Can we have a minute for Oscar Isaac?
Ok fine – every minute is for Oscar Isaac, this is true. But he is very sneakily putting on a performance as Poe Dameron in Star Wars Resistance – it’s not always easy to go from portraying a character on-screen to providing their voice, but Isaac is making it look easy.
In “Station Theta Black,” Kaz and Poe scout out an abandoned First Order mining outpost, and encounter more than they bargained for. Phasma encounters Poe for the first (?) time, and Major Vonreg once again fails to finish off Poe or Kaz (but I do love getting to see his shiny TIE Interceptor again). A fitting midseason finale, this felt like the episode we’ve been building toward for the past few weeks.
As I mentioned, Poe fit in seamlessly as the cocky, “I never engage… unless provoked” commander we know and love, but it’s fascinating to see how much Kaz has grown this season too… and how much he still has to learn. We see the improvement in his flying skills in outrunning an explosion, but still see his discomfort with actual spy and military work (which, I know he was a pilot, but shouldn’t the New Republic navy have given him a bit more training for on-the-ground combat? Thanks, Mon Mothma). Despite his growth over the past 10 episodes, Kaz is still the reckless, comedic, earnest flyboy that we first met in episode 1, but that’s not a bad thing. There’s enough else going on in Resistance that Kaz’s growth doesn’t need to carry the show, and he does learn from his experiences as time goes on (unlike a certain other Star Wars protagonist whose name rhymes with Pezra Fridger).
This was, from the outset, clearly going to be a plot-focused episode, which means we didn’t get any more development of the Aces, the Doza family, or the still-criminally-underused Tam. We did, though, learn a bit more about the galaxy pre-The Force Awakens, particularly the fact that no one has any idea what the First Order is doing, even the Resistance. Poe and Leia (now apparently voiced by Carolyn Hennesy, who has never, to our knowledge, publicly mocked an assault victim) seem shocked to learn the scale of the First Order’s operation and just how many blasters they’re producing, and they know that this information won’t move the Senate to action. It all adds up to a much richer picture, and the knowledge that people underestimated the First Order right up until Hosnian Prime went the way of Alderaan. It may not seem that significant now, but looking at The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, it helps us understand how the New Republic was so unprepared, and why no one was willing to come to the Resistance’s aid on Crait: the First Order planned everything perfectly, and executed their blitzkrieg before anyone even realized it was happening. That background is the sort of value-add that I am thrilled to see in Resistance: creating a story that stands on its own, while simultaneously making us look at older tales in a new light.
As I mentioned above, there’s plenty more that I want out of Resistance. More aces! Intrigue on the Colossus! TAM AND SYNARA DATING! But we’ve got time for that. The first half of season one has introduced us to a world of characters that I already love – but there’s a storm coming, and we’re about to see how they deal with the new reality they’re about to fall into.
