Star Wars: 8 Ways The Last Jedi Says F**k You To J.J. Abrams

7. Poe Gets Reduced To Just Another "Hot-Headed Flyboy"

The problems with Admiral Holdo's (lack of a) plan and general positioning through the film as a faux-antagonist for the audience are problematic and ruined by retrospection regardless, but her "redemptive arc" only serves to do one thing: Take Poe Dameron down a few pegs.

Now, did anyone watch scenes like when Poe first meets Finn or helps Han and the crew get freed on Takodana, and think, "Man, that guy is really full of himself"?

Poe was literally called the "best pilot in the resistance", and acted as such - but in a way that maintained a solid sense of camaraderie, as seen by him giving Finn his jacket, or the way fellow pilots joyfully say they'll follow his lead.

He was not, in any way, in need of a Top Gun-style "attitude adjustment", so when Holdo states she's "seen pilots like [him] before", it doesn't register. The audience certainly has no frame of reference other than the genuine, in-the-moment mistake he made prior, leading to many pilots being killed, but that isn't reflective of anything else we've seen beforehand.

Whatever JJ didn't have planned going forward after TFA, he certainly laid the foundations for a morally solid character that had the audience on-side. Reducing all that character work to force him into a cheap "And you should learn to blindly trust your authority figures" plot with Holdo was not only misguided, but completely illogical.