ST Was R2D2 explained?

R2 is the last character's voice that you hear in the entire movie.

 

R2 wakes up when Rey shows up. It's the will of the force and works for me.

 

R2 is the film's droid "Luke". The authors (all three) made a conscious decision to bring R2 in late as they did Luke. TFA needed to establish the new characters, including BB8. And as they had done with Luke, they felt waking R2 up late in the film and making im a contributing factor in finding Luke's location gave BB8 time to establish himself without being overpowered by the most beloved droid in the universe.

They wrote the script in a way to give his awaking significance, but timed late. It also lends a mystery as to why he went into low power and what Luke was doing to R2 (if anything) during the vision.

 

I've heard mention that the fact that R2 has the Death Star plans is significant. Am I hearing right? If so, why does it matter?

 

It's basically a hope thing. Han has died, and it's a dark mood. R2-D2 waking up lightens the mood somewhat.

 

It's been explained off screen. Apparently R2 starts mulling things over the very first time BB8 meets him. And then finishes mulling and finds the info required at just the right time later in the film. I believe that's the explanation JJ gave.

But no, never explained in the film and just comes across as goofy IMO.

 

There's an important thing that I think no one has properly considered, even though the dialogue and other materials do make it fairly clear: that the section of the map containing the location of the first Jedi Temple was removed from the map before it was stored away, incomplete, in the Imperial data archives in the first place.

To make it clearer, let's walk the map back to its very beginnings for a second: in the years following Order 66, the Empire, having already largely exterminated the Jedi, also made use of the knowledge recovered from the Jedi Archives (which were taken intact and, according to the Grand Inquisitor, were still quite complete some fifteen years later) in order to locate and destroy all the Jedi sanctuaries. We know this because Admiral Statura says it in dialogue cut from the film but still in the novelizations. In the course of this, the Empire made a trans-galactic navigational chart identifying all known locations of significant Jedi sites, including the location of what is believed to be the very first temple. This conjectured creation point would be the very last time we read any mention of the map being complete prior to the point when R2-D2 and BB-8 compare notes.

As we all know from ANH, years later (and we don't know how many years yet, because we don't know precisely when the map was made), a small band of rebels, led by the long-missing Jedi fugitive Obi-Wan Kenobi and including the astromech droid R2-D2, infiltrated the Death Star battle station and secured themselves in a hangar bay control room equipped with a computer terminal. As the station's computer systems (as Kenobi predicted) were networked via the HoloNet to the entire Imperial information network, R2-D2, while searching the station's records for evidence that Leia Organa was being held prisoner there, was also able to gain access to the Imperial archives and download its contents into his backup memory, including the map - but, as his projection of the map reveals, it was an incomplete version. We know the details of how he acquired his copy of the map because Michael Arndt made clear that this was the writers' intention - and to me, authorial intent does count.

Three decades later, the First Order was also able to recover and extract the map from the Imperial archives, but it too was an incomplete version of the map - we know this because Kylo Ren tells Rey this during her interrogation, and there's really no reason to doubt him on this particular issue.

So, both possessors of the incomplete map got it from the same source: the Imperial archives. Which means one of two things: either the section of the map containing the location of the first temple was removed BEFORE the map was stored in the archives; or (significantly less likely) the map was stored in the archives first, later extracted so that the crucial piece could be removed, and stored away again. Usually, in Star Wars, the simpler explanation is the better one, so I'm gonna go with option number one.

Who removed the section from the map to begin with? My eye turns to Sidious, the man who would have the most to gain, at the time and place we assume the map was made, to have that section removed. Why did he remove it? Who can guess? It's very easy to sweep a lot of things under the rug that is "Sidious had a lot of schemes going on," and indeed there are any number of reasons for Palpatine to want that section cut out before the map was stored in the archives; also, we know that he and his apprentices were no strangers to this kind of activity - Sidious did have his then-apprentice Tyranus delete all references to Kamino from the Jedi Archives long before this, after all. The specific reason he would have done so is best left for the LFL Story Group to decide, but the evidence points in his direction.

All of this also creates far more interesting opportunities for the Story Group to explain how Lor San Tekka got his hands on the missing section to begin with - and, when walking all the facts back, there's no explanation, other than that Tekka was a font of arcane knowledge who had access to all kinds of obscure information, even in his retirement. It was that talent of his that apparently made him useful to Luke the last time he tried to rebuild the Jedi Order, which is why Leia sought him out when trying to find where Luke went. But it speaks volumes about Tekka as a character if, as I speculate, he was able to get his hands on something Sidious apparently went to extra lengths to keep out of any hands that weren't his own.

 

In that scenario, it could also have been a Jedi during Order 66 at the Jedi Temple. The Empire then extracted the incomplete map from the Jedi archives. Maybe?

 

Maybe. It's a scenario that happens to fit the facts. Again, what we know for certain is that it was incomplete when it was stored in the Imperial archives; how it got that way is still up to speculation. The exact reason ultimately has no bearing on the story of TFA, and in all likelihood won't have any bearing on that of Episode VIII either, any more than the answer to why C-3PO has a red arm really has any true bearing on those stories - the answer is an interesting story in its own right, but it's still it's own story and doesn't enhance the story of TFA. This leaves the Story Group to come up with any number of good story ideas that happen to fit the facts; yours is just one possibility.

 

That is just really bad writing... good lord JJ.

Also as others have said BB-8 shows up and talks about Luke Skywalker right when he returns to the Resistance Base with Han and Chewie... only when Rey shows up does R2 wake up.

 

correct.

 

I personally still really think Abrams is BSing a temporary answer because for the time being he can't actually say that Rey's arrival at the Resistance base triggered his awakening.

 

I find Artoo's presence during Rey's vision to be quite disturbing for Artoo's sake. He looks utterly terrified and paralyzed. The hellish looking backdrop, a darkly caped Luke caressing him with his biomechanical hand, I think this scene is important in understanding why Artoo went dormant for so long. He must have been so traumatized by what he experienced that he just could not function properly as a droid unit.

And then it wasn't until the awakening that he finally woke up.

But still, I think that scene indicates Artoo experienced something very dark and sinister.