There’s something disgusting about seeing lawns in Star Wars. Once, outside the living memory of many people who will watch Skeleton Crew, this franchise became a franchise because it showed people things they’d never seen before — or at the very least, remixed its disparate sources into something exciting and novel. Skeleton Crew opts for neatly rectangular patches of freshly mown grass, in front of tasteful two-story family homes with attached garages, lining a sunlit street down which cars drive as their occupants return from their commute to the city…in Star Wars. An entire galaxy to explore, and co-creators/co-writers Christopher Ford and Jon Watts (who also directs this episode) decided to recreate the environmentally ruinous, politically alienating post-war American suburb? My reaction was instant and instinctive: This is sick.
Should the same thing be said about Skeleton Crew? To use an appropriately piratical term given the show’s apparent roots in the actions of a mutinous crew of spacefaring buccaneers, the Disney Star Wars franchise has been taking in water and listing badly to starboard for some time now. Its most recent show, The Acolyte, was canceled after one season despite being no more or less boring and pointless than, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Ahsoka — a frankly shocking state of affairs for what was once the fine china of nerd culture. Skeleton Crew is an attempt to slap a Stranger Things kids-on-an-adventure nostalgia filter on Star Wars, nu-Ghostbusters style, in hopes of righting the ship.
The thing is, though, that Star Wars doesn’t need a nostalgia filter. It’s already Star Wars. This franchise began nearly 50 years ago now, and generation after generation has experienced it in childhood and grown up still loving it, or at least remembering it fondly. The nostalgia filter comes as a standard feature with every Star Wars project.
That’s not enough for Skeleton Crew’s season premiere. This 45-minute episode recreates the Reagan Age suburbs of E.T., The Goonies, The Monster Squad and so on, complete with action figures and bicycles and doing fake lightsaber fights with your friends, right there within the Star Wars setting. It evokes not just suburban viewers’ memories of Star Wars, but their memories of the towns and homes in which they lived while they watched them, and their memories of time spent imagining and playing out their own Star Wars adventures, and their memories of the aforementioned suburban-fantasy movies that they were watching right alongside the original trilogy to boot.
The result is an uncanny recursive loop, a snake eating its own tail. I don’t mind telling you how viscerally I reacted against it, either. It takes a lot to get me to write notes like “vile” and “ghastly” in a review of a Star Wars show — I have a Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo for crying out loud — but that’s where we’re at. There’s something wrong about Suburban Star Wars, the way there’s something wrong about the garbled, inaccuracy-laden “writing” and mutant-handed “art” patched together from stolen work by AI. Goonies in a Galaxy Far, Far Away feels like an AI idea, and that is not a compliment. A more emphatic way to put it would be to say that this is like predigested food, puked into a baby’s bird’s mouth by a parent who thinks they’re not capable of handling anything solid.
But if you’re not like me and you don’t object to the entire enterprise, there’s not a ton here that’s terribly objectionable. The episode’s opening sequence introduces us to a helmeted space pirate named Captain Silvo (the top-billed Jude Law, I presume?), who captures and raids a frigate in a sequence so close to the opening of A New Hope that the dialogue all but quotes it verbatim. But like Darth Vader looking for those plans, Silvo’s quest for credits (the cash of the galaxy far, far away) comes up empty, and his werewolf-like first mate, Brutus (Fred Tatasciore), leads a mutiny.
An undisclosed period of time later, we join a young boy named Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) on his home planet of At Attin. (AT-ATs were the most coveted Star Wars toy going when I was a kid; this seems like a reference, which is a rough indication of Skeleton Crew’s fanservice levels.) Largely ignored by his workaholic widower father Wendle (TV on the Radio vocalist Tunde Adebimpe), he spends his time goofing off and dreaming of becoming a Jedi. (Just like you! Remember?????)
True to the “imaginative kid gets into a real adventure” genre, Wim gets into a real adventure. Along with his blue elephant best buddy Neel (Robert Timothy Smith, voicing a junior Max Rebo), and their eww-cooties girl frenemies, hoverbike racer Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and her cybernetically enhanced bestie KB (Kyriana Kratter), unearth what Wim wants to believe is a lost Jedi temple in the woods near his house. In actuality it’s a crashed starship, which he discovered after crashing his own bike while trying to take a shortcut to school in time to take an all-important career assessment exam. (Things seem pretty rigidly structured on At Attin; more on that later.)
No doubt we’re supposed to find Wim’s stubbornness and reflexive defiance endearing, but in all honesty, the kid comes across like, well, kind of a dumb jerk. When Fern spins out one of her habitual and obvious lies, he has a tendency to fall for them despite posing as too street-smart to do so. When his obviously terrified father comes looking for him in the woods, he doesn’t call back. When Fern warns him not to touch anything, he presses the goddamn ignition button for the ship (my notes read “this moron is going to get them all killed”) and launches them into hyperspace, which is where we leave them.
But before the stars turn into those familiar horizontal streaks of light, something interesting happens. By that point we’ve already seen that the planet’s night sky is a swirl of cloud and a series of large red lights set at regular intervals, suggesting a shield designed to keep things out — or in. And indeed, when the ship pierces this barrier and reaches the void, the children see stars for the first time. Wim, in fact, misidentifies them as planets. Clearly these kids’ horizons have been drastically limited, presumably by whatever government and its “Great Work” that Fern’s tiger mom, Undersecretary Fara (Kerry Condon), works for. The omnipresent “safety droids” feel less friendly than they sound as well.
This may well be Skeleton Crew’s saving grace. To paraphrase one of the Imperials in Episode IV, it’s possible, however unlikely, that this show may make a connection between its young main characters’ suburban existence and the fact that they’ve been patrolled by droids and sealed off from the stars, and exploit it. And boy, wouldn’t that be something — a Star Wars that argues that the dream of 2.5 kids and a picket fence is bullshit! I mean, Andor argues that regular people should straight-up murder cops who work for oppressive regimes, so who knows.
But Andor was made by the guy who did Michael Clayton. Skeleton Crew is from the creative team behind Spider-Man: Homecoming. When we crack open this show’s cargo hold, will we find a payload of subversion, or just some more scattered trinkets from a time long gone?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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