Gambling for Survival
In A New Hope, Luke Skywalker successfully completes a Jedi training exercise while his eyes are covered by a helmet. The subsequent dialogue between Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi draws a sharp contrast between depending on luck and having faith in the Force. Han, who only believes in what he can see, looks at Luke’s surprising success and scoffs, “I call it luck.” Obi-Wan, on the other hand, puts his trust in the Force and believes “There’s no such thing as luck.”
This contrast comes to the fore in The Last Jedi. The Resistance Vice Admiral Holdo plans to escape the First Order by hiding on the mineral planet Crait. She closes her first briefing with an appeal to faith in the Force: “May the Force be with us.” She hides her plan from Poe Dameron and challenges him to have faith in her leadership by reminding him of a proverb of Leia Organa’s: “Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.”
However, the hotheaded Poe does not respond well to being kept in the dark and asked to trust in something he cannot see. Together with Finn and Rose Tico, he anxiously takes matters into his own hands, concocting a plan to sneak Finn and Rose onto Supreme Leader Snoke’s Star Destroyer and disable its tracking system so the Resistance can escape. To do this, Finn and Rose must enlist an ally from the casino on Canto Bight.
Rose tells Poe that she met Finn by “luck,” and everything on Canto Bight revolves around gambling on games of chance. The planet’s main feature is a casino, and even the guards in the local prison spend their spare time playing card games. The casino patrons go to Canto Bight because they think they can win by getting lucky, and Finn and Rose are no different.
Fittingly, when Holdo learns of their plan, she rebukes Poe using the language of gambling: “You have bet the survival of the Resistance on bad odds and put us all at risk.” Holdo’s plan is based on wisdom, patience, and faith in the Force; Poe, Finn, and Rose’s plan is a foolish and impatient gamble based on luck.
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Characters: Finn / Poe Dameron / Rose Tico / Vice Admiral Holdo
Films: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
GO DEEPER INTO THE ARCHIVES…
Concepts: faith / hiding / gambling / luck / patience and haste / sight and blindness / wisdom and foolishness
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This post reminds me of something that I think a lot of people misunderstand about the Finn/Rose storyline in The Last Jedi. Years ago, a co-worker said that subplot was pointless and didn't matter. (Ironically, this same person loved Avengers: Infinity War, which has a subplot involving Thor getting a powerful axe to kill Thanos but he ends up not doing it.) I countered by saying that the storyline did affect the overall plot, but in a negative way. If they hadn't tried doing it their way, the Resistance would have landed on Crait with no problems.