Demotion or not, Poe is still highest ranking Squadron Leader which makes him Commander Air Group, fourth in line for command, behind Admiral Buzzfeed, the Captain of the ship they are aboard, and the XO of the ship they are aboard.Gethsemani said:This is actually one of the parts where I felt the movie actually kept the Resistance looking like a proper military force. Poe is a Commander, demoted to Captain. That means that at best he's a wing commander responsible for some half dozen ships and pilots. As a Captain he's the lead wingman in a fighter pair. Why should this guy, hero or not, be briefed on a plan that's devised by an Admiral (some six or seven ranks above the commander) and hinges on secrecy to be successful? For all the Resistance knows, there's a mole on their ships that's feeding the First Order their location and that's how they got tracked.
By brushing Poe aside and telling him to suck it up, Huldo is actually acting in a way that I'd expect a military leader to act. They aren't going to brief every random joe in their organisation personally on the grand strategy of the war, they will tell those people to get back in line and wait for orders. This also makes Poe's arc and the way it is played a nice deconstruction of the Ace trope. Poe might be the Ace, but the Resistance is still a military organisation with a clear chain of command and they are not making exceptions just because that one guy is a damn good pilot.
That right there is reason enough to keep him in the loop, since a catastrophic loss of command has already happened once today, and other officers who should outrank Poe keep going down with their ships instead of retreating to safety, further proving Admiral Holdo is a fuckwit who wasted lives and materiel.