Analysis

The hardest thing in discussing Skeleton Crew is defining who it was made for. It’s for kids, tweens and early teens, is the short answer, but it doesn’t seem like it’s for people who are presently kids that age; it seems like something made for kids of decades past, kids who liked Goonies, namely. Those people aren’t still kids, and so this show isn’t made for them in mind, either, as it’s too kiddish. You might say that it was made for kids today by people who wished kids today had something to watch like what they watched when they were kids, which is actually quite in keeping with Star Wars’s origins in George Lucas wanting ‘70s kids to have their own Flash Gordon like he had growing up. In any case, this is a show that looks to the past in a lot of its sensibilities.

As an aside, I can say that this show wasn’t made for me in particular. I’m a Star Wars fan, yes, but I’m not a kid, nor am I old enough to have grown up with Goonies; I’ve seen about the first ten minutes of that film, didn’t care for it.

What is clear about Skeleton Crew is that a great deal of thought and care was put into it. I think the show’s creators made exactly what they wanted to make. This show had the most consistent quality of all Star Wars’s Disney+ series; no episodes felt weak compared to the others, and every episode impressed me, in some way, as above-average television. This even though this show, like The Mandalorian, had different directors for each episode.

At Attin is the closest Star Wars has ever looked to the homes of most Star Wars fans, which I took to be quite intentional. The kids, Wim in particular, are set up as restless and yearning to be in Star Wars, essentially, so it can’t seem too much like they already do live in Star Wars; it needs to seem like they’re from Earth, at least for the first episode. Beyond that, At Attin also works as the adult world as seen by many kids: nice, but dull, with your parents doing something at an office, analyzing numbers and money. This incredibly mundane world that we’re introduced to serves through the rest of the show as a brilliant contrast to the El Dorado myth being told about it in the wider Galaxy. At Attin is the best-realized world we’ve seen in Star Wars in decades, a real character in its own right.

And the show’s actual characters are also notably well-realized. Jude Law I have seen before, in Captain Marvel and in those Sherlock Holmes movies he was Watson in, though not in any of the many other films he’s been in. This is easily the best acting I’ve seen from him in my limited viewing of his filmography. Beyond just the performance he put in, Law also did a lot to shape his character, doing things like singing the pirates’ legend of At Attin, so I give him a lot of credit for how the character turned out. The four kids, also, delivered great performances. I give them a lot of credit, of course, but I also give a lot of credit to the writing and direction. A lot of film’s bad kid performances, including those in Star Wars, come down to a bad script that just gives kids weird, awkward lines and scenarios to deliver. This show writes its young heroes quite authentically, particularly considering the fantastical tone of the story. They all felt their right age: not too timid and helpless, but also not quite capable people yet. The fact that our heroes are so young does cause a bit of an issue in that they don’t get complete character arcs, since they still have a lot of growing to do as people. But we do get at least one solidly formative moment for each of the kids as they’re making their way back home, and, in these moments especially, the young actors show real gifts for performance.

So, as far as technicals go, Skeleton Crew delivers on both the expected high quality and the accepted spirit and tone of Star Wars as it tells its story. But is the story itself any good? I say, yes, Skeleton Crew has a solid, solid story, although I can’t help but feel that something is missing from it, something I had to really consider in order to figure out what it was. Again, given that our heroes are children, we can't end with a great deal of finality regarding them. They can’t have the classic hero’s journey in a story about getting home safe. Their parents have a bit of a journey; it’s not a physical one, but they do go from trusting in their leadership to provide for them to feeling that their children have been abandoned and starting to resist the Supervisor’s control, but that storyline is rendered moot in the end.

And I think that’s what made part of the show, particularly the finale, feel a little hollow. The inevitable reveal to the people of At Attin that the Republic that they serve no longer exists doesn’t get much of a reaction — because there’s an active pirate raid going on, obviously, but then when that ends the show pretty much ends. How At Attin emerges back into the Galaxy is a story unto itself, one that wouldn’t really work appended to this one. But, still, some sort of payoff to this element of the show would have been nice. Then again, the people of At Attin who we’d met to that point were all the kids’ parents and I can absolutely believe that they were just so happy that their children were back home safe that they aren’t paying much mind to anything else in the end. To them, there is no bigger story in this show that needs resolution.

The other aspect of the show that was odd, that took me a bit to really appreciate, is the apparent lack of the moral struggle that’s been a part of Star Wars without many exceptions since Episode V. There are moments where our young heroes grow a bit or learn some lesson, but they are not struggling with how to be virtuous people or working to overcome the darkness in their own nature or anything. But Skeleton Crew isn’t a hero’s story; it’s an antihero’s story, that of Jod Na Nawood.

I say Nawood is an antihero because he fails as a villain — not as in, he doesn’t work as an antagonist in the show’s story (although he’s not really an antagonist, either) — but in that he sets out to be villainous but fails due to his, for lack of a better term, shortcomings. Nawood is the freshest-feeling part of this retro show. He is an unsuccessfully greedy person, which is a type of character Star Wars has certainly had before — that’s who Han Solo is in the start — but here the character type is used. Nawood is a character who induces a lot of uncertainty in the audience, and the contradiction between his all-consuming quest for money and his total poverty is a part of that. That is is so desperate also makes him sympathetic, to a point, moreso than he would have been if he were a well-established pirate lord.

Nawood’s character is an interesting study in narrowly avoiding cliché. He starts out pretending to be a Jedi, but we don’t wait too long for the kids to find out that he’s not. I fully expected this ruse would keep up for at least several episodes — kids’ media especially loves to set up a true identity reveal as a shake-up leading into the climax, for some reason — but Skeleton Crew mercifully does not do this. Rather than sepnding the show wondering what will happen when the kids find out Jod’s not a Jedi, we get to spend the show wondering what will happen when they find At Attin, which is a much more interesting and open-ended question. What starts out as a sort of wacky team-up gets more and more ominous as the show goes on, culminating in what should be the deaths of the children and their families. But there is a limit to Nawood’s villainy.

The other cliché that gets avoided in Nawood’s character is that he doesn’t turn hero in the end. He could have; it wouldn’t have been especially out-of-step with his character. But instead we got something a bit more subtle: he can’t bring himself to claim his victory. He has won: he has found At Attin; his rival Brutus is dead by his hand; he holds the loyalty of his crew; he has had the vaults of the Old Republic opened to him; he has destroyed the local authority on At Attin, and far greater circumstances have destroyed any other authority that might challenge his claim. The only thing left standing between him and a life without the hunger and want he’s always lived with are two professional administrators and four children. He has them at his mercy, and all he has to do is kill them before they can summon the New Republic. All that wealth can be his, all his troubles can be over, all his dreams can come true. He just has to kill the kids. But he can’t. He doesn’t apologize, he doesn’t turn against the other raiders, he doesn’t even really give up, but he cant bring himself to kill innocent people. He’ll kill pirates, but he can’t kill the kids. Ultimately that’s what defeats him: he fails for a lack of villainy.

As a moral story, as Star Wars almost always is, Skeleton Crew…hold up to scrutiny, I suppose is how I’d put it. On first watching it, I found the story a little bit “this happens…and then this happens”, but the more I’ve thought about the show, the more I’ve considered it in writing this review, the more I’ve come to like it. As I said at the beginning, it’s not something that I think was made out of a desire to give today’s kids a show they’d like; I also don’t think this was made out of some presumptuous decision to give today’s kids what they ought to like. And it also doesn’t push too hard to teach kids what they ought to take away from the show, either. The characters don’t really get taught the core lesson of the show; they get their own lessons along the way, but the main thing they learn from Nawood is to be less blindly trusting, and even that’s mainly just Wim, as the others never really trusted him. The audience has to interpret Nawood themselves. I took Nawood as a caution against the belief that you can retain nobility in wrongdoing, that you take moral shortcuts but still end up happy and at peace in the end.

Recommendation & Rating

Everything in this show is just a little better than it had to be. I don’t think there’s anything in the show that I’d say is the best of its kind in Star Wars — except child performances, I suppose — but everything here was at least baseline good and a lot of it’s better than that. As far as coming-of-age kids Star Wars foes, I’d have to say **I like Rebels and Bad Batch better, but those have the benefit of being much longer. Skeleton Crew had a lot of love and care put into it, which I really appreciate.

Skeleton Crew is good enough to be worth watching, even if you’re not in its middle-schooler age range. While it ends a bit abruptly, it tells a complete story, well, and very much in the spirit of Star Wars while also being built on new characters and settings. Go in expecting a classic hidden pirate’s treasure sort of story. Performances from Jude Law and the four child stars are all excellent. My only complaint about the show is that I’d have liked to see more of certain things.