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No, the New Poe Dameron Comic Doesn't Prove He's Force Sensitive

There are many more mysteries of just how the Force works in Star Wars than there are examples of us seeing the ways it works across the entire movie saga. It’s still a relative unknown to both us as the audience and the denizens of the galaxy far, far away at large. But we kind of know one thing: how it doesn’t work.

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Last week’s Poe Dameron #27, by Charles Soule, Angel Unzueta, Arif Prianto, Rachelle Rosenberg, and Joe Caramagna, featured a potentially very intriguing conversation between Rey, Finn, and Poe. Set in the immediate hours following the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the comic’s latest arc has seen Poe, just really getting to know Rey, recount his exploits during The Force Awakens to her while she was off doing the whole, you know, “discovering she’s a Jedi” thing.

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While the prior issue saw Poe touch on a story we didn’t get to see in the film, Poe Dameron #27 sees the hotshot pilot recount his heroic entrance on Takodana alongside the rest of the Resistance’s pilots, including that incredible sequence where he sweeps the field shooting down TIE Fighter after TIE Fighter. It’s an impressive feat, and Rey is impressed too—hinting that, in some subtle way, Poe might have channelled the Force to perform it:

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Even though Poe doesn’t agree with Rey’s theory, the conversation, as with many little tidbits about the mysteries of the Force in past Marvel Star Wars books, has lead to racy speculation and even racier headlines across the internet declaring that the issue “proves” Poe has Force abilities. But... he doesn’t, and nothing in Poe Dameron #27 says that. It proves something we already knew about the Force: It’s everywhere, binding everything and everyone together, Poe included. In fact, in the very next sequence of panels, Leia explains pretty much that, to Finn’s confusion:

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Rey has the Force. Poe has the Force. Finn, as little as he understands it, has the Force. Whatever the Star Wars equivalent of a cabbage would be, has the Force. But that doesn’t make all of these people (or cabbages) Force-sensitives in the way we typically understand the meaning of that descriptor. It doesn’t mean that they can all manifest the Force at will, it just means they are connected by it, as are all living things.

Some people manifest that connection by being able to wield the Force like Luke, Rey, or Kylo Ren do. Some, like Rogue One’s Chirrut Îmwe or The Last Jedi’s Admiral Holdo (at least, according to Laura Dern), might manifest it in more subtle ways. But even if they don’t—even if Poe’s skills in the skies above Takodana were just natural instinct and his piloting know-how, rather than a subtle tapping of unknown abilities—they are still connected by its presence in the very fabric of existence in the galaxy far, far, away.

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That doesn’t mean everyone’s secretly a Force user in waiting. It doesn’t mean that in Episode IX that Poe Dameron is going to pass on getting a new X-Wing to pick up a lightsaber and lift some rocks. It just means something Yoda told us all back in Empire Strikes Back: The galaxy is populated by luminous beings, bound together by the living Force. Just because it’s within that crude matter doesn’t mean people necessarily have the capacity to coax it out.