Skeleton Crew is good clean fun. That may sound like faint praise, and in the context of, like, Mad Men and I, Claudius (and Andor, for that matter), it is. But in the context of The Acolyte and Ahsoka, the Disney Star Wars Universe’s last two TV outings? This show is an enjoyable, zesty enterprise, with big ugly creatures, cool little droids, frequently inventive action sequences, and Jude Law as a scoundrel who my even turn out to be a real scoundrel this time. It has a pulse and a purpose. It justifies its own existence by being entertaining.
With regards to the aforementioned scoundrel, Jod Na Nawood finds himself dragged before a pirate tribunal this episode, overseen by his first mate turned nemesis, Captain Brutus. (SM-33 is out of commission, zapped by Cyborg Jaleel White in a very short-lived rescue attempt.) Despite a sentence of death, Jod is given a short amount of time to plead his case as per the Pirate Code, using a cool-looking space hourglass to keep the time. (Yes, there are hourglasses in space, and pirates in tricorn hats for that matter if you look carefully.)
Jod sells the assembled buccaneers on the no-longer-a-legend location of At Attin, home of the last surviving Old Republic mint, showing off his last coin as proof of the story. Even Brutus is intrigued enough to pay the place a visit, though Jod is dead meat if the promised limitless fortune isn’t there when they arrive.
Meanwhile, the children Jod betrayed have a considerably harder time getting on the same page as to what to do next than Jod and Brutus do. Dumped down long ‘80s-movie chutes to the snowy, trash-strewn ground below, the four kids discover that their ship remains at the top of the tall cliff directly above them. Fern proposes climbing the metal structure that lines the cliff to retrieve it.
Wim, of course, disagrees, but reasonably for once. Fern’s plan sounds fully insane, and would almost certainly lead any child to their death if they weren’t the main character in a fictional narrative. But this is Wim, a character obligated to make the stupidest decision possible at any given juncture: This time, he proposes following a little squad of hermit-crab-type critters who walk around in discarded droid and starship parts and repeat the last word they hear like robotic parrots, reasoning that they…know someone who can help them, or something? “Follow a group of arthropods to their leader” is rarely, if ever, a good idea even when you’re not in outer space.
The kids split up but not in the usual pairings: Neel goes along with Fern, while an angry KB, whose cybernetic enhancements have by now briefly malfunctioned and partially shut her down, takes Wim’s side and heads off with him. When KB shuts down again later on, more seriously this time, she reveals to Wim why she blew up at Fern: The other girl never takes KB’s disability into account (she was in some kind of accident, and the electronic augmentation keeps her alive) and just assumes she can still do everything Fern can do. (Even as they speak, Neel is struggling to get Fern to understand he’s too short to scale the cliff at her speed, if he can even do so at all.) KB’s afraid that if she reveals her struggles or her resentment, Fern will lose patience with her and ditch her as a friend.
The writing, by Myung Joh Wesner, is direct without sounding too much like a PSA or a therapy session. It’s brought to life by an understated, at times difficult to watch performance by Kyriana Kratter, as KB lets her guard down with Wim even while her body and voice alike grow visibly and audibly weaker. Like the times a memory-locked SM-33 and a suddenly cruel Jod Nod Nawood threatened the children’s lives, it’s a moment where we in the audience can really understand why they’d be scared. It’s hard to relate to nearly getting eaten by a giant crab, but an unexpected betrayal by an adult you trust or a sudden bout of debilitating illness are things any kid can feel in their gut.
The bulk of the action sequence that ends the episode is, frankly, a mess — an attempt to extract the kids from their multitudinous jams by waving a hand at them and saying “don’t worry, they’re fine, it’s cool.” In short order, Fern and Neel scale a cliff, leap onto a moving trash hauler, which Fern knows how to fly well enough to drag its three companion ships and their own pirate vessel, which is what they’re hauling, over to where Wim and KB are running from the giant crab mentioned above. Wim and KB also leap onto this moving vehicle.
But! The giant crab tosses a boulder and causes the whole mess to spin out of control and crash in a fiery explosion which all four kids survive without a scratch, including KB, who we’d just spent an episode learning is extremely vulnerable to snow and cold. I guess the idea is that the new component she and Wim make out of melted-down wires poured into a borehole in the sand has given her a new lease on life, but buddy, I can’t even get Apple-compatible wires to charge my phone if they’re not officially Apple products, so I’m having a hard time buying it.
Anyway, the kids run over to their ship, which is now being chomped on by a gigantic trash compactor, and successfully jumpstart it, activate its hull detonation sequence, withdraw an undamaged new ship from the shell of the old, escape the trash compactor, and fly to safety. The new ship is cool, at least!
But even in Star Wars, you’re asking a lot of your audience’s suspension of disbelief in this sequence, when you probably could have just crafted an escape that didn’t depend on four little children all acting like a cross between R2-D2 repairing Luke’s hyperdrive while flying through space and Captain America keeping that helicopter from flying away with his bare hands. I enjoy space werewolves and space kaiju and space Urkel and space Kelly MacDonald as much as anyone, but they can’t compensate for underbaked writing, which is what keeps Skeleton Crew from making the jump from fun to special.
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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