The stormtrooper FN-2187 grew up with no friends other than his squadmates and no life outside of First Order training designed to create super-soldiers of unquestioned loyalty. He performed well in combat simulations, and was part of the First Order’s assault on a village on Jakku.

The Jakku raid taught FN-2187 that real-life combat was nothing like the sims: he saw squadmates die, and found himself appalled by the First Order’s brutal massacre of civilians.

His conscience awakened, FN-2187 decided to escape from the First Order’s service. Lacking pilot training, he freed the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron – who’d been captured during the Jakku raid -- from his cell aboard the Star Destroyer Finalizer.

Poe dubbed his unlikely savior Finn, and the two stole a Special Forces TIE from its hangar, with Finn serving as Poe’s gunner. Finn assumed they would flee into hyperspace, but Poe ignored Finn’s protests and headed for Jakku, where he had unfinished business. First Order gunners shot down the fighter, which crash-landed on the desert planet.

Finn ejected from the doomed fighter and woke up in the desert. At the crash site he found no sign of Poe – just the Resistance pilot’s jacket. He took the jacket and shed his armor, then began the long walk to Niima Outpost.

A parched Finn reached Niima, but was almost immediately set on by a young woman and an angry astromech, who accused him of stealing Poe’s jacket. Finn explained that he’d helped Poe escape but he’d died in the crash. The young woman, Rey, assumed Finn was with the Resistance … which he let her believe.

Stormtroopers backed by TIEs attacked Niima, forcing the three to flee. They made their getaway by stealing a battered old freighter, the Millennium Falcon. Finn once again handled gunner duties, and the Falcon eluded her pursuers.

While Rey worked to fix a problem with the Falcon, Finn confessed to BB-8 that he was a First Order deserter, and persuaded the droid to tell him the location of the Resistance base in exchange for promising to get the droid there. But a massive bulk freighter intercepted the Falcon and swallowed her up. The new ship’s owners were Han Solo and Chewbacca, who’d once called the Falcon home.

Han and Chewie had their own problems, though – two criminal gangs intercepted their ship, leading to a free-for-all involving vicious predators called rathtars and far too many blasters. A rathtar seized Finn, but Rey’s quick thinking saved him.

Han and Chewie escaped the fight in the Falcon, along with Finn, Rey and BB-8. They decided to head for Takodana, where the ancient smuggler Maz Kanata maintained a castle frequented by underworld figures. Han thanked Finn for tending to Chewie’s wounds, but sensed Finn was lying about his Resistance ties, and warned him that women always figure out the truth.

At Maz’s castle, Finn faced a choice: leave Rey and find his own path, or join the fight against the tyrannical designs of the First Order he’d once served. He decided to sign on with a pirate band in exchange for passage to an Outer Rim world, leaving Rey feeling betrayed and abandoned.

But perilous events were in motion. The First Order used a terrible superweapon to destroy the New Republic capital of Hosnian Prime, then attacked Takodana. Maz gave Finn Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, which he used in battle against his former stormtrooper comrades. The arrival of Resistance starfighters prevented a First Order victory, but the warlord Kylo Ren captured Rey.

At the Resistance base on D’Qar, Finn was reunited with Poe, and met with General Leia Organa. He told her that he’d been stationed at Starkiller Base, the location of the First Order’s superweapon. Finn’s knowledge of the facility allowed the Resistance to formulate an attack plan.

While the Resistance’s fighter squadrons prepared to attack, Finn joined Han and Chewbacca on a mission to infiltrate Starkiller Base and take down its shields. The three managed to lower the shields and found Rey, who’d escaped her cell. But now they had to get free of the First Order base during the chaos of the Resistance raid.

Kylo Ren confronted Finn and Rey, with the dark side warrior and the former stormtrooper squaring off in a lightsaber duel. The untrained Finn fought well, but proved no match for the powerful Kylo. With the Starkiller’s home planet beginning to collapse, Kylo left a bereft Rey and a badly wounded Finn for dead.

Chewbacca rescued Finn and Rey in the Falcon and the three returned to D’Qar, where the Resistance’s medics assured Rey that Finn would survive. The Starkiller had been destroyed, but the fight against the First Order had just begun.

Resistance medics sedated Finn and placed him in a bacta suit to heal. He woke up to find the Resistance had fled its base on D’Qar but was under attack by the First Order. Finn wandered around the Resistance flagship until he found Poe. His first question: Where was Rey?

The Resistance fleet escaped D’Qar, but the First Order followed it through hyperspace. Convinced the fleet was doomed, Finn took the homing beacon Rey would follow back from Ahch-To and decided to desert so his friend wouldn’t be caught by the First Order. But before he could board an escape pod, he was intercepted and stunned by maintenance tech Rose Tico.

Rose and Finn figured out that the First Order’s hyperspace tracker only operated from a single ship. If they could slip aboard that ship and turn off the tracker, the Resistance fleet would have a brief window in which to escape. But to sneak through the First Order’s defenses, they needed to find the Master Codebreaker in the gambling resort of Canto Bight.

Before Finn and Rose could speak with the Master Codebreaker, they were arrested and thrown in jail on Canto Bight. They escaped with the help of the thief DJ, then fled on the back of a speedy fathier. It looked as if they’d be recaptured, but Finn thought the attempt had been worth it: they’d torn up a glitzy playground for jaded arms dealers and given the captive fathiers a brief taste of freedom.

As Canto Bight’s police closed in, DJ arrived and spirited Finn and Rose away aboard a stolen ship. He agreed to help them sneak aboard the Supremacy to shut down the First Order’s trackers – for the right price. But DJ had no interest in the Resistance’s cause, telling Finn that the galactic war was an amoral profit machine without good guys or bad guys.

Finn, Rose and DJ infiltrated the Supremacy in stolen First Order uniforms and reached the power breakers for the hyperspace tracker, but were captured by Captain Phasma and her troops. Then a horrified Finn learned DJ had cut a deal, revealing the Resistance’s plan to slip away in small transports to the First Order.

General Hux ordered Finn and Rose’s execution, but the two were saved when the Raddus sliced through the Supremacy, throwing the massive capital ship into chaos. Finn faced off against Phasma and defeated his former commander, who plummeted into the warship’s burning wreckage. He then escaped with Rose and BB-8.

Finn realized he could no longer stay on the sidelines: rather than try to flee the war with Rey, he needed to fight for the Resistance’s cause. He and Rose escaped the Supremacy and raced for Crait, where they joined the Resistance’s desperate last stand against the First Order.

Both Finn and Rose flew ski speeders on Crait, where Finn made a suicidal run against the First Order’s battering-ram cannon. Rose saved him by knocking his speeder off-course. Badly injured in the wreck, she expressed her love for him. Finn carried her to safety and tended to her after their escape aboard the Millennium Falcon.

Finn helped the Resistance rebuild after the near-disaster at Crait, and joined Poe Dameron on a dangerous mission to the Sinta Glacier Colony to obtain a datafile leaked by a spy inside the First Order.

Like all in the Resistance, Finn was shaken by the datafile’s confirmation that Emperor Palpatine had returned from death and now threatened the galaxy with a Sith armada. When Rey decided to seek out a Sith wayfinder on Pasaana, Finn insisted on going with her – as did Poe. He said farewell to Rose, who remained behind to study the Sith fleet in hopes of finding weaknesses the Resistance could exploit.

Finn helped the Resistance rebuild after the near-disaster at Crait, and joined Poe Dameron on a dangerous mission to the Sinta Glacier Colony to obtain a datafile leaked by a spy inside the First Order.

Finn and his friends escaped the vexis burrow, but Chewbacca was captured by the First Order and led away in a transport. Finn watched in horror as a transport lifted off and then exploded, destroyed by an eruption of Force power from Rey.

The quest for the Sith wayfinder led Finn and his friends to Kijimi and an underworld droidsmith who could bypass restrictions on C-3PO’s programming, allowing them to access a vital clue. While on Kijimi, Finn learned something startling: His friend Poe, that stalwart of the Resistance, had once been a spice runner.

When Rey discovered Chewbacca was alive and in First Order custody, Finn and his friends vowed to rescue the Wookiee. They succeeded with help from an unlikely source: General Hux, who revealed he was the First Order spy. Hux helped them escape, demanding that Finn leave him with a blaster wound to avoid suspicion. Finn was happy to oblige.

On Kef Bir, Finn discovered that Jannah, the leader of a group of exiles, had once been a First Order stormtrooper, conscripted in childhood as Finn had been. Like him, she had refused to follow orders, driven by her conscience – and by a strange feeling. Finn had thought he’d been the only stormtrooper to shake off his First Order brainwashing, but here was an entire company that had done the same.

In search of the Sith wayfinder, Rey commandeered a sea skiff for the perilous journey to the Death Star wreckage half-submerged in Kef Bir’s ocean. Finn followed with Jannah and found Rey locked in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. He tried to help her, but Rey used the Force to hurl him back, determined to keep him out of harm’s way. She then left Kef Bir in Kylo’s TIE fighter, with Finn unable to follow.

Finn recruited Jannah and her company to return with him to the Resistance base on Ajan Kloss. There, Poe asked Finn to take command alongside him, and the two planned a desperate assault on the Sith world of Exegol and its armada. Finn, Jannah and Rose agreed to lead a ground attack against the navigational beacon the Sith fleet needed to leave Exegol’s atmosphere. But the First Order commanding officers foiled their plan by switching the beacon to a backup source.

That strange feeling – which Finn decided must be the Force – told Finn the beacon was now transmitting from a First Order Star Destroyer. He and Jannah improvised a charge on orbaks across the Star Destroyer’s deck. In a desperate fight, they used the Star Destroyer’s own cannons to take out its command deck, then escaped in the Millennium Falcon before the massive battleship plowed into Exegol’s surface.

Against all odds, the Resistance had triumphed, sparking a galaxywide uprising. Finn reunited with friends new and old in a galaxy where evil had been defeated – and where Finn could think about exploring his potential abilities without the shadow of the First Order.