The Kids Go Into the Galaxy

It feels at this point like we’re reached peak Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same.. Hell, I think we might have long since gone past that point, with all the shows that Disney+Disney's answer in the streaming service game, Disney+ features the studio's (nearly) full back catalog, plus new movies and shows from the likes of the MCU and Star Wars. has dumped on us over the last few years. I say this as a Star TrekOriginally conceived as "Wagon Train in Space", Star Trek was released during the height of the Hollywood Western film and TV boom. While the concept CBS originally asked for had a western vibe, it was the smart, intellectual stories set in a future utopia of science and exploration that proved vital to the series' long impact on popular culture. fan, and that franchise has five shows going at once at one point, but it never felt as bad with Star Trek as it has with Star Wars, and I think in large part that’s because the quality was never there. While you could argue about the relative merits of the various Star Trek shows, most have managed at least a minimum quality standard that kept them all watchable. But with Star Wars, while Disney has spent a ton of money on their products (and, really, these do feel like products and not carefully crafted shows) most have not been able to live up to the high standards fans expect from the franchise.

I’m not going to sit here and relitigate the whole of the franchise, but suffice it to say that much of what Disney has cranked out on TV has not been great. The Mandalorian started strong before petering out in season three. Ahsoka was mediocre, while Obi-Wan was even worse. The less said about The Acolyte, the better, and the only reason that show was the first series canceled in the franchise is because Disney is pretending that The Book of Boba Fett was only supposed to get one season. We’re not fooled. It felt like, outside of Andor, Disney’s team simply didn’t know what they were doing with the franchise. If you are a fan of the franchise, it’s easy to get disillusioned by the Mouse House’s output.

Andor sticks out because it’s a different kind of show with a different perspective, and it works free and independent of (almost) anything we’ve seen from Star Wars before. Sure, it is a prequel to Rogue One, but if you hadn’t seen that film before, or actually any other Star Wars at all, you wouldn’t be at a loss as to what’s going on in the show. You can just enjoy it for what it is as it tells a ripping story of resistance and revolution. Outside of that series, we haven’t gotten a lot of stories that can stand on their own, with Disney instead playing to nostalgia bait, rehashing eras and stories we already know all too well. To keep fans interested, Disney needs more standalone stories that can be their own thing, have their own perspective, and be free of the bounds of the eras they’re a part of. And, thankfully, Disney has at least found one more story that can stand free and independent of the franchise, telling its own, different kind of tale that works on its own merits: Skeleton Crew.

The pitch for the series, as I’ve seen all over the web, is that this is Star Wars filtered through the Steven Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment lens. It’s as if the cast of The Goonies somehow ended up in Star Wars yarn. A bunch of kids accidentally end up way out in the middle of the Galaxy Far, Far Away and have to find their way home. I very nearly wrote a premiere article for this show (as I have done for the likes of Andor and The Acolyte, but I held off in large part because while everyone else was raving about the show online, the start of Skeleton Crew simply didn’t gel with me. I wondered why? What did everyone else see that I didn’t. Thankfully, past the first two episodes the series picked up for me and I was able to get into it, enjoying it as much as everyone else because, yes, this is a show that feels different enough from the standard Star Wars that while it clearly still exists within the universe (this isn’t Star Wars: Visions) it works on its own merits without having to comment on Star Wars or be bound by the standard story we’ve seen so many times before.

The series focuses on four kids: dreamer Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), type A student Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), cybernetically modified tech genius KB (Kyriana Kratter), and kind-hearted Neel (voiced by Robert Timothy Smith). When Win is late to school on a very important day, he elects to take a shortcut through the woods that he saw Fern take the day before, cutting through the trees on his speeder bike in the hopes of getting in on time. He fails, getting stuck in a ravine, but does discover something interesting: a hatch that leads him to think he’s found a lost Jedi temple.

He hasn’t, but once Fern catches wind of the find, she and KB show up to try and take it from Wim and Neel. The four end up teaming up to get in, and what they find is a ship, lost in the dirt for who knows how long. While exploring, Wim presses a button, activating the ship as well as its droid, SM-33 (voiced by Nick Frost). The ship powers up and launches into the air, kids still on board, all before hitting hyperspace and flying out into the stars. Now the kids are lost, not sure of where to go or even how to get back to their home planet, At Attin, and everyone they meet seems to think their planet is nothing more but a myth. However can they find their way in a galaxy that feels very confusing and strange?

As I said, the first two episodes don’t do a great job of selling the show. The focus is on the kids, of course, but I struggled to really care about them. Neel and KB don’t come into focus until much later in the series, leaving the heavy lifting up to Wim and Fern and, honestly, neither of them are written well. Wim has too much childish wonder without anything grounding him, making him a tedious character to be around. Fern isn’t much better, being pretty rude to everyone around her. It’s clearly a front as she’s taking out the stress of having to be the best on everyone around her, but it takes time for that all to come into focus and for the first two episodes she just sucks. I really didn’t like the kids at the start of the series, and since they were the focus, that kind of ruined things for me.

Thankfully I stuck around through the third episode and that’s when things became much more interesting. By this point the kids have gotten captured by pirates (yes, this series introduces honest to goodness pirates of the “yo ho ho” variety), and while sitting in their cell they meet Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law), a con artist, former/ pirate captain, and Force user. He promises he can get them out of the cell and back to their home planet, and he shows keen interest in At Attin, in part because (as we quickly learn) there’s a supposed treasure waiting at the planet for the first pirate to find it. Jod both becomes their overseer and their foil as he’s a not very good guy having to deal with four (largely) kind-hearted children. It makes for an interesting personality mix that perks up the series a lot.

But then, Jude Law also perks things up all on his own. He really seems to enjoy his character here, playing someone that doesn’t properly fit the mold of anyone we’ve seen in the Star Wars universe before. He’s not just a colorful villain, even if at times he does chew a little scenery. He’s a Force user, but neither Jedi nor Sith so he doesn’t fit into the clear “good” or “evil” boundaries those two sects belong to. He’s a rakish personality, but not in the same mold of Han Solo. He gets to be his own kind of character, played with aplomb by the actor, and because of that we’re never really sure what he’s going to do within the bounds of the story. He doesn’t play by the standard conventions of Star Wars and that makes him especially interesting.

The comparison the series draws to The Goonies is apt. There’s a lot of this series that clearly is designed to play with that motif, from the lost treasure to the pirate story. There’s a hidden headquarters filled with dangerous traps, slides and false floors and other such nods. It’s not a direct parallel, of course, but there’s enough here that lines up that you can tell the showrunners, Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, knew exactly what they were doing. The back of the napkin pitch to the Disney heads was clearly “what if The Goonies, but in space,” and that’s exactly what they made. It’s different enough that it’s not just a trace job, but close enough that those in the audience that grew up with the old film can see what’s going on. I think it works, in the moment, just because it’s so different from what we expect of Star Wars that, despite its obvious allusions, it still feels fresh and interesting.

Skeleton Crew might be a homage – to Spielberg, to The Goonies, to the child-friendly adventures of old – but it’s a homage that actually works. It has energy and vitality that the Galaxy Far, Far Away has been missing for some time. It stands apart, not worried about giving us a story of good and evil, Empire and Rebellion, Jedi and Sith. It does its own thing, giving us a different kind of Star Wars story that fans, young and old, can just enjoy. I keep harping on the fact that Star Wars needs to move on and find new things to say, new stories to tell. Skeleton Crew, like Andor before it, points that way. Hopefully in the future we can get more stories like this one because, honestly, I just can’t take another The Acolyte.