Resistance (Star Wars)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Resistance began as an act of insubordination. Thirty years after the Rebel Alliance defeated the Galactic Empire, Senator Leia Organa and several fellow veterans broke from the New Republic's military. They did it to fight a war their own government refused to acknowledge. They named the threat the First Order, a military dictatorship built from the fallen Empire's remnants in the unmapped Unknown Regions. The New Republic refused to see the First Order as a credible danger. So its leaders tolerated the Resistance without ever officially arming it.

  Introduced onscreen in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Resistance became the central force of the sequel trilogy. It reappeared in The Last Jedi in 2017 and The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. Its officers mixed Rebel Alliance veterans with a younger generation, including Poe Dameron, whose own parents had fought in that earlier war. What does it take to convince a government that a threat is real when that government refuses to look? And what does the fight cost the people who take it up without waiting for permission?

• 2. A Splinter Force

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  One year after the Battle of Endor, Imperial forces suffered a further defeat at the Battle of Jakku. Many of those loyalists then fled into the Unknown Regions, a part of the galaxy considered nearly impossible to navigate safely. A secret contingency plan, designed to destroy the Empire and eventually rebuild it, guided their escape. Meanwhile, the victorious Rebel Alliance modeled the New Republic on the Old Republic that had existed before the Empire. It also signed the Galactic Concordance with what remained of the Empire, reducing it to a rump state. That rump state eventually dissolved entirely, leaving the New Republic as the galaxy's sole government.

  The Resistance recruited from both the New Republic's own military and from worlds that had suffered the worst of Imperial rule. Some members of the Republic Senate quietly funded and armed the group even as the wider government refused to back it openly. Admiral Ackbar was among the veteran officers who joined, lending the fledgling Resistance his experience from the war against the Empire. In the Unknown Regions, the First Order was already rebuilding old Imperial fleets and training new stormtrooper forces in direct violation of that same Concordance.

• 3. The Hunt For Skywalker

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  General Organa sent her pilot, Poe Dameron, to the desert world Jakku, to retrieve a partial star map from an old ally, Lor San Tekka. The map pointed toward the last Jedi, Luke Skywalker, whom the Resistance hoped to bring back into the fight. Kylo Ren of the First Order intercepted the mission, killing San Tekka and capturing Dameron before he could complete it. Dameron's droid, BB-8, escaped into the desert with the map still hidden inside. Dameron was tortured for its location but escaped with help from a defecting stormtrooper he nicknamed Finn, previously designated FN-2187. The two crash-landed back on Jakku, where Finn was presumed to have lost Dameron for good. There, Finn found BB-8 in the company of a scavenger named Rey. First Order stormtroopers marked the pair as targets, forcing Rey and Finn to flee aboard a ship docked nearby, the Millennium Falcon.

  Han Solo and Chewbacca recaptured their old ship mid-flight, then found themselves fleeing two rival criminal gangs alongside Rey, Finn, and BB-8. The group took refuge on Takodana, where Solo's old friend Maz Kanata ran a refugee outpost and sensed Rey was strong with the Force. Kylo Ren tracked the group to Takodana and captured Rey after learning she had seen the map. He withdrew only when Dameron, alive after all, arrived with Resistance starfighter pilots to defend the base. At the same time, First Order General Hux fired the Starkiller Base superweapon at the New Republic's capital. The strike destroyed the Republic's government and its Starfleet in one blow, leaving the Resistance the only force still standing against the First Order.

  Solo, Finn, and Chewbacca flew to the icy Starkiller Base itself, using Finn's own knowledge as a former stormtrooper stationed there. Dameron led two starfighter squadrons, waiting to strike the weapon once its shields came down. The team captured Captain Phasma and forced her to lower those shields, then planted explosives at the base's thermal oscillator. Amid the assault, Solo confronted his estranged son, Kylo Ren, born Ben Solo, and pleaded with him to abandon the dark side. Urged on by Supreme Leader Snoke, Ren killed his father instead. Chewbacca detonated the planted bombs, and Dameron destroyed the weakened oscillator in a bombing run that collapsed the entire planet. Rey then dueled and defeated Kylo Ren before escaping with Finn's unconscious body aboard the Falcon, back to the Resistance base on D'Qar. There, the droid R2-D2 reactivated to reveal the rest of the map, and Organa sent Rey to deliver Skywalker's own lightsaber to him.

• 4. Retreat And Sacrifice

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  After the destruction of Starkiller Base, the First Order pursued the Resistance without pause, nearly wiping it out entirely. It dispatched the Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought Fulminatrix to destroy the Resistance base on D'Qar with heavy orbital weaponry. As the Resistance evacuated aboard its flagship, the Raddus, and a fleet of smaller ships, Poe Dameron led a desperate counterattack. He had just been promoted to commander. His starfighters destroyed the Fulminatrix, but many of his pilots were killed in the attack. General Organa demoted him back to captain for losing so much of the Resistance's remaining starfighter strength.

  The First Order's fleet then chased the Resistance across the galaxy, led by the massive Mega-class Star Dreadnought Supremacy with Supreme Leader Snoke aboard. The Supremacy could track the Resistance's hyperspace jumps, and it launched starfighters led by Kylo Ren to wear down the fleet's defenses. The Resistance lost its remaining starfighters, and several leaders were killed in the assault, including Admiral Ackbar. Organa herself was seriously wounded, so Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo took temporary command of the fleet. With fuel and resources nearly gone, Holdo decided the only option left was to evacuate the Raddus by escape pod. Dameron objected but could not stop her. The First Order then fired on the fleeing convoy, destroying escape pods and much of what remained of the Resistance fleet. Most personnel abandoned ship, though the Raddus itself survived thanks to its rear shield deflector.

  Meanwhile, Finn, BB-8, and Resistance technician Rose Tico slipped away on a secret mission to the planet Cantonica. They needed a slicer who could disable the Supremacy's hyperspace tracker, a man they found named DJ. The four snuck aboard the Supremacy in disguise and nearly disabled the tracker. DJ betrayed them to the First Order instead, and escaped with a monetary reward. Finn and Rose were taken to a hangar to await execution. Before they could be killed, Holdo turned the Raddus around and rammed it through the Supremacy at hyperspace speed, tearing the larger ship apart. Finn, Rose, and BB-8 fought their way out of the collapsing wreck, defeating Captain Phasma along the way. They joined the surviving Resistance personnel gathering on the planet Crait, taking shelter in an abandoned Rebel Alliance base.

  Kylo Ren led the First Order's assault on that base, breaking down its heavy doors with a superlaser siege cannon and AT-M6 and AT-AT walkers. The Resistance defended itself with laser turrets and ski speeders, while the Millennium Falcon counterattacked the First Order's TIE fighters. Finn even attempted a suicide run at the siege cannon, but the First Order still breached the entrance. A Force projection of Luke Skywalker then confronted Kylo Ren, stalling him long enough for the Resistance's remnants to slip out a back exit. The Resistance escaped with only a handful of survivors, all it had left to carry the fight forward.

• 5. The Final Order

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  A year after the story of The Last Jedi, the Resistance had regrouped on the jungle moon of Ajan Kloss. Finn, Poe Dameron, R2-D2, and Chewbacca gathered intelligence on a rumored return of Palpatine, passed along by a spy inside the First Order. They fled back to base aboard the Millennium Falcon after shaking off pursuing TIE fighters. Rey, joined by Finn, Poe, Chewbacca, and C-3PO, then searched for clues to a Sith wayfinder artifact that Luke Skywalker had once mentioned. Under the joint command of Dameron and Finn, the Resistance fleet traveled to Exegol to face the Sith Eternal's forces, the Final Order. The Resistance emerged victorious. After Palpatine's death, citizens across the galaxy rose up against the First Order, bringing the regime to its end. What came next for the galaxy was never shown onscreen, though the Resistance's win likely pointed back toward democracy, perhaps a restored New Republic.

• 6. Command Structure

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  Fleet Admiral Gial Ackbar commanded the Resistance's ships alongside General Leia Organa and Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, the trio jointly leading Fleet Command. On the ground, General Caluan Ematt and Commander Larma D'Acy led the Resistance's ground forces. The Resistance was never large enough to support dedicated infantry units of its own. So pilots, technicians, and other personnel trained to fight on the ground whenever the need arose. That fleet proved vital to keeping the Resistance alive at all during the events of The Last Jedi.