1. To blow up the 120-km “Death Star” in Star Wars, the rebels needed detailed plans for the base and a full-scale invasion force — as well as the supernatural targeting skills of the most powerful Force-user in the galaxy. To destroy the exponentially larger and better-protected “Starkiller Base” in The Force Awakens, all that was needed was a janitor with no special skills, a few run-of-the-mill handheld explosives, a couple not very difficult X-wing blaster strikes, and some moxie. It also helped that the Millennium Falcon was able to “fly low.”

First, Finn is a Stormtrooper. Sanitation might have been part of his duty rotations, but that’s the way a great number of militaries work: non-combat duty shifts mixing in with training and engagements. So calling him a “janitor” is plain wrong.

Handheld explosives brought down the shield generator on Endor back in Return of the Jedi, so we can figure that the “thermal oscillator” Starkiller had a similar vulnerability to attack.

Those weren’t blasters, those were proton torpedoes that the X-Wings were dropping. A whole mess of them. Similar to what Luke used on Death Star I. Back then it just took two with a one in a million shot. This time it took a lot more.

The whole thing took a team effort, which puts it a little closer to Jedi than Star Wars in terms of the similarity scale. I, for one, happen to like the idea that it takes a lot more than just the “Chosen One” to get the job done.

2. The wily Han Solo loses track of his most prized possession, the Millennium Falcon, for more than a dozen years. He has no idea where it is — in the entire Galaxy. When you lose something in your house, that’s bad; when you lose something on your planet, you kiss it goodbye but pray for a miracle; when you lose something in the entire Galaxy, you just get on with your life. And yet, less than a minute after Rey begins piloting the Millennium Falcon, Han looks out the window of his freighter and says, “Oh, there it is.”

“More than a dozen years,” assumes facts not in evidence. Also assumed is the “less than a minute.” We have no idea how long Rey spends fixing the gas leak, or how far they get away from Jakku. Judging from the way Han reacts to the naming of Jakku we can figure that they are just about as far away as sublight can get them.

It’s still a mighty coincidence, but nothing a little light imagination — Ducain and the Irving Boys put tracking bafflers on the Falcon that Unkar Plutt removed at some point to sell to someone else once he figured she was just “garbage” does the trick. See: that wasn’t so hard.

3. Kylo Ren, a powerful Force-user, fights a light saber duel with an ex-janitor who has never held a light saber and yet (a) never uses the Force on his opponent, though doing so would have ended the duel immediately, and (b) barely wins the fight, suggesting that he is simultaneously one of the least strategic wielders of the Force the Dark Side has ever seen and, despite his training, absolutely terrible with a light saber. None of this stops Kylo Ren from designing and building his own, completely impractical cross-barred lightsaber.

Again with this janitor spiel.

We already saw Finn in a mêlée fight with another Stormtrooper, and while he got his ass handed to him and had to be rescued he did manage not to cut his own arm off. Points: Finn.

We can thus assume that First Order Stormtroopers are not only trained in mêlée weapons, but are actually equipped with anti-lightsaber gear. Such as a the mag-baton that the “riot” trooper uses against Finn.

Since Finn has the Stormtrooper training, he knows the basics.

Kylo Ren, meanwhile, has gotten hit in the gut by one of Chewie’s bowcaster bolts, which have been ripping apart mooks left and right the entire movie. Setting it up as “more than a blaster.” Ren is hurt and bleeding and does what he can to use the pain to push himself forward (hitting his injured side). This isn’t Ren at top form, but a depleted man.

4. Rey becomes nearly as effective a Force-user in a few hours as Luke Skywalker did in a few years.

Yeah, that sure is suspicious. It’s almost as if she’s some kind of scion of a family or that she’s had training someone made her forget. Too bad there aren’t going to be any more movies to help us out with this one.

5. Just minutes before Starkiller Base explodes, Supreme Leader Snoke tells Hux to go get Kylo Ren and take him off the planet. Unfortunately, Ren had recently (unbeknownst to Hux) run into the woods like a lunatic, leaving no information about his whereabouts. It’s no problem, though, because Hux apparently has special Kylo Ren GPS and (one assumes) goes right to the spot in the middle of the forest where Ren is bleeding to death; otherwise, Ren would have died on the planet along with everybody else from the First Order.

See, you solved this one yourself. It’s easy when you let your imagination do your thinking at a fantasy film.

6. The reason Ren was slowly bleeding to death — instead of being dead by Rey’s hand — is that a massive a chasm had just miraculously opened up in the several feet between the two of them. Such bad timing for Rey! (Damn you, deus-ex-geology!)

One: the reason Ren was slowly bleeding to death is that aforementioned bowcaster bolt. Two: if you don’t like giant chasms opening up after the climax of laser sword fights than maybe don’t see movies about people with magical powers and laser swords.

7. Rey, who has never left her home planet since she was a child, can speak Wookie. Nobody can speak Wookie — it’s a running joke in the Star Wars universe. But Rey being able to speak Wookie surprises neither her, Han Solo, nor Chewbacca himself.

“Nobody can speak Wookie?” Have you been watching the same movies as the rest of us? Han has spoken Wookie since 1977. He speaks Wookie throughout the movie. Rey appears to have freakish levels of talent — an open loop that needs to be addressed, for certain — and one of those talents appears to be languages.

The easiest explanation is that she scavenged the Galactic equivalent of a Rosetta Stone software set and went about learning everything she could while she wasn’t dusting off rocket ship parts.

(In the second piece Abramson’s cops to the weird bit being that Han doesn’t think it’s strange that Rey understands Chewie. Please refer to Defense Exhibit 45: Lando Clarissian. Works every time.)

8. It’s okay that Poe survived a Tie Fighter crash; after all, so did Finn. But has any film ever cared less about (a) giving the false impression a character has died, and then (b) having that character show up later with no one being surprised by it? Even Finn doesn’t seem to care very much what the explanation is.

The one thing this movie does better than any other chapter in the Saga is move. Until now, Jedi was the most efficient of the series, but The Force Awakens takes that crown and just runs with it. Does that mean that we wouldn’t like more Poe Dameron? This is the Internet. It is suddenly made up of seemingly nothing but Poe Dameron and cats. And Poe Dameron with cats.

Besides, stopping to explain every little thing leads to midichlorians. (Which aren’t as bad as everyone makes them out to be, but you have to have been exposed to Theosophical ideology pretty early on to wrap your head around them. Something I don’t recommend to anyone but your serious student of the strange.)

9. What is all this nonsense about the First Order only wanting to destroy the Republic because the Republic is supporting the Resistance? First of all, isn’t the Resistance part of the Republic, not a separate operation? And if it is separate, why has the First Order only just now discovered the not-very-well-hidden fact that the Republic is supporting the Resistance? And if the Resistance is in fact a part of the Republic, why didn’t Starkiller Base destroy the Republic’s planets and moons much, much earlier? In other words, what is the status of the war between the Republic and the First Order at the beginning of The Force Awakens, such that this precise moment is when General Hux decides to simply press a button and destroy the Republic?

Point by point:

No, the Resistance is not part of the Republic. We are told this in the opening credit crawl. Perhaps you were out getting popcorn.

Why would you assume that they just found out about the Republic supporting the Resistance?

Even if we just keep ourselves to the text of the film the galactic political system is fairly easy to decode: it’s a Cold War.

The Republic exists — that’s what the Alliance officially turned into. Some remnant of the Empire held out after the destruction of Death Star II and the death of Palpatine. That morphed into the First Order. It’s the path of least resistance to assume that neither side wants an open conflict, because neither is confident it wouldn’t lead to mutually assured destruction — at least not until Starkiller Base comes online and tips the balance of power to the First Order.

Leia, who throws herself back into her old guerrilla warfare ways after the leader of the First Order corrupts her son and sends her brother into self-imposed exile, gathers a small band of fighters together to take down the First Order in their own territory. This is something that the Republic can’t officially condone without leading to open war. Some of the Senate might even just see the Resistance as Leia’s personal vendetta endangering a fragile peace. Old soldiers and all that.

Not that anything like this ever happens in the real world. This is just all space fantasy.

10. For that matter, why is it made to seem like the entire Republic is centered in just one star system? Let alone one whose planets and moons are all visible to one another with the naked eye? Isn’t the Republic intergalactic? And why did the First Order choose to destroy all the planets and moons visible from Maz Kanata’s home-world, but then initiate a conventional invasion of the latter planet? Why not just fire one more planet-killing beam and destroy Kanata’s planet too? Because not doing that leads to a significant military defeat for the First Order that was totally avoidable. And another thing: if the Republic is in power, why is the Resistance the “Resistance”? What are they resisting? Isn’t the First Order the “Resistance,” as they’re resisting the hegemony of the Republic? It’s like someone on-set said “the Rebels need a new name,” without realizing that the political situation in the Galaxy had totally changed since the events of the previous films.

Alright, here’s where we are cooking with gas, because what I call “Our Starkiller Problem” bugged me too. I had to use the old “Marvel No-Prize” tactic to wrap my head around it, and one of the keepers of Star Wars lore signed off on it. Suffice it to say, when it comes to planet killing hyperspace plasma lasers conventional physics don’t apply.

As to why is the Republic all in one system: it’s not. The Hosian system is the equivalent of Washington D.C..

If North Korea managed to nuke D.C. the rest of the world would likely talk about the United States as if it were finished. They might even be right.

11. Kylo Ren is the head of the Knights of Ren, but there are no other Knights of Ren in the movie.

Never let them upsell you to the large soda. You miss things when you are in the bathroom.

12. Captain Phasma is supposed to be a big-deal character in The Force Awakens, if the merchandising and casting are any indication, and yet (a) how bad of a commanding officer do you have to be, how thoroughly inept in military tactics and strategy, to command the worst-trained fighting force in the Galaxy (the Stormtroopers hit even less with their blasters in The Force Awakens than in any preceding Star Wars film); (b) she’s only in three scenes, in one of which she relays an order from Kylo Ren to initiate a massacre of innocents (hardcore!) and in another of which she immediately surrenders to Han, Rey, and Finn as soon as they encounter her and then does exactly everything they ask of her (pathetic!), making her character incomprehensible; and (c) in her third scene she effectively reveals that Finn’s character is incomprehensible, as she notes that he has in fact been trained since birth to obey all orders, and has never in his life disobeyed even a single order until the day he decides to act like he’s never been trained, indoctrinated, or dehumanized at all.

a) They kill a lot of people in this movie. Just no heroes. Like just about every action movie ever.

b) Yup, they built her up a lot and gave her little to do. Which has never happened in a Star Wars movie before. And I’ve never paid $50 for a toy of a lizard guy who didn’t even say two lines in Empire. Nope. Didn’t happen.

c) Or maybe Finn had an “awakening” in the form of an empathic bond with suffering that takes place when his fellow trooper gets shot. Then he has this moment of clarity where the whole evil weight of the First Order’s machine comes into sharp focus and he goes straight into a panic attack that lasts pretty much the length of the entire film.

Or, you know, it could have just been something he ate.

13. Really? Was there no previous order Finn had ever refused to execute? Was the slaughter on Jakku actually the first naughty thing the First Order had ever required of him?

The term of art is “inciting incident.”

But let’s be fair here for a second — and let’s go into the expanded realm of work too — because I don’t want to be fully dismissive here.

The text of the film suggests that this was his “first battle” and it was then that he decided that he wasn’t going to kill for the First Order. It’s a melodramatic conceit — and if there’s one thing that Star Wars is it is melodramatic.

It isn’t all that satisfying to think that Finn was just regular old FN-2187 that morning and a hyperventilating nut job by dinner time. There’s a really excellent short story by Greg Rucka in “Before The Awakening” which pads out his background and suggests that Phasma might actually be covering for him a bit here.

And let’s take that idea for a second. You’re the head of the Stormtrooper divisions and one of your guys just committed high treason. You work in a military whose traditions include summary executions for any form of stupidity. Do you really admit that you screwed up to your boss?

14. Finn is an ex-janitor who goes AWOL from a Stormtrooper force numbering in the tens of thousands. Yet he is absolutely convinced, despite being someone of no importance whatsoever to the First Order, that he will be chased across the galaxy for having defected. Apparently, there’s a premium on janitors in this quadrant of the Galaxy. Sure, Finn killed some people during his escape, but doesn’t the First Order emphasize with every tactical decision it makes that it considers its soldiers thoroughly expendable, and don’t they quite obviously have much bigger fish to fry during the events of The Force Awakens than to worry about Finn? Why wouldn’t this be obvious to him?

“Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

We’ve never had a Star Wars movie where one of the lead characters was having a nervous breakdown for the whole film before. I think that’s pretty wonderful.

15. Let’s be clear: Han’s son joins the First Order, and Luke’s attempts to train new Jedis goes horribly wrong, and both men respond to these setbacks by, well, abandoning the Resistance to be utterly slaughtered by the First Order. Luke chills on an island, and Han on a smuggler’s freighter, while untold thousands or millions of innocents are killed by the Order. Can we even comprehend how pissed Leia would be at both of them, and how cowardly Leia (at least the Leia we see in the first three films) would consider them both? And yet she seems only mildly peeved at Luke, and, despite Han implying otherwise, is almost entirely happy to see him when he turns up at the Resistance stronghold.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

16. By the end of the movie, the impression is left that every single First Order soldier is dead besides Supreme Leader Snoke, General Hux, and Kylo Ren. That probably won’t turn out to be the case, but the fact that we’re given this impression makes the climactic discovery of Luke on an isolated island entirely irrelevant. After all, what need does the Resistance have of Luke now? Why should anyone care, at this point, if he’s found? Because there are two bad dudes left in the entire Galaxy, one of whom only shows up anywhere as a hologram? And okay, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there are millions more First Order soldiers elsewhere in the Galaxy; isn’t it strange that the film gives absolutely no indication whatsoever that this is the case?

The same could have been said about Star Wars after the Death Star blew up. Clearly not the case. So again: assumes facts not in evidence.

17. Why does General Hux need to gather all of his troops just to tell them he’s about to press a button and destroy the entire Republic? Can’t he do that without a cattle-call of his entire army? Because it really ends badly for him, putting his entire army on the very planet he’s about to make Resistance Target #1. No chance anybody saw that coming?

Why does Kim Jong-un throw lavish military parades? Why did Stalin? Why did Hitler? Wouldn’t it make made more sense for them to just get on with the business of being the human equivalent of mechanized evil without the ego-stroking that having legions of fashionable military personnel standing around listening to you shout about how much your enemies suck and how you will make them regret they ever crossed you?

Also: assumes facts not in evidence about the size of First Order forces.

18. How pissy is it of Luke to (a) abandon the Resistance, and then (b) leave an obnoxiously coy trail of bread-crumbs to sort of (but not really) help people find him (at some unspecified time)? Why did he leave multiple maps out there in the ether, anyway, given that him having done so allows the First Order to find one of them?

After the massacre at his school Luke went looking for the “first Jedi temple,” if Han is right. The map we see has a pathway on it, some kind of migratory and pilgrimage path. The First Order acquired part of the map from the “archives of the Empire”… so an alternate explanation is that Luke used the same/similar resources to get the bulk of the map and had to piece together the last of it — most logically with the help of Max Von Sydow’s character, since he has the missing piece.

19. Why wasn’t the Resistance able to access R2D2’s data archives at any point over the course of the many years Luke was gone? Why did they, instead, simply prop him up in a corner, when they had to know that he knew Luke’s whereabouts — as he always has in the past?

R2 being out of the game is thin ice. The main thing I can say here is this: it would only have put them on a level playing with the First Order.

Then again… maybe there’s something else going on. Maybe R2 was waiting for something to happen. Maybe they asked him when he first showed up — however that happened — and he said he didn’t know and then went into “low power mode.”

(My initial thought was that the big change between when we see R2 for the first time and the end of the film is that Rey reaches the base. That Rey’s presence is what wakes R2 up. Now Abrams has gone on record saying that R2 starts to wake up when BB-8 asks about the map — that it’s the right question that kicks our little blue friend into gear. I don’t know if I buy that.)

20. When the Resistance finally figures out where Luke is, after looking for him for many years, why do they send only Chewbacca and a random girl who Leia just met to collect him?

Who says she’s random? Who says that Leia just met her?

21. Kylo Ren has such a Force-enabled sense of where his father is in the Galaxy that when his father lands on Starkiller Base, Ren immediately exclaims to himself, “Solo!” Yet a few minutes later, when Ren is just twenty feet from Solo, he can’t detect him — and actually starts searching for him in the wrong direction.

Yeah, Kylo Ren’s feelings towards his father aren’t conflicted or anything. That wouldn’t mess with his powers. (Hint: that is how the Force works.)

22. How lame is Han’s attempt to convert his son? Han knows Ren (Ben) has just participated in the genocide of literally billions of people on multiple planets and moons, and he basically says to him, “Hey, this just isn’t you, buddy…” Of course his son kills him! What else was going to happen?

Guess that Solo is going to have to give back that “Father of the Year” trophy he won from the Palpatine Foundation now.

23. Why do Rey and Finn just stand by watching as Ren murders Han? They didn’t know Ren was Han’s son, so the drama on the catwalk must have looked absolutely bizarre to them. Why didn’t they think to fire even a single blaster shot down at Ren (given that he was just standing there on the catwalk) until — from their vantage-point, with the knowledge they had at the time, entirely predictably — Ren killed Han?

Because they show up and Kylo Ren takes off his mask and doesn’t just Force-toss Han off the bridge, maybe? They’re confused by what they see, as we are, and for a moment it actually appears to be working.

Then it all goes to hell.

24. Rey says that the Millennium Falcon is “garbage” and hasn’t been flown in many, many years. Indeed, it’s such junk, in her view, that she won’t even board it when she’s about to be ripped to pieces by twenty Tie Fighters. Then she gets on board and it basically flies perfectly. So much so that it’s not at all clear why no one has been flying it, let alone why its owner (Unkar Plutt) hasn’t tried to sell it at any point over the past dozen years — despite the fact that Plutt appears to live in a hovel.

First off, check the count. That’s TWO Tie Fighters.

Look, if you’re going to play the Game of Nitpicks you need to come correct.

Second: dudes love their hot rods. Love them. Put them up on blocks on their front yards and work on them forever intending to make them better and take them out for a spin. But other things get in the way. If you want to see how hard the life of a junk trader can be Netflix has this great documentary series called Making A Murderer available right now. I guarantee it will blow your mind.

25. Why does Plutt offer Rey 250 times her usual pay for BB-8 and then, when she says “no,” simply tell some of his heavies to just steal it? If Plutt is enough of a baddie to order it stolen at all, why not just steal it from the outset instead of first offering some random urchin the biggest financial windfall she’s ever seen?

You can’t just steal from your indentured servants as your first move. You gotta make them think that they’ve got a little bit of hope. Otherwise they rise up at night and slit your blobfishy throat with a rusty thermal exchanger that’s been sharpened in your own toolshed.

26. Maz Kanata is a friend to the Resistance. So why is she hiding Luke’s light saber from them? Wouldn’t she give them anything she could to help them find Luke, and doesn’t it in fact turn out (as anyone could have supposed) that Luke’s light saber is indeed helpful in tracking the last Jedi down?

This assumes that Luke’s lightsaber is helpful in tracking him down, which is not in evidence.

It’s also pretty clear that Maz is, at the time of the start of her scene, a neutral figure. She might be sympathetic to the cause but isn’t willing to risk, say, having her whole castle keep bar that she’s owned for 1000 years brought down on top of her head the second she decides to pick a side.

Not that anything like that happens in this film.

27. How did Kylo Ren manage to get Darth Vader’s mask into his little fetish den? This is only the most significant piece of memorabilia in the entire Galaxy. Not a plot hole per se, but still odd. And yet a similar question could be asked of Rey: how did she get that X-wing pilot helmet, and why doesn’t she sell it for food? And why does Teedo (a fellow scavenger on Jakku) just give Rey BB-8 after capturing the droid, given that as an experienced trader Teedo would already know that (as Rey quickly discovers) BB-8 is worth 100 times more than any random pile of junk either he or Rey could ever offer Plutt? Now that is a plot hole.

Here’s a question for you: do you actually like Star Wars movies? I ask because all these questions right here are exactly the kind of thing that the original movies used to ask and then let us run our imaginations wild on. And when we finally got the answers we had been daydreaming about for two decades we wound up with podracing and lines about how space was cold.

Kylo Ren getting Vader’s helmet is a good story. Maybe he stole it from Luke. Maybe he went to Endor. Maybe Snoke dug it up.

Rey’s helmet: she dreams of being a pilot, enough that she spends a lot of time in the simulator. Enough to actually pilot a ship damn well. She’s a nerd and certain classes of nerds like helmets.

Teedo: that’s a good-ish question. Could be that Teedo doesn’t know that Plutt would pay out that well for a fully functioning droid. Perhaps because he doesn’t know about the bounty yet because word hasn’t reached Jakku. Oh yeah, I’m making an assumption here: that Plutt wants the droid to sell it to the First Order, but that goes with a lot of what follows in the film after that point.

28. How does Finn find Rey’s settlement, given that the film makes clear that all Finn can see, after his Tie Fighter crashes, is endless dunes in every direction?

He keeps walking and he lucks out on it. Otherwise we’d have a very short film.

It is also entirely possible that he may have seen a ship landing — we see one taking off earlier — or people traveling by speeder in the direction of Niima Outpost.

29. Who trained Rey to fight with a staff as effectively as she does, given that (a) she is an orphan with no friends or family, and (b) she has never been in a battle, but is, rather, merely a scrap-metal scavenger?

The sandy streets of Niima Outpost are where a girl learns to be a woman, son. And by “woman” I mean “kicker of ass.”

30. If Finn is such a good guy that he would try to save Rey the moment he saw she was in distress, doesn’t it further call into question just how in the world the order to kill civilians on Jakku was the first time he’d ever had qualms about doing something the First Order had asked him to do?

“There’s been an Awakening, have you felt it?”

Finn has a crisis of conscience in that first scene. Everything follows from that. It’s melodramatic, but this is melodrama.

31. Given that all Poe knows about Finn is that he’s a First Order defector, why does he seem happy to see Finn just seconds after (and perhaps as) BB-8 tells him Finn is alive? There’s no real reason for Poe to trust Finn — or care about his well-being — at all. Rather, he would assume, as anyone would, that whatever Finn did or did not do on Jakku, he surely had committed other atrocities for the First Order (and killed many a Resistance fighter) before then.

Because Poe Dameron is just a better human being than you or I, buddy.

32. Kylo Ren takes his mask off pretty readily, and in pretty mixed company, for someone determined to wear super uncomfortable headgear perpetually.

What the hell does this have to do with plot? Is this the first stirrings of Seinfeld-style observational humor making a comeback? Because that is something we can leave slumbering.

But let’s examine the two times he does take the mask off: both wind up being attempts to unsettle his target, to get them to open up emotionally. Both times seem to backfire — because Kylo Ren isn’t entirely stable. Yet they start off well — Rey is shocked to see Adam Driver’s face, and Han comes in closer than is safe.

33. Why does Kylo Ren assign just a single Stormtrooper to guard Rey, the most valuable prisoner in the history of the First Order?

For all we know assigning even one Stormtrooper into the room with the torture chair might be an extraordinary measure. We don’t see one with Poe earlier in the film.

34. How do the Rathtars on Han’s freighter get loose? If he’s just keeping them loose in the hanger, why don’t they kill him when he’s walking through the freighter toward the Millennium Falcon, or at any other time? And if he’s got them chained up, how do they escape?

Did you miss the part where Rey turns off the fuses, and then says “Wrong fuses?” How many times did you go to the bathroom during this film? (I know you copped to this in the second piece, but I wrote this before I knew you did that. So I’m going to be a jerk and let it stand. Feel free to despise me here.)

35. Why do the Rathtars immediately kill every human they encounter — except Finn, who is randomly dragged off just long enough to be rescued?

That one is still digesting the last couple of guys. Finn is a snack being saved for later.

36. Why are all Stormtroopers human (or humanoid)? If by the time of the First Order any clones being raised to be Stormtroopers are no longer clones of Jango Fett, why aren’t there now Stormtroopers of every species as well as every (human) race? Why aren’t there flying Stormtroopers from the same species as, say, Watto (from The Phantom Menace)?

The Empire was speciesist and the First Order has held onto that trait.

37. If basically everyone in the Galaxy knows the Force is not a myth — for instance, every single Stormtrooper in the First Order, who has seen Kylo Ren use it or heard tell of him using it; every single person in the Resistance, who knows the Resistance is looking for Luke Skywalker; every single person in the Republic, which was first established in part by the heroism of the Jedis — how is the existence of the Force a total shock to Rey? Jakku is sheltered, but as we know from the film (cf. Lor San Tekka) there are many people on Jakku who either have seen the Force first-hand or heard first-hand accounts of it from visitors to the planet.

There are a lot of people in the galaxy, the films tend to show us the ones who have had the most contact with The Force. So it assumes facts not in evidence that “basically everyone in the Galaxy knows the Force is not a myth.”

There’s also the possibility that somebody put the whammy on Rey to make her think it’s all mumbo jumbo. But that’s just speculation on my part.

38. Is Supreme Leader Snoke actually a giant? Because if not, wouldn’t him using holographic technology to make himself appear huge be a pathetic affection signaling deep-seeded insecurities? Even the Emperor never did that; he just appeared normal-sized or tiny. And if Snoke is a giant, how come we’ve never seen a humanoid that size in Star Wars before?

You mean, like the Wizard of Oz? Yes, yes it would. Again, this is not a plot hole. This is a character trait. (You note in the second piece that this is a beat taken from Empire, which I will admit I didn’t even clock to because a giant floating head and a giant parse differently. So, thank you for that clarification.)

39. Why would the First Order spend untold quadrillions of insert unit of money here to build the Starkiller Base, when a similar concept and design plan had twice before been destroyed with minimal difficulty by the rebels? And doesn’t the recurrence of this tactical error for the third time in the (relatively) brief history of the Empire/First Order suggest that everyone in the First Order who was involved in the construction of Starkiller Base, at every level of management and authority, should be instantly shot in the head? (Of course, it’s too late for that by the end of the film, but still.) How positively brain-dead is Snoke to have learned literally nothing from history? And for those who say that clearly a solar-powered Death Star is way better than a non-solar-powered Death Star, well, clearly not!

Planet killing terror weapons are a central fetish of bad guys in Star Wars. Yeah, it’s stupid when you think about it for too long. So are laser swords and ships that fly faster than light speed.

Look, big death metal spheres are the dragons of the Star Wars universe. Somebody’s got to build them.

On the other hand, going back to the North Korea analogy: we all give that tiny country a wide berth because of how much they mess around with nuclear technology. Who knows what Hux and Snoke had in mind originally for Starkiller before they decided to use it on the Hosnian system. Perhaps they were going to hold various systems for ransom for billions of credits. I don’t know, I’m not an evil mastermind.

Or I am and I’m just not telling you.

I’m going to cut number 40 down to just the top line. Mostly because there’s a lot to unpack in the full version of it, and a lot of people have point to this one as “the reason why this post is important.”

But the core question is… well, let’s just get to it.

40. Is there any other film franchise in the history of cinema that would be permitted, by its fans and by critics, to recycle so many plot points?

Bond. James Bond.

Okay… now onto the “bonus 20.”

1. Starkiller Base has been constructed to allow it to suck all the energy out of a star thousands of times its size. Do the math on that. Or, if you like, do the science-fictional math. Neither is anything but ludicrous; neither shows writing effort.

And yet, planet killing lasers apparently are fine.

Or maybe there was something special about that particular planet that could let them get away with it. Would a twenty minute dissertation on the fake physics of Starkiller Base really make this a better movie?

Because I think we know what that movie looks like.

2. If Starkiller Base is a weaponized, orbit-locked planet that can’t be flown, it’s the worst weapon ever and not one the First Order would ever have constructed. Why construct such an object directly under the nose of the very Republic it aims to destroy? Are we to assume the Republic doesn’t even do the most cursory “check-ins” on nearby planets and moons to see if they are, I don’t know, being turned into anything fairly denominated a “starkiller”? And if Starkiller Base is a planet-sized object that can fly on its own, why is it anywhere near Republic-held territory when it fires its killing blow at the Republic? There’s no reason for that risk. More simply: how is this orbit-locked planet any improvement on the maneuverable Death Star?

Assumes facts not in evidence.

There is a bigger problem touched on here, tangentially, and that is with hyperspace travel times. Unfortunately the “it takes exactly as long as the filmmaker needs it to take” is how hyperspace has always worked in Star Wars movies. I wish it were otherwise.

3. Why does Maz Kanata keep her most prized and valuable possession in an unlocked chest in a publicly accessible basement? If her bar is as dangerous as Han says, wouldn’t she have at least one or two or a hundred safeguards in place to ensure that no one steals Luke Skywalker’s light saber? To those thinking this sort of thing isn’t a plot hole, realize that it’s a logical inconsistency that serves to contradict everything else said about (a) the shrewdness of Maz Kanata, (b) the value of Luke’s light saber, (c) the dangerousness of Kanata’s cantina, and (d) Kanata’s commitment to the Resistance. If these things don’t matter to you as a movie-goer, that’s cool. But they do — and should — matter to the sort of writers who get paid mid-six figures (or more) to produce scripts for billion dollar-earning film franchises.

This assumes that the saber is in a publicly accessible basement room. The door unlocks as Rey approaches. Almost as if some force were guiding her.

4. Speaking of Maz Kanata’s cantina, before the heroes enter it, Han (who sure as heck knows from “dangerous”) makes it sound incredibly dodgy — so much so that he tells Rey and Finn not to even look at anything once they’re inside; however, the patrons they encounter couldn’t be friendlier. Kanata offers them lunch; a couple dudes in a corner offer Finn a ride to the Outer Rim even though he has no money; Rey is allowed to just wander around the building’s basement; and like a concerned parent, Kanata reads Finn’s past and fortune. So what the heck was supposed to be scary about that place? The CGI?

Glad to know that you think a bar filled with wasp-men, man-sized leeches, and other night terrors isn’t scary. Please send me a list of not-scary bars you frequent so I may avoid them.

5. When Rey lands on Takodana, she says that she never imagined so much green could exist in the entire galaxy. The problem here is that we also know that every single night Rey dreams of an oceanic world dotted with idyllic and gorgeously lush islands. So maybe she can imagine it, and in fact does so every night? The point here is that Abrams and his writers can’t decide if Rey is a hick or someone who knows, deep down, that not only is she special but the world is waiting for her to prove it. In Star Wars, Luke’s certainty that the world was vastly larger than even his imagination was critical to his character from the jump; here, it seems unclear what type of person Rey is supposed to be, or even thinks herself to be. And yet at many points in the film she’s clearly portrayed as self-assured. It’s a logical inconsistency.

She sees the ocean in the dreams, and the island. But those islands, while green, are also rocky. The ocean dominates. Takodana is green on a whole ‘nother level.

6. Has any film, in any genre, ever allowed a sketchy, background-unknown defector from the Bad Guy camp (Finn) such quick in-person access to the Supreme Commander of the Good Guys (Leia) as we see here, and with so few questions asked?

Look, we know how badly number 40 went for you, but I don’t have a precise answer on this one. So, fine, point to you.

7. Rey remembers quite clearly that she’s been told not to leave Jakku, in fact that memory is so imprinted on her psyche that it’s effectively her Prime Directive, and yet she has no memory whatsoever of the face of the person (or any of the people) who communicated to her that life-defining piece of information. There’s coincidence, and then there’s logical inconsistency. This is the latter.

Or it’s a story point that’s yet to be revealed.

You see, this is the entire problem with this approach to deconstructing serialized material: it demands instant satisfaction. It’s like watching a movie with a toddler: why is that man hurting the other man daddy?

Have we all lost the ability to let the storytellers take the lead? Has advertising so scalded us as a people that we need everything to be unpacked the second it is revealed to us?

I genuinely want to know. Because you see a plot hole/logical inconsistency and I see a story hook. The later often looks like the former.

8. Why are there Stormtroopers using giant tasers in this film? In what possible way does a taser (let alone a taser shaped like a less-handy light saber) improve on a blaster, especially if the user has no access to the Force? This is another plot point clearly driven by toy merchandising, and yes, it is a logical inconsistency. The technological superiority of the First Order is kind of the entire point of the film — think Starkiller Base — so why is it okay to send Stormtroopers into the field with laughably inept (and inapt) weaponry? It undercuts the movie’s core contention: that the First Order is an existential threat to the entire galaxy.

Here’s where you have to have a little knowledge of the film saga for these to make sense. Those “taser batons” are based on the staffs of the “magnagaurds” in Episode III. Which could be used against a Jedi wielding a lightsaber.

Blasters aren’t very effective against Jedi — they can deflect bolts back at their opponents — so you have to go old school. You have to go hand to hand with materials that can withstand a lightsaber strike. Apparently that includes shock-staff materials. I feel, almost, that this answer is a form of cheating, but it is consistent within the film canon.

9. Sticking with the “Second-Rate First Order” theme, let’s just say it: “Flametroopers” are (a) cool-looking, and (b) have absolutely no place in the Star Wars universe. The Star Wars universe is a place in which just a couple blaster strikes can cause anything to combust; the only reason for The Force Awakens to feature WW2-era weaponry like a flamethrower is because you want to sell toys and “Stormtroopers” with slightly updated helmets won’t cut it. Enter “Flametroopers,” who smack way too much of the bottom-of-the-barrel G.I. Joe characters of the 1980s. Maybe this is why Flametroopers only make one (very brief) appearance in the film. On the other hand, the Flametrooper division helps make the case for a stand-alone Star Wars film from the perspective of one of the First Order’s silliest military contingents: an idea the several clerks of Clerks, but also many others, would love.

There’s a difference between “blaster shot ruptures fuel tank and thing goes boom” and “fire enough blaster shots that a house catches fire.” If you want to burn structures down a flamethrower is still the better way to go.

10. One more toy-related gripe: certain toys licensed for the movie appear to not be in the movie — suggesting another egregious money-grab. Anyone see that battle involving Resistance speeder bikes and open-air First Order snowspeeders? Me neither. Is this a plot hole? Maybe, maybe not. The case for “not”: it’s something left out of the movie, not something wrongly put into it. The case “for”: a film franchise like Star Wars has always been not just the films but also the canon surrounding it, and for The Force Awakens, an already confusing movie, a lot of “preemptive canon” was released that only underscores logical inconsistencies in the film. For instance, why didn’t the Resistance have more of a presence (e.g. speeder bikes) on Takodana? Why didn’t the Resistance ever contemplate a ground invasion (e.g., one that would force them to confront First Order snowspeeders) in the many years the Starkiller Base was being created? To send a handful of X-wings in the final minutes of the Republic just makes Leia look inept, which she isn’t. Look at it this way: when Star Wars fans wonder openly about the absence of Constable Zuvio from The Force Awakens, on the one hand it’s pretty derpy, on the other it probably means they’ve picked up on (a) something that was cut from the film for non-artistic reasons, and (b) something that, once cut, created a plot hole.

Okay, here we go.

Why did a bunch of toys get made of stuff not in the movie: because the film that is shot and the film that is edited and released are two different things. The toys are based on the former and not the later.

Why didn’t they send in a ground invasion while Starkiller Base was being built? As far as we know they learn of the base when the rest of the galaxy does: during the destruction of the Hosnian system.

“Something that was cut from the film for non-artistic reasons” is a giant assumption. Easier to assume that Zuvio was cut because he added nothing of real value to the story, and that if he was in there you’d just be wondering why they left it in just to sell a toy. Which would be that “egregious money grab” you mention up above. So no logical inconsistency there, quite the opposite: they pulled something out that wasn’t working to make a better, faster film. And now Constable Not-Appearing-In-This-Film keeps shelf pegs warm across this great nation of ours.

11. Since when, in the history of space films, have spacecraft in a well-guarded spaceship hangar needed to be tethered? This is just silly on so many levels. But it elongates a cool escape scene by thirty seconds, so hooray!

Since when, in the history of space films, have spacecraft had power lines attached to them? 1977? Let me check. Yup. 1977.

12. Han Solo and Chewbacca have spent nearly every day together for forty years, often fighting off baddies in small skirmishes and giant battles, but Han has never before tried Chewbacca’s bowcaster? The scene in which he does so is a little cringe-worthy, as it’s clearly just a sight-gag and a poor excuse for a one-liner. Yet is also undermines the central premise of the Han-Chewie relationship, which is that these two know everything about one another. The gag wasn’t worth it.

This one bugs me too. The only story reason is to set up just how potent Chewie’s bowcaster is — see above — but I don’t like that Han hasn’t played with it before either.

Still: it’s not just for a joke. It serves the plot by setting up Kylo’s injury. It does so at the expense of Han.

13. Returning to the “Tasertrooper”: the only reason Finn doesn’t die in this movie is that a Stormtrooper on Takodana inexplicably chose to fight him with a taser rather than shooting him with a blaster. This is “Indiana Jones fighting a guy with a whip”-level ridiculous — by which I mean, it’s as ridiculous as it would have been had Harrison Ford taken out a whip to fight that whip-wielding assassin rather than just shooting him in the chest with the gun already in his hand. Anyway, it’s a good thing for the saber-armed but saber-untrained Finn that he’s the only one who ever gets to (er, has to) fight these Tasertrooper toys (er, soldiers).

Yeah, we’ve been over this one before, more or less.

But don’t you get the sense from the way the guy yells “TRAITOR” at Finn that he knows him? That this might be a little more personal and that the other guy wants to make Finn hurt?

I know that’s what I got out of it.

14. For folks trying to hide BB-8 from the First Order, BB-8’s friends sure make some inexplicable, unnecessary decisions to trot him out in public.

Well, how many orange and white BB units are there out there?

Is it like orange and white cats? Because there are a bunch of those.

15. When Finn, a First Order defector who no one knows very well, reveals to Han and Chewie that he’s lied to them about his knowledge of Starkiller Base, and that he’s really only there to rescue his prospective girlfriend, who’s also a big unknown to Han and Chewie, why doesn’t Han let Leia know that they’ve been had? Exactly as Han expected, the lack of a credible assault plan subsequently leads to many needless deaths among the members of the Resistance. So did Han’s “Oh, you scamp!”-type reaction really make any sense at all?

It’s a melodrama, man.

But beyond that: Han sees a lot of himself in Finn the same way he sees a lot of himself in Rey. Only it’s the con-artist with a heart of gold part that he sees in Finn, as opposed to the great pilot.

So maybe Han wants to believe in this kid. He sure seems to keep acting that way.

16. Why can’t Starkiller Base be used until it’s dark, as Poe (oddly) insists? Seems like it can be used whenever it’s taken in enough energy, which would be, well, whenever it’s taken in enough energy. Time of day should have nothing to do with it.

“Once the sun is extinguished it is ready to fire.” Or words close to that effect, are uttered by Finn back at the briefing.

It’s goofy, but it is established in the text.

17. I know that in sci-fi, people survive crazy crashes all the time — but at some point it gets ridiculous. Usually, a film utilizing the vehicle edition of the “narrow escape” trope shows us the final moments before a big crash happens — for instance, a shot in which a crack pilot somehow manages to get his craft just enough under control to keep the crash from being fatal. Here, Poe and Finn seem to lose all navigation control over their Tie Fighter and crash head-on into a planet from an unimaginable (literally hyper-atmospheric) height. And yet both survive unharmed. Poe, in particular, is so unharmed that he’s already walked miles away, entirely out of sight, by the time Finn awakes. So maybe we did need a shot of some extraordinary, last-second piloting? Especially if no one’s going to be hurt at all in a fiery crash? Hell, as it turns out, quicksand is way more dangerous than freefalling into a planet at an unimaginable rate of speed from a height of hundreds of miles.

Ejector seats. You can see the parachute on Finn’s, which lands far from the crash site, and yet you assume that Poe goes down with the ship. The jacket is in the cockpit because Poe takes it off when they first get in.

18. Kylo Ren can read Rey’s mind from a distance, which is why he tells his subordinates that she’s going to steal a plane from the hanger to escape — so why didn’t he know exactly where she was on Starkiller Base? And if he wasn’t reading her mind, and was instead just speculating, where was that foresight when he left a single lightly armed Stormtrooper/James Bond to guard her — despite already knowing she was a Force-user as powerful (or even more powerful) than him?

What? Or maybe he figures that she’s going to steal a ship because that’s how she got off Jakku.

As for where was his foresight earlier: he had just gotten seriously shaken up by Rey, and needed to go whine to his father figure to get his helmet on straight.

19. A little petty, but still irksome: since when do blaster wounds cause massive bleeding?

I’ve cut the argument on this one down significantly. Because there’s a simple answer: the bleeding actually takes us back to the 1977 rules on these energy weapons. Remember that when Obi-Wan cuts off Ponda Baba’s arm (no, I didn’t have to look that up, why do you ask?) there is blood a-plenty.

It’s only later, in Empire, that we get the whole “cauterize as they wound” thing with lightsabers.

Both can actually be consistent: because it’s the secondary trauma of these wounds that can lead to bleeding. In Ponda Baba’s case we can figure that the cut wasn’t clean and a chunk of flesh ripped off as the limb fell. Which is totally gross so thanks for making me work that one out.

In the case of Finn’s buddy we can assume that the burn hole on the bolt lead to bleeding around the wound/out of the wound and that it isn’t a perfect cauterization every time. Or that the blood is coming from shrapnel from the stormtrooper’s damaged armor being embedded into flesh.

Man. I’m so glad I ate a bunch of spicy Thai food before reading this question.

20. Even accepting that Jakku was Finn’s first military assignment of any kind, as many readers of my first article on the film clearly did, are we to assume that he was entirely in the dark about the giant, racist, homicidal, Galaxy-spanning terrorist organization he was mopping floors for?

I cut a lot of this one down, just like with 40 above.

What’s the word I’m looking for. Oh, right. Indoctrination.

If you really want to know refer back to that Greg Rucka short on Finn. It does a damn fine job of fleshing out his backstory and is officially canon. If you are offended by such things — the idea that you have to go look something up to answer these questions I sympathize. A story should be able to be understood on it’s own merits, without having to do a whole lot of studying.

As for the rest of the question on 20-that-is-60: I think this culture of ours has lost much of it’s patience, but that there are still plenty of folks who are more than eager to see what happens next to Rey, Finn, Poe and Kylo Ren.

Make no mistake: a promise has been made and if Rian Johnson and Colin Trevorrow don’t keep the promises made by J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan there’s gonna be hell to pay. But before you go and doubt the ability and willingness of Kathleen Kennedy’s Lucasfilm to come through I want you to search your feelings and ask: which of these were really just assumptions you made because you missed something and which were truly contradictions within the logic of the film itself?

I think you’ll find that a great deal of what you’ve seen has depended largely on your point of view.