sherlockpotter said:
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.
Right, they don’t need to disable the signal to shoot the canons, they need to disable it to stop the ships from leaving atmosphere, where they’d become unstoppable as their shields would protect their “weakness”. Only by stopping the ships on the planet they can be destroyed by shooting the cannons.
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?
Like I said, the whole thing is dumb if you think too hard on it, why can’t they just shoot a torpedo at the tower and blow it up? Because we’re told they need a ground team to disable it, they “can’t take it down from the air”, we’re not shown or explained why, we just have to take their word for it, like wise we have to assume they can’t leave the fleet permanently stuck there because we’re told they can only do it temporarily. Of course from a storytelling perspective, the reason why is temporary is to keep a sense of urgency and tension, as there should still be a chance for the Final Order to escape, and so there should be an urgency to take down the ships while they can. Instead of “we disabled the nav signal, the whole fleet is stuck here for good!”. We don’t get that release of tension until Finn takes the command ship down.
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.
Poe’s full line is “they’re toast, come on!” implying there’s still work to do, so it’s safe to assume they continue taking down the rest of the SDDSSDs while Lando rescues Finn and Jannah and Rey is busy dying and such. Yes the sheer number of SDDSSDs is ridiculous, but we get an equally ridiculous amount or civilian ships so the implication is supposed to be they take 'em all down. And in case you’re not convinced, that is the plan as discussed in the briefing: “Fighters and freighters can take out their cannons if there are enough of us”, it might seem like there’s just too many of them, but as Lando says “There are more of us!”. There’s still debris falling down as Rey leaves on Luke’s X-wing that implies they kept on blowing them up, and all the enemy ships are gone on those final shots, so it’s all wrapped up in a nice bow. Again, it’s ridiculous by the sheer scope of the fleet, but that’s the way this movie operates.
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!
[3] Things go according to plan, Poe is fully aware the nav signal won’t be down for long.
[5] Poe is feeling hopeless because they’re counting on backup to take down the fleet, there’s too many ships for the Resistance alone.
[6] The civilian fleet is not there to help Finn, it’s there to take down the Final Order, the whole fleet. Poe doesn’t even know of Finn’s plans.
[7] Poe is surprised that the command ship is destroyed which turns the fleet into sitting ducks. That wasn’t part of the plan, a surprise to be sure, but a welcomed one.
[9] Everyone ignores the second, fully operational tower on the ground, because there’s no ships left for it to guide.
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?
Because it’s the only shot they’ve got at defeating the fleet. If they don’t blow them up while they’re on Exegol then they’ll never be able to blow them up. If they don’t block them from leaving the atmosphere it’s over.
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.
It’s more like an inverse of the plan in TLJ to temporarily disable the tracker so the fleet can escape.
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?
I agree it’s bad, specially after a less ridiculous plan fails in the previous movie, and Poe and Finn were supposed to learn from it. But it’s what we’ve got to work with, and we have to work with what we’ve got. I don’t think cutting a few words does anything to make it better, I think it would make it more nonsensical, and remove elements of urgency and tension that at least work on a surface level.