To tell you the truth “Skeleton Crew” wasn’t something I was looking forward to, from its vague announcement to the first trailer and beyond nothing really clicked with me. I knew I’d give it a proper go because I love Star Wars and about half way through the series I realised that I was actually enjoying it, and then by the end it was up there with the higher end of live action Star Wars programming. It’s just pure fun, not bogged down in continuity (not that I don’t love continuity references…) or serious story telling (not that I also don’t love that either!) and instead just tells a good family adventure story. Let’s take a look!
The story is centred on a quartet of children living on the planet At Attin, which has been cut-off from outside communication for many years and thanks to being hidden by a special shield nobody visited it either, the planet falling into pirate’s legend. The children comprised of regular boy who dreams of adventure Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), rebellious daughter of an under-secretary Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), Fern’s quiet and cybernetically augmented friend KB (Kyriana Kratter) and Wim’s shy and naïve blue elephant-looking friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith provides the voice) are all attending a far too American-looking school in the definitely too American looking suburbs when they discover what they think is a buried building (or Wim thinks it’s a Jedi Temple) but it ends up being a long-crashed pirate ship that with a push of a button takes off into deep space. To help them on their journey they find an old droid on board called SM-33 (voiced by Nick Frost), who takes them to a pirate and outlaw den in the middle of an asteroid field. Our main children however have no idea how to operate in this kind of environment and end up in prison, where they meet a man called Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) who uses the Force to get them out.
Everyone’s favourite blue elephant alien not called Max Rebo.
This sets up the middle chunk of episodes as the four kids and their clearly-the-helmeted-pirate-we-saw-in-the-opening-scene buddy Jod fly from location to location trying to find a way home, or in Jod’s case, trying to find the kids home because it’s a legendary thought-lost planet of riches and he wants to finally make it big and get the big score. To start with Wim and Fern don’t get on, which puts their hangers-on in awkward positions too, but through these adventures they get split apart and learn to like each other, as these things tend to go, and to be fair all four ended up being very likeable and well rounded characters, with Neel being especially endearingly naive. Jod is also good fun, starting off as a likeable rogue and then slowly but surely showing his true colours whenever the kids get him caught up in a pinch. SM-33 is a good laugh too, talking in a stereotypical piratical voice and is the focus of a great twist as whenever asked about At Attin, a planet he must know about given he and his ship had crashed there, he replied “I can’t say I’ve heard of no At Attin…” and soon its discovered that his previous owner literally programmed him to not speak about the planet, so he literally can’t say he’s heard of it. He then tried to kill the children before being turned off and rebooted, but hey, we can’t all be perfect.
Okay, I do get the criticism that a lot of At Attin doesn’t look very Star Wars-y…
Eventually they find a long-lost vault belonging to the legendary pirate who once helmed their ship and there they find their biggest clue and Jod finally shows his true self when he gets SM-33 on his side via a technicality and threatens the children, who manage to escape. Jod is captured by his old pirate buddies while our “heroes” find their ship and manage to activate it and escape the planet, but Jod manages to convince his old crew of one last score and captures the kids craft in the space above At Attin’s cloud barrier…
It’s a really fun show, while all this going on the parents of the children have a small adventure trying to find out about their kids while dodging the AI overseer and his camera-headed robots. Jude Law though is the stand out, as he readies to head down to the planet he threatens the kids with a lightsabre he took from the vault and tells them he’ll slaughter their parents in front of them if they act up and tell the truth about who he is once they make planet-fall, a real departure from the loveable Han Solo-esque rogue he’d been playing for most of the show.
Overall Thoughts:
A fun droid design, though boy they got a basic human-like outline and stuck to it for 100s of years, didn’t they? I guess they really didn’t fancy human-looking androids like in our fiction!
Skeleton Crew blew away my expectations and became a highlight of each week, keeping the mysteries and fun action sequences flowing with a small enough episode count that it didn’t out-stay its welcome. While I love the Jedi, continuity-heavy shows like Ahsoka or the more serious stuff like Andor, I always have a place for something that’s just fun, and Skeleton Crew was definitely that.
Thanks to the bravery of both the kids and their parents the New Republic arrives en masse and take out the Pirates, leaving Jod the smirk to himself before vanishing. The kids reunite with a still-alive KB and everyone is happy, especially Wim who watches some X-Wings fly overhead and clearly feels like he’s found his goal in life. Plus the New Republic have just found hundreds of vaults of gold, so… that’s handy. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays into everything! Apparently the gold is part of Chancellor Soh’s Great Works from the High Republic era, so that was fun to hear for this HR fan, though I will admit to being slightly disappointed the old Republic they were talking about wasn’t the Old Republic but instead just the Republic before their current one, though a time of constant war between Jedi and Sith wouldn’t have been the best time to create a planet-wide gold stockpile, to be fair…
Jod was trained by a Jedi on the run who soon got killed by an Inquisitor, by the way. It’s not a flashback or anything, but he does at least mention how he knows how to use the Force…
Jod figures out that their ship is uniquely crafted to get through the At Attin barrier and goes down with the kids, pretending to be a Jedi and gets shown the massive vaults of endless gold and money before gleefully going to see the Overseer, who soon outs him as either not a Jedi or an enemy of the Republic as the last broadcast he received from the outside world was the report about the “Jedi uprising” that Palpatine had fashioned. Jod destroys the Overseer and lets his pirate buddies down to At Attin for some exciting chase sequences with our main cast as they head to face-off with Jod. They eventually make it and it becomes clear that Jod doesn’t have the heart to actually kill them, even when they take down the barrier around the planet and allow KB to get a plea for help out to the New Republic (and seemingly crash the ship).
Hogan Reviews 