In hopes of finding Luke Skywalker, Leia asked Poe to seek out the hyperspace explorer Lor San Tekka. After a lengthy search, Poe located San Tekka during a mission with BB-8 to the forlorn desert planet Jakku. Eager to help Leia find her brother, the explorer gave Poe a bit of a star chart that might reveal Skywalker’s whereabouts.

Before Poe could escape, the First Order attacked San Tekka’s village, destroying Poe’s X-wing. The always-impulsive pilot hid the chart in BB-8’s memory banks, telling the little droid to flee and promising they’d be reunited later. Poe then rushed back to the village, where the First Order captured him.

The troops took Poe to the Star Destroyer Finalizer, where dark side warrior Kylo Ren used his Force powers to probe the pilot’s mind. Poe couldn’t resist this invasion, and Kylo told his troops to find the missing BB-8 and retrieve the map.

To Poe’s shock, a stormtrooper – FN-2187 – broke him out of his cell. The trooper, whom Poe nicknamed Finn, sought to escape the First Order, but lacked the piloting skills to do so.

The two stole a special forces TIE fighter, which Poe piloted back to Jakku, hoping to find BB-8 before the First Order did. But cannon fire struck the fighter, which crashed on the desert world.

A dazed Poe awoke having crawled out of the TIE, leaving behind his Resistance jacket. There was no sign of Finn, who’d apparently ejected. Unable to find BB-8, Poe hitched a ride with a scavenger and made his way back to the Resistance.

Poe returned just in time to learn that a Resistance spy droid had spotted BB-8 on Takodana. With Poe’s X-wing squadron flying lead, the Resistance rushed to the planet, interrupting a First Order assault aimed at capturing BB-8.

Poe returned to the Resistance base on D’Qar, where he was reunited with Finn. The pilot then joined Resistance leaders discussing how to destroy the First Order’s superweapon, the Starkiller.

The Resistance formulated a desperate plan: Han Solo and Finn would infiltrate Starkiller Base and disable its shields, allowing Poe and his pilots to attack the facility. Overloading the Starkiller’s containment field oscillator should destroy the superweapon – and perhaps the planet that housed it.

Poe took the controls of Black One, his Resistance X-wing, and led the starfighter attack under the call sign Black Leader – with BB-8 once again serving as his astromech.

Starkiller Base proved a tough target, and many Resistance pilots died battling the First Order’s TIEs. Explosives placed by Han, Chewbacca and Finn breached Starkiller Base’s defenses, and the X-wings’ weapons damaged the superweapon, with a chain reaction ensuring the planet’s destruction. Poe and his fellow pilots raced back to D’Qar having won a great victory – but knowing tough battles lay ahead.

The First Order tracked the Resistance to D’Qar, forcing an evacuation. Poe led a fighter assault that destroyed a massive First Order Siege Dreadnought, but disobeyed Leia’s orders to break off the attack. An angry Leia demoted him to captain.

The First Order followed the Resistance fleet through hyperspace and attacked it, leaving Leia badly injured and destroying Poe’s X-wing. The starfighter ace was now effectively grounded.

While Leia recovered from her injuries, Vice Admiral Holdo assumed command of the Resistance. Poe immediately clashed with her: she saw his brand of heroics as reckless and destructive, and curtly told him to follow her orders.

Poe feared the Resistance had chosen poorly in handing command over to Holdo, and went behind his new commander’s back, plotting a mission in which Rose Tico and Finn would try to infiltrate the First Order’s flagship and disable its hyperspace tracker. As his unease about Holdo grew, he waited desperately for word from his friends.

When Poe discovered Holdo planned to evacuate aboard small, unarmed transports, he angrily declared that she wasn’t just misguided but a traitor. To buy time for Finn and Rose, Poe organized a mutiny against his commander, stopping her evacuation in its tracks.

It was a rash move. In telling Finn and Rose what Holdo planned, Poe inadvertently allowed the Resistance’s strategy to be discovered by the First Order. He took over the bridge, and was relieved when a recovered Leia confronted him there. To his shock, his mentor raised a blaster and stunned him.

Poe woke up on a transport bound for the shadow planet Crait, the site of an old rebel base. He realized the wisdom of Holdo’s plan, but his relief turned to horror as the First Order, alerted to the trick, began blasting the transports. Holdo sacrificed her life by ramming the First Order flagship, buying the transports time to escape – and teaching Poe a valuable lesson about leadership.

Poe commanded a hastily assembled squadron of ski speeders as a last-ditch defense of the old rebel base against the First Order. But when he realized the attack run was suicidal, he called it off. True heroism, he’d learned, was saving his pilots’ lives and seeking a wiser way to fight.

Watching Luke Skywalker confront Kylo Ren, Poe realized the Jedi Master was stalling to buy time for the Resistance to escape. He searched for another way out of the mine, leading his fellow soldiers to safety with Rey’s help. The Resistance had survived to fight another day.

Poe helped Leia rebuild the Resistance after Crait, and tried to make amends for his missteps as a commander. After the Resistance found a new home on Ajan Kloss, he borrowed the Millennium Falcon for a dangerous mission to retrieve intel sent to a Resistance sympathizer from a spy within the First Order.

The Falcon escaped the First Order by lightspeed skipping, a dangerous technique that took a toll on the old ship’s already-balky systems – much to Rey’s displeasure. But the Resistance soon faced far greater threats: The intel confirmed Emperor Palpatine had returned from death and built a vast Sith armada on Exegol, a legendary world located somewhere in the Unknown Regions.

Poe accompanied Rey and Finn to Pasaana to find a Sith wayfinder that could let them reach Exegol. When the First Order followed them, Poe hotwired a pair of skimmers so they could flee, evading a surprised Finn’s questions about where he’d learned this rather shady technique.

Poe and his friends recovered a Sith dagger etched with runes revealing where to find the wayfinder, but lost it to the First Order when the Knights of Ren captured Chewbacca. The Wookiee then apparently died when a transport exploded. Images of the runes remained in C-3PO’s memory, but the protocol droid’s programming forbade him from translating them. Poe knew where to find a black-market droidsmith -- but unfortunately, he was on Kijimi.

Kijimi was where Poe had been a spice runner in his rebellious youth, before abandoning both the spice gang and his friend Zorii Bliss. Zorii heard Poe had been spotted on Kijimi, intercepted him, and threatened to decorate the snow with his brains. She relented only reluctantly and brought them to see Babu Frik, who was able to unlock the images in C-3PO’s memory.

The First Order occupation was strangling Kijimi, and Zorii wanted out. She invited Poe to come with her, but he told her he couldn’t walk out on the Resistance and its struggle. When Poe and his friends learned Chewbacca was alive but in First Order custody on a Star Destroyer above Kijimi, Zorii gave Poe a data-medallion that could get him aboard the ship.

Poe and Finn rescued Chewbacca, but were swarmed by stormtroopers, with Poe taking a blaster bolt to the arm. The First Order sentenced them to die by execution, but they were saved by General Hux – who revealed he was the spy in the First Order. Retrieving the Falcon, they rushed to Kef Bir in the Endor system to secure the Sith wayfinder.

Poe returned to Ajan Kloss to learn Leia was dead – the great Resistance leader who’d been his mentor was gone. Palpatine ordered all worlds to surrender to the Sith, but a grieving Poe rallied the movement’s forces to fight on, for Leia and for everyone else they’d lost, and helped plan a daring raid on Exegol.

Poe led the starfighter attack, which looked like it would end in tragedy – the Resistance was badly outgunned by the Sith armada and Palpatine lashed Poe’s forces with deadly Force lightning. But Lando Calrissian came to the rescue with another armada, piloted by ordinary galactic citizens. That turned the tide, and the Sith fleet was destroyed.

Thanks to Poe’s leadership, the Resistance had won an enormous victory over the forces of evil – and could look forward to a more peaceful era of galactic history.