Summary
Skeleton Crew sticks the landing with a fantastic ending. Episode 8 is a note-perfect finale that rounds out an unexpectedly brilliant season.
“The Real Good Guys” is as perfect an ending as Skeleton Crew could have hoped for. It’s action-packed, beautiful looking, thematically resonant, and feels at its deepest core as quintessentially Star Wars as anything that has been put out under Disney’s ownership. There was always an upper limit to how truly memorable Episode 8 could be given the nature of the show – this is not, for instance, the finale of The Mandalorian Season 2 – but series creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford really did nail this finale.
There aren’t too many new revelations aside from the particulars of Jod’s backstory, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the payoffs; the kids putting the lessons they’ve learned during their adventures into practice, teaching their parents a thing or two about bravery, while providing that hopeful glimmer of endless adventure that underpinned The Last Jedi.
Meeting the Supervisor
We pick things up right where we left them in the penultimate episode, with Jod feeding Fara and Wendle a line of silver-tongued rubbish about being a Republic Emissary and the kids having made a nuisance of themselves during the journey home (to be fair, that last part is true from Jod’s perspective.) To protect his identity Jod orders the kids to be confined to their quarters and monitored ceaselessly by the planet’s droids, which are all too happy to obey.
Meanwhile, Jod takes Fern and Fara to meet the much-talked-about Supervisor of At Attin, which turns out to be a giant droid voiced by Stephen Fry. Jod needs to get his pirate frigate through the planet’s barrier so they can plunder the mint, but he needs permission for that. And since he mistakenly introduces himself as both a Republic Emissary and a Jedi, and the last communication the Supervisor received from the Republic was a warning that all Jedi were traitors, he tips his hand. (I’m taking from this that At Attin has been cut off from the wider galaxy since Order 66 – correct me if I’m wrong.)
When the Supervisor sics his droids on Jod, he buries his lightsaber in the Supervisor’s eye (if you can call it that), which shuts down the Supervisor and all of the planet’s power. That doesn’t help Jod get the frigate through, though, so he threatens Fern and Fara so that the latter will give him access. She does, much to Fern’s visible disappointment.
The Pirate Invasion
A good chunk of the Skeleton Crew finale is devoted to the pirates’ invasion of At Attin, with the bad guys steaming into the planet’s atmosphere and opening fire on everything while the other kids race around on hoverbikes to get to the Onyx Cinder. Their plan is to contact Kh’ymm from way back in Episode 3 and get her to call in New Republic reinforcements.
This is a multi-pronged plan that ends up requiring Wim and Wendle to get into the Supervisor’s office to reroute power from the docking clamps keeping the Onyx Cinder in place, which will allow KB to shoot off into space and hail Kh’ymm from the other side of the barrier. It involves distracting Jod, making use of SM-33’s detached head, and a comprehensive ruse about a made-up magical crystal to keep Jod occupied. It doesn’t go entirely smoothly, but for the most part, it works.
Things do take a downhill turn when KB re-enters At Attin’s atmosphere and seems to crash-land, and the others are still under Jod’s watchful eye. Jod seems genuinely remorseful about how badly things are suddenly going, and you know what that means – there’s a Star Wars villain monologue coming along.
Jude Law in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew | Image via Disney+
Jod Reveals His Backstory
Jod isn’t a villain in the truest sense of the term. He’s just a guy who was born into incredibly hardscrabble circumstances and has had to suffer a lot of trauma, which explains why he is so obsessed with money (he has none) and why he’s so openly resentful of the relationship the kids have with their parents (he has none of those, either.)
Jod grew up alone and starving, scraping by one day at a time, and his only salvation was being discovered by a Jedi who looked after him for a little while and saw that he had potential. However, that Jedi could teach him very little before she was executed in front of him, and he has presumably been a pirate ever since. So, he is moderately Force-sensitive, but he’s not a real Jedi, as Wim threw in his face earlier.
This is a surprisingly “adult” backstory for the villain in a kids’ show to have, and I think that’s good. Star Wars might have always mimicked the structure and themes of classic adventure serials but it has never been shy about its themes; totalitarianism, control, corruption, inequality, exploitation, all that good stuff that underpins the space wizard malarkey. Jod’s a product of a galaxy indifferent to those without a particular surname.
Skeleton Crew’s Happy Ending
Despite Jod’s sympathetic monologue and claims not to want any harm to come to the kids or the planet, he’s eventually overpowered by the combined might of the heroes and the barrier around At Attin is lowered, allowing the New Republic to sweep in and blow the pirate frigate to smithereens, detonating Jod’s hopes of limitless wealth.
We needn’t worry about any casualties. It’s promptly revealed that KB survived the crash and that SM-33, carrying his own head under his arm like Nearly Headless Nick, is fine too. The pirates get their comeuppance, At Attin is saved (though inevitably changed by the reality of the wider galaxy that the kids have brought home with them), and it’s clear from Wim’s expression as he watches the New Republic fighters jet out of orbit that he has more adventures in his future.
Will those adventures happen in a potential Season 2 of Skeleton Crew? Maybe. But even if they don’t, Episode 8 provided the ideal conclusion for a series that has, against all odds, injected a lot of heart and excitement back into a series that was becoming mired in nostalgia-mining and cynicism. For that, it deserves all the credit in the galaxy.
