Summary
Skeleton Crew delivers a near-perfect half-hour in Episode 5, fully embracing its Star Wars underpinnings and its many classic adventure inspirations.
Skeleton Crew has had its ups and downs, but Episode 5, “You Have a Lot to Learn About Pirates”, is pretty much perfect. Relax – I don’t mean it’s a flawless, all-time-great episode of television, but what I do mean is that it’s everything that works about this particular show condensed into a half-hour with an essential Star Wars adventure spirit and a sudden uptick in writing quality. It does what anyone who likes this show has come to expect from it and then some, all with real style.
Maybe it’s the personnel. For the first time, co-creators Christopher Ford and Jon Watts have passed the pen to someone else, namely Myung Joh Wesner, who also wrote Episode 6 of High Potential. The director is new, too – Jake Schreier, who is set to direct Marvel’s Thunderbolts* and worked on Netflix’s Beef. It’s a good creative line-up and it results in a just-right fusion of Skeleton Crew’s most obvious influences and upsides.
Oh Captain, My Captain
Despite the previous episode having ended by essentially laying out a perfect structure for the next few installments, “You Have a Lot to Learn About Pirates” doesn’t really take that route. Instead, it throws up a new lead for the kids and Jod to investigate that will hopefully reveal the coordinates of At Attin directly.
In the time between episodes, KB has diddled with SM-33’s memory chip so that he hopefully won’t try to kill the kids when he’s reactivated. And it works. When SM-33 is turned back on he instead reveals the identity of his former captain, Tak Rennod, a legendary pirate whose ship, the Onyx Cinder, everyone is currently aboard. Like all good pirates, Rennod had a secret lair, and it’s there, beneath Skull Ridge Mountain, that he might have stashed the coordinates to At Attin.
So, the kids set out for this new destination while SM-33 regales them with stories of Rennod’s mutinous crew and Jod reassures Wim about his disillusionment over galactic adventure not being quite what he expected. Make some notes here – I thought we’d done away with Jod’s is-he-isn’t-he Jedi arc, but you can tell from his lessons about throwing off attachments and the fact Wim brings up his apparent ability to use the Force again that we haven’t finished drawing water from this particular well just yet.
Welcome to Skull Ridge Mountain
Despite its rather terrifying name, Skull Ridge Mountain doesn’t quite live up to its reputation. It’s now a swanky wellness spa, its deadly acid pits retrofitted into mud baths. It’s all very upper-class. Security is tight because the spas are hosting the Banking Clan for an economic summit, and kids are very much not allowed, so they’re forced to infiltrate the gaff by posing as Elders of the Bratric System who don’t speak any Basic.
Jod serves as their translator, but he has to pull double-duty as a bit of an old-school fixer, bribing the receptionist for a suite they can use as a base of operations while keeping things low-key. But nothing about Jod is low-key. He’s recognized immediately by a vengeful former flame, Pokkit, who’s still clearly a little salty about him having apparently left her for dead the last time they met and reminds him that there’s a bounty on his head.
So, while the kids enjoy the sudden luxury of their new suite – kids will be kids, after all – Jod panics about the crew of bounty hunters that is no doubt heading his way. This adds a bit of a ticking clock quality to Skeleton Crew Episode 5, with the novelty that only one person in the cast even realizes it.
Jod (Jude Law) grasps a lightsaber in Skeleton Crew | Image via Disney+
Spirit of Adventure
The descent into Rennod’s lair is great stuff, all classic adventure business full of dangerous traps and puzzles, with the constant pressure of Jod’s former crew, who have arrived on Lanupa to collect his bounty, getting closer and closer.
This is where the episode’s title comes in, too. One of the puzzles is a giant acid pit that can only be bypassed by making “the greatest sacrifice”, which the kids assume is their lives. As Jod points out, “You Have a Lot to Learn About Pirates”. The sacrifice is treasure, and Jod, with another performative Force flourish – remember those notes – drops their final Republic credit into the burbling liquid and gets them inside the secret chamber just as the bounty hunters arrive.
Things Take A Dark Turn
Perhaps what I like about the writing here is that it doesn’t necessarily feel like something you’d find in a kids’ show. While it hasn’t exactly been a secret that Jod isn’t to be trusted, I expected him to just be a self-serving scoundrel type who eventually warns to his new companions. But he might be a little more villainous than that. The first clue is how he deals with the bounty hunters – while SM-33 is plugged into Captain Rennod’s dataport, he orders him to refill the previous room with acid, and we hear his former crew screamingly dissolve off-screen.
Jod now has what he wants, you see – the coordinates to At Attin, which turns out to be the last remaining Old Republic Mint. In other words, it literally prints currency. It’s an endless supply of treasure. On a roll of villainy, Jod challenges Fern for the captaincy of the Onyx Cinder, and despite the best efforts of the kids, she yields. Jod is now the captain, and his first act is to order SM-33 to take the children as prisoners.
Luckily, the kids are able to escape through a trapdoor. In their absence, Jod focuses on the lightsaber that was among Rennod’s treasure, which Wim had just tried to use to save Fern. Using the Force again, Jod pulls the lightsaber into his grasp, seemingly proving that he is – or at least was – a Jedi after all. And he might well be the show’s bad guy rather than one of its heroes.
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