Summary
Skeleton Crew feels more like Star Wars than anyone could have expected, capturing the franchise’s innate sense of adventure and wonder better than any project has for a while.
The debut of any Star Wars project is fraught with peril these days since The Discourse™ is inevitable and certain to be embarrassing. I can’t imagine what the die-hard purists will think of Skeleton Crew, a younger-skewing adventure series that is mining deep for nostalgia not just within its franchise but within pop culture generally. Episodes 1 and 2, “This Could Be A Real Adventure” and “Way, Way Out Past the Barrier”, feel as much like classic Amblin Entertainment fare, particularly The Goonies, as anything to do with a universe far, far away.
And that’s… fine. Why are people angry about this? The increasingly common accusation that something “isn’t Star Wars”, which has been leveled at The Acolyte and several other shows, is nonsensical. There are spaceships and aliens and Force users and blasters, and you can almost guarantee there’ll be a lightsaber at some point. How much more Star Wars do you want?
In its first two episodes Skeleton Crew proves, if nothing else, that it’s possible for a show to feel a lot like Star Wars as well as feeling a lot like something else, too. What’s being evoked here is a spirit of 80s imagination and adventure that feels, ironically, closer to the core values of Star Wars as it was originally conceived than anything the franchise has put out in years. It’s nostalgia not as a cynical toy-selling exercise, but as a playful lament for simpler, more hopeful times. It’s as good at being that as I think anyone could have imagined it being.
Plot-wise, creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have dumped us somewhere in the New Republic era, but the timeline is largely irrelevant. Before we predictably jet off into space, the place where we spend the majority of time is the planet At Attin, which is deliberately designed to resemble suburban Earth in a way that no Star Wars location has before. There are kids, families, schools, roads, and traffic; if it weren’t for the aliens here and there and the fondness everyone seems to have for cloaks, you’d be forgiven for thinking we were back in Hawkins, Indiana.
Likewise, the characters feel of a piece with the misfit outcasts in something like Stranger Things. Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) and Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) are dreamers, stopping their walk to school for an imaginary lightsaber fight and spending their lessons dreaming of adventure and discovery. Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and KB (Kyriana Kratter) have a bit more edge to them; they’re rebels pushing back against expectations and small-town ennui on speeder bikes, not in their imaginations.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Still | Image via Disney+
But they’re all recognizable archetypes; their parents, too. You just know they’re all going to end up as reluctant allies in a galactic adventure, and sure enough, they promptly find a hidden spaceship and accidentally jet off into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, where they quickly cross paths with a pirate outfit we met in the opening scene of Episode 1, turning on their own captain.
The pirate port of Borgo is a great setting, almost diametrically opposed to At Attin, which is the point. The kids are out in the wild now, crossing paths with genuine dangers and getting embroiled in real adventures. In a neat twist, At Attin is known among the pirates as the lost planet of eternal treasure, a place of myth and wonder. The fabled El Dorado-style promised land that is a mainstay in these kinds of stories is, in Skeleton Crew, a home so boring that the main characters couldn’t wait to escape it.
I’m sure there’s more to At Attin than we’ve seen. What Skeleton Crew Episodes 1 and 2 offer up is a place that feels like a facsimile; it’s ostensibly part of the Republic but has a weirdly totalitarian vibe, and a giant barrier keeps dangers out and citizens in. What is really going on here is sure to be something for subsequent episodes to unpack.
But that’s a while away yet, it seems. Episode 2 ends with the kids in Borgo’s brig, finally meeting Jude Law’s (Peter Pan & Wendy, The Nest) character, Jod Na Nawood, who is seemingly a Force user. I’m pretty sure he’s the masked pirate captain who was betrayed in the cold open, but that’s another reveal for down the line. Until then, there’s an escape to be getting on with, introductions to be made, and doubtlessly many misadventures to enjoy. Watts and Ford have crafted something quite lovely here, a throwback family adventure with all the Star Wars trappings but an earnest sense of enthusiasm that has been missing from the franchise for a long time. It’s about kids and for kids, that’s for sure, but there’s something here for the grown-ups among us who can still, if we squint a little, see ourselves in these wide-eyed adventurers just looking for a good time.
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