; and that, if the navigation signal is gone, they won’t be able to navigate off of the planet, my read of the situation is:
- They send a sabotage crew in to destroy the navigation tower.
- They send an aerial crew for cover fire and support.
- Finn tries to destroy the Nav tower with his grenades, but it’s not powerful enough, and the Nav tower starts to come back online.
- Finn decides to destroy the entire command ship to make sure the nav tower is destroyed.
- Poe’s feeling pretty hopeless because so many of them are dying while trying to take out the nav tower.
- Reinforcements come, and give the Resistance the additional support they need to hold off the First/Final Order and let Finn complete his mission.
- Finn blows up the ship. Poe thinks this went according to the original plan. He doesn’t realize Finn had to improvise to destroy the nav tower, and is still stuck on the ship.
- Falcon picks up Finn and Jannah.
- Everyone ignores the second, fully operational tower on the ground, because f*ck it. WE WON, BABY!
I think the part I don’t understand in your explanation is, “the plan was always to temporairly disable their navigational systems.” Like…why? Why would you decide to temporarily block them from leaving, then try to destroy every single one of their 10,000+ ships in the “just minutes” before the navigation signal goes back online? The navigation signal that doesn’t even need to be destroyed for them to destroy the ships, because the ships already don’t have shields in atmosphere?
It’s like in ROTJ - Han didn’t just disable the shield generator for 60 seconds and then tell Lando, “You’ve got 60 seconds to destroy the Death Star!!” He just destroyed the shield generator. End of story.
And I don’t blame you for reading it the other way. Chris and J.J. clearly had no clue what was happening in their own finale. It’s mind-bogglingly poor writing, in so many ways that I honestly just scratched the surface here. But all of this confusion on both of our parts sort of gets back to my original point. If we can make this whole thing make a lot more sense by just cutting a few words, why wouldn’t we?