Admiral Holdo

Admiral Holdo is a secondary character from the 2017 movie . She was played by Laura Dern.

Why She's Loathsome

 * 1) She strips Poe Dameron of any responsibility on the grounds that Leia demoted him before she was incapacitated. This completely ignores the fact that Leia's actual last act before she was incapacitated was to reinstate Poe and authorize him to attack the First Order fleet once it became clear that the Resistance fleet had been tracked through hyperspace. It comes across as her using a loophole to sideline someone who, by all indications, is far more qualified to command the fleet than Holdo herself is.
 * 2) After she demotes Poe, she constantly lectures and speaks down to him, when she and everyone else on-board should be thanking him for preventing the whole fleet from being destroyed (since if he hadn't destroyed the dreadnought Fulminatrix against orders, it would have wiped out the whole fleet in just a couple of shots after tracking them through hyperspace).
 * 3) Even leaving aside the gender politics of her character, she's basically just your standard-issue inflexible military authority figure who refuses to listen to a young, hotshot officer who's clearly in the right, albeit with the story contrived to make Holdo the one who's in the right this time. And even then, it turns out that Leia was actually the one who came up with the plan to save the fleet, meaning that Holdo's only "right" in that she sticks with a plan that a more competent officer thought up.
 * 4) We're repeatedly told that she's a great, highly decorated military commander, but absolutely nothing she does in the movie demonstrates this.
 * 5) Despite being trusted by Leia to save the Resistance, she ends up nearly getting it wiped out instead, after she repeatedly refuses to tell Poe what her plan to save the fleet is. This causes Poe to send Finn and Rose on their own mission to disable the First Order's tracking capability, and a series of mishaps cause the First Order to find out about the plan and destroy most of their shuttlecraft before they can land on a nearby planet. While you can argue about Poe's violating orders or Finn and Rose's mistakes on their mission, none of it would have happened in the first place had Holdo taken literally ten seconds to explain her plan, therefore making her completely to blame for everything that follows.
 * 6) Her outfit and hairstyling choices, namely her ornate robes and frizzy purple hair, make her look completely ridiculous. She looks more like some kind of civilian leader along the lines of Padme Amidala or Mon Mothma, rather than any other military officer in the entire franchise.
 * 7) * Note that her being a civilian leader suddenly thrust into a position of military authority would instantly solve most of the problems with her character, or would at least make her bad decisions a lot more understandable.
 * 8) Laura Dern gives probably the worst performance of her career as Holdo, making the character feel even more bitchy and unlikeable than the script already does.
 * 9) As a result of all the aforementioned reasons, she is widely considered to have surpassed Jar Jar Binks, one of the most legendarily unpopular characters in all of fiction, as the single most hated character in the entire Star Wars franchise.

Her Only Redeeming Quality

 * 1) Thankfully, she later sacrifices her life by hyperdrive-ramming Snoke's flagship in a successful attempt to disable it (despite the many logical flaws with the scene), so that Holdo would not longer bother the Resistance. The scene itself is also super epic.

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