Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Star Wars: Resistance television show, and has featured in a score of additional novels, comics, and short stories.
As such, audiences have followed the young Dameron from his earliest days in the New Republic Navy, including his The Last Jedi. We even get glimpses of a young, two-year-old Poe as he and his just-retired Rebellion parents make a permanent home on Yavin IV following the events of the original trilogy.
To say that Star Wars fans have a pretty good hold on the fighter pilot’s character is an understatement – which is what makes Force-sensitive tree in his backyard that was gifted to his mother by none other than Luke Skywalker, and was so distressed that his parents’ lives and many sacrifices would be for naught once the First Order rose up that he decided to leave the ineffectual Republic behind to General Organa’s next iteration of the Rebellion.
Then there are the character problems such a twist also creates. Even though Poe was essentially made to be the Han Solo of the sequel trilogy’s trio of protagonists – the older pilot with the self-assured smile and the penchant for wise-cracking – he was always the sure-footed hero who might bite off more than he can chew but who never erred in his understanding of what is right and wrong. Poe’s flaws were meant to reside in his present, not his past – that was the whole point of his character arc in The Last Jedi, after all – and this, in turn, was meant to be a huge contrast with the rest of the Star Wars sequels’ cast. Think of him, then, as more Leia than Han.
Just why director and co-writer J.J. Abrams wanted to take the character down this road is unknown, particularly since it’s not meant to be a revelation that makes the audience fundamentally reassess the nature of Dameron or, at the least, its understanding of him (just the opposite of the planet of Kijimi – a relationship that doesn’t particularly amount to much, in the grand scheme of things, and one that could just as easily have been heightened through other means, more in keeping with the established backstory and characters.
