All these people sneering “well how would YOU have done it better?” to people who hated TLJ like there isn’t a simple answer–focus on the stormtroopers.
Keeps Finn center stage. Puts Phasma in a key position for a bigger role. Not to mention it puts Star Wars in the unique position of not relying on the default “blow it up and we win” position. What if the Resistance, with nothing to blow up, focuses on the people? What if it decides to undermine the First Order that way–by attempting to liberate the very people trained to kill them? And who would lead the charge? Finn.
Finn wakes and there is a doctor who rushes in and calmly answers his questions, who helps him extricate himself from his suit with dignity and informs Poe and Leia immediately. They sit him down and talk about their plan–starting a stormtrooper rebellion. It was Poe’s idea, but he wouldn’t have thought of it if he had never met Finn. Leia looks at him critically, and takes his hand. With that touch, they can both feel how powerful the Force is in him.
“You’ll be a symbol of hope,” she says, and Poe beams. There could be no greater compliment from the general. They spend a little time preparing, but they need something else. They need Luke.
Luke Skywalker, in this version, did not run away, did not even consider running away, but rather went looking for the Jedi’s beginnings find the balance of dark and light–Luke Skywalker felt Rey and Finn awaken across half the galaxy, and settled on Ach-To, and waited. And when Rey came to him, he taught her the way he himself had been taught. He had her run. He had her face her demons (in this version, it is less her longing for her parents and more her fear of abandonment), and when she is ready, he lifts his X-Wing out of the sea. She didn’t need to. She already has faith. She started with the trust Luke worked so hard to find.
They leave when she has a vision about Finn being in trouble, because she needs to help her friends. Luke smiles. He knows that feeling.
Meanwhile, there’s another young stormtrooper feeling the stirrings of rebellion inside them. Perhaps it’s Rose. Perhaps she’s a lowly mechanic and kept to herself, kept her head down, just trying to survive. Perhaps her older sister (unrelated by blood, perhaps, but they knew what they were to each other) was still killed as battle fodder and she’s had enough. He didn’t know her but she recognizes him. Pulls him aside to a corridor and hisses “traitor” but she says it with a degree of awe, not condemnation. By the end of the conversation she’s nodding and saying she’ll help. By the end of the conversation, Finn catches himself asking her name and she says “R0S-E23” and he thinks of the flowers Poe showed him on Yavin and he asks if he can call her “Rose”. She beams.
And somewhere out in hyperspace, Luke and Rey and Poe are speeding toward their location–Phasma’s caught the scent, and they’re in danger. Rey could feel it.
They manage to get enough stormtroopers on their side to start a rebellion and symbolically blow up the ship in the process (because they have to blow up something), but Phasma confronts them in a huge hangar bay. Brothers and sisters, face off against each other and Finn has had enough. He walks right in the middle of all the shooting and calls for a cease-fire, his eyes flashing, his stance tall and proud. Everyone knew FN-2187. Everyone knew how high his aptitude was, and of his escape. He’s legendary among the stormtroopers, envied and hated and revered. Phasma screams at them to keep firing but all of them stop and listen. Several of the stormtroopers on Finn’s side forcibly wrestle her to the ground, disarming her and ensuring she doesn’t move.
“My name is Finn!” he calls out, and it echoes through the hangar bays. He is a person. He has a name. He was not born for this, being cannon fodder and less than nothing, and neither were they, he tells them. Some of them shift, unsure of what to believe. Rose, who was wearing her helmet, takes it off and goes to stand by Finn. “My name is Rose,” she says proudly. Another takes their helmet off. And then another. And then another. “There is still hope,” Finn says, looking every single person in the eye that he can. “For a life beyond this. There is still light beyond the darkness.” He turns to Phasma where she is being held on the ground. “Even for you.”
“TRAITOR!” Kylo Ren screams from where he has arrived, one cue, at the end of the hangar bay. Finn, without a lightsaber but still armed, goes to fight him and is losing ground fast, and just as Kylo goes to strike the killing blow, he is intercepted by none of other than Rey. She had built a double bladed lightsaber during her training, and untwists it now, handing one half to Finn. He lights it, and they charge together.
At one point, Kylo Ren escapes to the upper levels of the hangar, and spots Luke, who has been evacuating as many stormtroopers as he can to Leia’s ship. They take Phasma with them as a hostage. Poe, meanwhile, has been coordinating a separate assault as a diversion. “I DESTROYED YOUR ORDER!” Kylo screams, pointing an accusing finger at Luke. “THERE IS NO HOPE LEFT FOR THE JEDI!”
“Wrong,” Luke says, dropping his cloak and striding forward, gripping his father’s lightsaber in his hand, going to stand by his students (for Finn, he knows, will be among the greatest of his pupils). “The word ‘Jedi’ means hope. These two are Jedi, but so are all of those people back there, who you took as children and corrupted. Every spark of light that is still left inside you is the Jedi.”
“Hope is like the sun,” Leia says, striding up in front of her brother and his students and standing, her old lightsaber finally in hand again, blue as the sky of Alderaan. “If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night. And they all will,” she says, nodding back to the stormtroopers. “So can you, Ben. Come with us.”
Kylo hesitates, but ultimately bares his teeth and charges toward his mother, rage radiating off of him like a tidal wave. He never makes it within five feet of her–Luke Skywalker Force-pushes him so strongly he flies a hundred feet down the corridor. Before the hangar doors close, we see his face contorted with rage, and possibly confusion.
They all make it out, and Rey is wondering what they do now, since they didn’t defeat Kylo. Luke puts his arms around both her and Finn’s shoulders, and says, “Now the real training begins.”
