Remembering the Challenger Explosion

     (Originally posted to Another Lover of the Blade.)

     Thursday marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Challenger explosion. I was really surprised(and disappointed) that I couldn't find any TV specials about it. (Scowling particuarly hard in the direction of the History Channel.) This YouTube video archived the live news feed of the explosion. That night, President Ronald Reagan gave the following speech, written by Peggy Noonan. (Emphasis mine.)

  "...Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all the people of our country. This is, truly, a national loss. Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight - we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle. But they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, and overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gergory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. Wemourn their loss as a nation together. The families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we are thinking of you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge, and I will meet it with joy.' 
     "They had a hunger to explore the universe and to discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us. We've grown used to wonders in this century: it's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States Space Program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we've forgotten that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
     "And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff: I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew were pulling us into the future, and we will continue to follow. 
     "I've always had great faith in, and respect for, our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program, we don't keep secrets and cover things up, we do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change any of it in a minute. We will continue our quest in space; there will be more shuttle flights, and more shuttle crews, and yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here. Our hopes and our journeys continue. 
     "I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and every woman who works for NASA, or who worked on this mission, and tell them: 'Your dedication and professionalism had moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it.' 
     "There's a coincidence today, on this day 390 years ago the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Canada. In his lifetime, the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He was raised by the sea, lived on the sea, and he was buried by it.' Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew, their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

     This is an amazing speech. The world has gotten so cynical, I'm ashamed to say that I wonder exactly how much of this was heartfelt and how much was acting. But that doesn't matter, because it works either way. It had been a long time since the country had had a disaster of this scale(JFK's death, probably?); and we were hurting. We needed to hear this message, to calm our nerves and assure us the world would keep spinning. The language he used is extremely plain and everyday; even the multisyllable words are common and simple, like "coincidence" and "Challenger". It's easy to understand. And it's comforting. Inspiring, even. (The cynical part of me wonders what are we inspired about, like it does during the Olympics.)
     But that paragraph speaking straight to the kids - that's one of the greatest parts of this speech. Mom was one of those kids watching; I was watching fifteen years later when 9/11 happened. Resgan just explained what happened, like Mr. Rogers advised, and he didn't hide that he didn't understand it all yet, either.
     But as a nation, we mourned. Together. This happened in the aftermath of 9/11, but grief brings people together far closer than anything else does. It's comforting, somehow, particularly in these times we live in now, to realize that it's possible for an entire country to be weeping in response to an event. Maybe that's just because we're constantly at each other's throats about race violence or gay rights or abortion or any of the other things ripping the nation apart right now.
     "They had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge, and I will meet it with joy.'" (Looking at you, Leslie Knope.) That might be one of the most perfect and inspirational epitaphs you could ask for.
     Think about it.
     Don't you want to have someone say that about you when you're gone?
     I just shook my head at the part where he said "we don't keep secrets and cover things up, we do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change any of it in a minute." We don't do that any longer. Maybe we never did. But a lot of things change in thirty years, and a lot of that freedom, that feeling of invincibility, has gotten lost somewhere along the way. And it's really sad.
     That final phrase is amazing. "...and they slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God." "Surly" means "ill-humored or ill-tempered" according to my copy of the Webster New American Handy College Dictionary, which is a great way of looking at this life, because it's just so true. And while Dale Hinshaw from Philip Gulley's Harmony novels might be a weirdo who could've come straight from Pawnee, he has good intentions, most of the time. But anyway, he said once that being faced with sickness was bound to turn our thoughts to the eternal. This is especially true in times of massive tragedy like this.

     I don't know, I've always said pop-culturally I belonged to the 80's. So that might have played a part in the solemnity that was the anniversary, why I couldn't concentrate on school. Or maybe it's just my love of history. One of the most amazing sights at the Newseum while on Youth Tour in D.C. June 2011 was the local paper right after the disaster from Christa McAuliffe's hometown. The scale of the event had something to do with it; cell phones and the internet didn't exist yet. But I read somewhere that 85 percent of the country knew what happened within one hour. It just needed to be talked about. 

The front page of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor from Tuesday, January 28, 1986. Concord was the hometown of civilian astronaut Christa McAuliffe, a teacher at the high school.

Modeling Christlikeness in a Sitcom-like Stage Family

    This personal essay was for Topics of Advanced Composition. It scored a 93, and Dr. Dial-Driver just gave me one of those "Really?" looks when I turned in a revised version. That got 100 points.

            Talking about the citizens of Pawnee, Indiana, Parks and Recreation’s Ben Wyatt says at one point, “You know, it’s weird. I’ve been to a lot of towns…usually people don’t care about anything. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re weirdos, but….they’re weirdos that care” (“Time Capsule”). For a while around the Northeastern State University campus, and to a lesser extent the city of Tahlequah or Cherokee County generally, if “the SWAT team” were mentioned, the speaker likely didn’t mean a squad of heavily-armed law enforcement officers. Instead they were talking about the drama ministry of the Baptist Collegiate Ministries, which was considered as somewhat of a loose cannon amongst the tight-knit community of BCM outreaches. But we cared about each other. And that was important.

            I was a loner growing up, for the most part. Not that I didn’t like people – it’s more just that I like a small group of specific people, and if someone is able to gain my trust in order to be called a friend, then that trust is nearly indestructible. I had acted in middle school musicals with our homeschool co-op and really enjoyed that, but in general, Oklahoma is rather lacking in acting opportunities. So there was just the occasional murder-mystery, and quoting good TV lines with my siblings. But in general, nothing, which didn’t do much to take my mind off a disastrous freshman year of college or the violent implosion of the sarcastic, witty and creative support group that served as our personal Buffy-type “Scooby Gang” for me and my friends in surviving high school.

            The project known as “Students with a Testimony” began when Samantha Hill transferred to NSU around the spring of 2012 from Carl Albert; their branch of the BCM had a drama ministry primarily used as a tool for evangelization, and Sam wanted to continue that work in and around Tahlequah. She obtained the blessing of NSU BCM directors Bob and Debbie Lipscomb, and then the project was off and running. So she set out to round up some team members through word-of-mouth.

“I pretty much just had to go out on a limb, finding strangers who wanted to be a part of the BCM and say, ‘Hey, are you a Christian? Would you like to share your testimony?’” she said during an interview for an unpublished newspaper article in September 2013. “I was the crazy girl that everyone saw coming and, believe me, they’d run the other way, because they knew exactly what I was wanting to recruit them for.”

Sam tried to recruit me to immediately join the team when I came to Tahlequah in fall 2012, but I declined, since I thought I had better focus solely on schoolwork until I was more adapted to campus culture. Besides, I was more involved at the time with Campus Christian Fellowship, another ministry which has (though no one on either side wants to actually admit it) a fierce rivalry with the BCM. She got about a dozen people to sign up, though; and they performed a handful of shows in churches of various sizes, interspersing testimonies and Scripture with music and comedy sketches.

      Through a mix of gentle pestering by Sam throughout the year and knowing several other people who attended the BCM regularly, together with realizing that CCF wasn’t at all a place where I could grow spiritually, I started going to the Monday-night worship service, and gradually discovered that this was a good organization to be a part of. When fall 2013 started up and the SWAT sign-ups were passed around, I figured that I ought to dive deeper into helping out. It had been forever since I’d acted in anything, and besides, it was a ministry opportunity. The team was made up of mostly new faces this time around, with Haley Ritter co-leading the group with Sam for a semester.

     “I actually heard about SWAT when I first met Sam and Haley, they were telling me about it, and it seemed like a really, really cool way to do ministry,” said Elizabeth Hodge in an interview from September 2013. “I’ve been involved in theater most of my life, but never have done any kind of ministry like this before. It’s a really cool way to spread the Gospel, because you don’t have to go five thousand miles away and spend five thousand dollars.”

     Once we’d gotten the sketches memorized, life quickly turned into something of a sitcom: Friends was blended into Full House and the sketch comedy group Studio C, and then that combination was added to the YouTube series Messy Mondays, as I put it in a blog post simply titled “SWAT.” But we really did become like family. Sam was the mom of the group, Haley the drill-sergeant aunt. And together, they kept things running with a mix of strictness and sweetness. Jacob was the cool older cousin, while Elizabeth, Susan and I were like siblings. Neighbors included the spacey janitor James, four-wheeling Becca, obnoxious Scott (everyone hated him), couple Skylar and Ja Li Si (we gave them a hard time, of course), while Caleb and Holly were always sort of hanging out in the corner. New additions to the cast several weeks in were TJ, serving as the fiery deadpan snarker in addition to doing voiceovers, while Justin turned out to be a jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from locating churches to running sound equipment and acting.

     There were a lot of coffee runs to McDonald’s when someone had a lot on their mind –

“Random coffee runs late at night make for a gem of a night,” Elizabeth tweeted once – and there was entertaining improvisation out of necessity, and malapropisms galore (well-chronicled in my video “SWAT Blooper Reel”). Road trips to and from shows were also very…interesting, to say the least. As Elizabeth said, “The basic theme of all our road trips is, like once we get there, you ask: ‘…But did we die?’ And that sums up everything perfectly.” For example, there was that night we went looking for the invisible church in Sallisaw.

     Having put together a silent project to go with the Lifehouse song “Everything” for a charity fundraiser/talent show, we were invited to perform it at a revival at Deliverance Baptist the next week. We didn’t usually do shows on Wednesday nights unless it was a special occasion, and this definitely counted. Thing was, though, we’d lost several key props between performances, since it was supposed to be a one-time thing. And several people were late, adding to the tension. So we nervously played ping pong to pass the time, then split up, one group racing to Wal-Mart for glass-bottled root beer, the other group flying to Dollar Tree for play-food money. We got to Sallisaw with a half hour to spare, more than enough time to find the church…..except that none of us can find it on our phones’ maps. We did find three other churches, which all turned out to be the wrong ones. So we finally talk Jacob into calling the pastor, where he’s given directions which sound straightforward enough: “At Wal-Mart, turn right onto Maple and then drive a ways, and then another right.” Maple is located, but it leads to a really sketchy-looking neighborhood….and none of us (ten people in three vehicles) had ever been to this city before, so we were completely lost. And by now it was pouring down rain. Susan and I ask for directions from some terrified construction workers at the Assembly of God, which turns out to be another dead end. (Also, we realized once we got back in the car that she was already in costume as Death.) We get a lead on another place it might be, which takes us several miles out of town and past three burned-out buildings which were at one point churches. The search has now taken an hour and fifteen minutes, all five occupants of our car vote for giving up and finding dinner. We relay this information back to the other two cars, and then eat and drive back home to Tahlequah, crying in frustration yet knowing the situation was hilarious. . This experience was recapped in far more detail in my blog post “Getting Lost.”

     Weather slowed the beginning of our spring semester’s schedule, but the execution of the performances was greatly improved, due in part to the addition of Drew and Ashleigh as tech crew and about a quarter of the cast dropping out. We banded together often to cover roles whenever necessary, and strengthened connections with the other BCM ministries, as the more musical of us joined the worship band. Organization-wide lunch hangouts were a staple of Friday afternoons, and watch parties during Thunder games caused much screaming and strangling of pillows. The overall atmosphere was much like working in Pawnee’s Parks Department, and when you enjoy your coworkers, coming in every day is awesome. Most of us spent nearly every nonclass moment in either the BCM’s basement, living room or office. Special SWAT events included Christmas caroling at a senior citizens’ center - three days before Thanksgiving - a birthday party picnic, and a game night featuring intense rounds of Catchphrase and Apples to Apples. An elderly pastor in Muskogee even gave a handful of us marriage advice after the show one night. (”If you live long enough to say ‘Yes, dear,’ you’ll live to learn everything else.”) Pretty good advice.

      After Sam and her husband moved once she graduated, the way everyone planned the leadership transition to take place was for Susan to take over the reins the next year, with me taking the second-in-command role which Haley had filled. But there were a lot of family problems at home, which meant that I had to leave for a semester in order to help out. Susan’s theater duties kept her too stressed to run SWAT properly, so it was absorbed into the worship band, where it limped along for the rest of the year before apparently being shut down sometime in spring 2015. And by then transfers happened – Skylar and I came to RSU, Elizabeth went to NSUBA, Caleb to Southwest Baptist, etc. And life happened, too – Justin and Ashleigh fell in love almost immediately, and their wedding will be held in a couple months. Jacob is engaged now, and Haley got married. Ja Li Si became Miss Cherokee last year, and began dating Sam’s brother. Graduations will begin proceeding in a couple months.

     We weren’t that successful at evangelizing, but we did do well at encouraging those who needed it – whether that was audience members, relatives, friends or castmates – through the spiritual valleys, discouragements, breakups, general insecurity and school panic of this life. We were a team, which doesn’t come up very often. You don’t really get that Parks and Rec vibe in real life very often. And when you do….that ought to be treasured. “A team isn’t a bunch of kids out to win; a team is something you belong to. Something you feel. Something you have to earn,” Gordon Bombay said in The Mighty Ducks. We earned that, and you don’t let those ties fall slack. So we still keep in touch, and have mini-reunions whenever possible. I may be allergic to college, but SWAT has definitely been one of the highlights.

Works Cited

Coburn, Wesley. “Getting Lost”. Blog post. Another Lover of the Blade. Blogger. 21 November 2013. Web. 17 January 2016.

--------------------. “SWAT”. Blog post. Another Lover of the Blade. Blogger. 9 November 2013. Web. 17 January 2016. 

-------------------. “SWAT Blooper Reel”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 29 December 2014. Web. 17 January 2015.

Hill, Samantha. Personal interview. 9 September 2013.

Hodge, Elizabeth. Personal interview. 9 September 2013.

------------------ (HodgepodgeEH). “Random coffee outings late at night make for a gem of a night.” 7 March 2014. Tweet.

The Mighty Ducks. 1992. Dir. Stephen Herek. Buena Vista Pictures, 1992. DVD.

“Time Capsule”. Parks and Recreation: Season Three. Writ. Michael Schur. Dir. Michael Schur. NBCUniversal Television Distribution. 2011. DVD.

Observation Pantoum

     The final part of the observation assignment, taking the poem we translated the prose into and then further translating it into a pantoum format. The numbers aren't actually part of the poem, just a reminder to myself what the order of the form is.

1 Tuesday morning in late January,

2 the birds are too cold to fly in formation

3 Everything looks the color of cement

4 and it would be ideal for hiding with a book.

2 The birds are too cold to fly in formation

5 and the parking lot engines snort in reluctance.

4 Hiding with a book would be ideal,

6 but living requires dealing with people.

5 The parking lot engines snort in reluctance

7 while the solitary hikers prove

6 living requires dealing with people

8 everywhere you look.

7 The solitary hikers prove

9 there’s nothing worthwhile outside today.

8 Everywhere you look

10 the sky, sidewalk, even buildings –

9 there’s nothing worthwhile outside today.

3 Everything looks the color of cement,

10 Sky, sidewalk, buildings –

1 It’s a Tuesday morning in late January. 

Observation Free Verse Poem

     This assignment was to sharpen our observation skills. So we were set loose to wander around campus for ten minutes and then write a couple paragraphs describing what we noticed. Then we were to turn those paragraphs in a more poetic rendering.

Tuesday morn in freezing January,

I don’t mean to be contrary,

it’s just…everywhere you look, you see cement,

and even the birds overhead are spent.

I don’t hate winter, it’s just natural weather

that happens every year, so you just wear that old leather

jacket all the time, then conserve body heat

as much as possible.

That’s probably why everyone else is staying indoors,

looking out from window-warmth near the printer;

not like those isolated and independent souls

trudging along to destinations in the cold.

Do the dead leaves get lonesome?

And if so, how could you tell?

From somewhere distant a motor hums,

Taking its occupants to the post office or Taco Bell.

EADGBE

     For Dr. Mackie's Studies in Poetry, this assignment was to take an object and build outward into a metaphor for life in general.

Those dull guitar strings lost their stress,

it’s no wonder the sound’s a mess –

optimum performance comes only with tension,

so there’s no need for such apprehension;

challenges stretch them, but that’s by design,

it’s the same thing with bones –

they grow stronger through cracks in the fault lines.

We’re all playing down a few pieces in this game of chess,

let’s just face it – much as we’d like it to,

life can’t be a permanent recess. 

Sarah's Life

     This was a fun assignment. I tend to use allusion in most of my writing; so for a whole poem to be based in allusion without quoting, and especially for specifically focusing on songs...this was too easy. Although, technically it wasn't, because the hard part was deciding which songs to allude to. It was supposed to be a song of our generation that other generations might not catch, but written in such a way that they understood what the song was about. After a careful survey of possible candidates to reference(about forty), I finally whittled it down to ten, because if one is good, then more is much better...particularly if they're mainly country, which only like two other people in the course listen to. But they know that I tend to allude to pop culture in my poems, so that made it easier. But Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks and Carrie Underwood were all way too obvious, though they all have tons of story songs.
     Also, it was almost like writing a song, blending all these different scenes into the larger story, which was really fun. If you stack them on top of each other into a literal timeline, the details don't all mesh, obviously, but just taking the main threads, it seemed to work out okay.
     Allusions classmates caught: "Boondocks", by Little Big Town; "Independence Day" by Martina McBride; "We Danced" from Brad Paisley, "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton; "The Letter(Love, Me)" by Collin Raye, "Fireflies" by Owl City and "The House That Built Me" by Miranda Lambert. They missed "The Little Girl" by John Michael Montgomery, "Travelin' Soldier" from the Dixie Chicks, and "Vanilla Twilight" by Owl City. I suppose Avril Lavigne's "Darlin'" and Jason Michael Carroll's "Hurry Home" could be implied, too.

It happened out in the boondocks

where y’all all learn about life,

lust, discipline and Jesus Christ. –

Sarah’s folks shot each other, burned down their house,

that Fourth of July she was eight.

Lamberts took her in and raised her right –

Ten years later Sarah’s a waitress

at the diner, she played piccolo in the high school band,

and met a boy waiting for the Army bus.

They exchanged letters, fell in love,

But his return was wooden, not with that velvet box –

Dave was sweeping up the bar early one morning,

when Sarah walked through that door.

He told her “We’re closed, now, ma’am,”

She said, “Yeah, but I lost my purse-“

Don’t worry, she got it back

But not until they danced across those weathered floorboards –

Now I’m downtown, walking quickly homebound

with Vanessa Carlton piano chords in my head,

Darlin’, I wish you were here,

Helping take care of Grandpa Dave now she’s dead…

He told her, weeping there,

“I dunno how long I’ll be…”

I left the hospice in a milkshake-colored mood,

And began this email to say please come home soon.

Because nothing is ever quite as it seems,

I realize, clearing out this house that built me.

Love you - Dad.

Shadows

     There is absolute zero meaning to this rondeau from Studies in Poetry. The assignment was just to craft evocative imagery; and so that's what happened...

Shadows are evaporating into the dark,

while the tune of the meadowlark

slips away into the night.

Caress the face staring in fright,

Inhale the perfume that is her trademark.

Eat something exotic, like aardvark,

try to ignore the current plight -

In the neighborhood of the trailer park

shadows are evaporating.

Sure, there’s the lousy job at Hallmark,

And glory days from high school as a Knight,

they’re gone; but there’s this campsite

and the flame’s arc

lighting up the space under the stars with sparks.

Shadows are evaporating.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens

      May as well review The Force Awakens, since I can't think of anything else to write about. Also, because Star Wars is pretty much the pop culture version of the Super Bowl. And besides, it seems like the whole world's seen episode seven by now, so it's not like I'm spoiling anything.

     Unfortunately, all that post-movie history, which was explained at length in a ton of novels, no longer exists. So Luke was never cloned, he never got married to an assassin named Mara Jade, the remnants of Imperial and Rebel forces never had to team up to fight off a massive takeover attempt by a bunch of aliens, and Han and Leia never got to explore the Millennium Falcon's history with their granddaughter. Lots of other stuff happened, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head. Anyway, none of that ever happened. Although technically the folks at Disney said that it did "in an alternate universe", which is a lame excuse. But basically we have to start from scratch now.

     It's been thirty years since Return of the Jedi. The Empire has fallen apart after the deaths of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, and a group called the First Order has picked up the biggest part of their scraps. The New Republic apparently disbanded its army, so a group of dissidents are known as the Resistance, and they're facing off against the First Order.

     On a desert planet called Jakku, an old man gives a trinket to an X-wing pilot named Poe Dameron, who feeds the trinket into his soccer-ball-like astromech droid BB-8 before a bunch of Stormtroopers arrive and massacre everyone in the town. (This trinket turns out to be a slice of a treasure map.) Those Stormtroopers are under the command of a guy named Kylo Ren, who can Force-freeze blaster bolts and read people's minds. Ren captures Poe, BB-8 escapes into the wilderness(have we seen that before?), and one Stormtrooper can't bring himself to murder innocent people, as indicating by frowning at his blaster rifle. (They can hit things now.)
      BB-8 is captured by a desert scavenger(it seems to be the sole occupation on the planet, as it's basically a junkyard) before being rescued by a girl named Rey, who grouchily agrees to take the droid into town the next day. She's very used to taking care of herself, living alone in the hulk of an old AT-AT(those elephant things used during the Battle of Hoth in Empire Strikes Back). She probably would like to leave, but doesn't mention anything about it directly. Everybody in town wants the working droid, but she decides to keep it, which leads to the food trader calling someone to alert them that there's this droid here that everyone in this corner of the galaxy is apparently searching for.
     That one Stormtrooper, FN-2187, defects and rescues Poe, and they steal a TIE fighter, crash-landing on Jakku after getting shot. (Poe was looking for BB-8, who is now with Rey.) She beats him up when they meet, thinking he was a thief, but he explains that there was a wreck and Poe didn't make it, and so that's why he is wearing Poe's jacket. This leads Rey to think that he is a Resistance fighter. Right about then a bunch of TIE fighters come blazing into town looking for the droid, and so they all bolt towards a ship to get away. (She's a natural pilot and mechanic.) The ship they were going for is blown up, so they redirect and steal "a piece of garbage" from the food trader. This "piece of garbage" is an ugly Corellian YT freighter that hasn't flown in years. (That model sounds familiar!)
     Rey pilots masterfully away from her pursuers during a chase, where she manages to allow Finn to shoot most of those chasing them, and they go into deep space....where they're captured by a much larger ship's tractor beam. So they hide, naturally. But when these new invaders arrive, they turn out to be friendly: Han Solo and Chewbacca. As Han says, "Chewie - we're home." They have a brief encounter with Rey and Finn, Rey explaining that she stole the ship from the guy who stole it from someone who stole it from somebody else - "That guy was me!" Han complains. Anyway, now it's backstory time; they explain that they're trying to get BB-8 back to the Resistance, and that sounds like as good a venture as any. So sure they'll help. Han reveals that the legends were true. the Jedi did exist, and he was the same Han Solo who fought with the Rebellion and knew Luke Skywalker before he disappeared, due to a student falling to the Dark Side. (Apparently the last cargo Han was hauling before the Falcon was stolen was a pack of rathtars, terrifying octopus-like things, and they have stayed alive somehow for all that time the Falcon was parked. Either that, or they were on the much larger ship Han anhed Chewie were piloting.)
     Anyway, two separate gangs show up to cause trouble for Han, only to be dispatched through a mix of blaster and bowcaster fire and getting eaten up by the rathtars. Those gangs were going to try to get a First Order bounty on BB-8 while they were at it.
     Han decides to head to visit one of his old smuggling contacts, an ancient lady named Maz Kanata who runs a gathering spot bar on a very green planet called Tokodana. (Maz is about a thousand years old. And on entering the planet's atmosphere, Rey comments that she "had no idea that there was this much green in the entire galaxy." Han looks guilty.) Anyway, Rey finds an old lightsaber and picks it up, only to have a bewildering dream sequence/flashback. She is scared and runs into the woods. Someone in the bar has alerted the First Order to BB-8's presence, and so a bunch of Stormtroopers crash the place.
     Kylo Ren is there, too; and he has some serious anger issues. Or something. Anyway, he flipped out when he heard that there was a girl with the droid, and so he's on Tokodana to capture her. (He does, by using his jagged growling lightsaber for emphasis.) The First Order uses their new Starkiller Base(which is a Death Star built into the core of a planet) to evaporate much of the New Republic system. And Supreme Leader Snoke has told Kylo Ren that he must kill his father to complete his training. Poe's squadron of X-wings saves Han, Chewie, Finn and BB-8, and escorts them to the Resistance base.
     At the Resistance base, a raid is commissioned to attack the possible weak spot in the design, which means the X-wings have to fly down narrow channels again on a bombing run. And Han, Chewie and Finn have to go inside the base to disarm things so that it will explode properly at the end. But before all that, Han and Leia have a terrific reunion, and we learn for sure what we already knew; that Kylo Ren is their son, and he was the one responsible for wrecking Luke's school.
     Back on the Starkiller Base, Rey and Kylo frown at each other a lot as they try to out-stubborn the other. Rey has just realized that she can use the Force, and she mind-tricks a random Stormtrooper into letting her escape. Lots of wandering through hallways occurs here, which chews up a lot of time. Anyway, she runs into everyone else(literally), and Han confronts Kylo, calling him by his birth name, Ben. Chewie, Finn and Rey can only watch in horror as Kylo murders Han; Chewie blows some stuff up as a way to express his grief(and also finish the mission for why they were all there in the first place). Chewie also shoots Kylo for good measure.
     Kylo chases Rey and Finn into the snowy woods outside the Starkiller entrance, and Finn has his spine all slashed up, since he has no training in lightsaber dueling. Rey draws with Kylo, and everyone survives the planet's explosion.
     R2-D2 conveniently wakes up from a coma to deliver the rest of BB-8's map, where Rey travels to a watery island, finds Luke Skywalker, and silently holds out his lightsaber.

     It's Star Wars. There are a ton of plot holes and maddeningly poor dialogue throughout, and everyone knows far too much about what's going on all the time. But somehow you can overlook that for the most part. Harrison Ford is amazing, and Carrie Fisher did a great job, too. And Daisy Ridley was pretty good. I didn't love the movie like Mom, Dad or Courtney did, but it was enjoyable. (Really, basically the entire world loved it.)
     And also, this was the start of a new trilogy, so there will be a lot explained in Episodes VIII and IX.