From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver.
But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offender, never grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time.
Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win.
That’s barely an exaggeration, by the way. Now fronting not only as a Republic Emissary but a Jedi Knight, Jod has security droids escort the reunited kids and their parents back to their homes — except for Fern, whom he correctly calculates is the one most likely to rat him out despite his threat against her mom. He forces the pair to accompany him to the Supervisor, a giant non-anthropomorphic droid whom he disables with a lightsaber to the HAL-9000 red-light eyeball. Kind of an anticlimax, frankly, and there’s a lot of those to go around here.
With the Supervisor out of commission and the power shut down, Jod disables the barrier for his pirate buddies, who commence a Red Dawn/Invasion U.S.A.-style attack on suburban homes and parked cars and public transportation and children on ten-speeds. The goal isn’t just to rob the Mint, it’s to enslave the people to keep making even more money. This seems like a bit more hassle than its worth when the amount of money already available is basically incalculable — after all, what good’s the money if you have to sit around ruling the planet where you found it — but these are Bad Guys, and Bad Guy Logic is its own thing.
But the Supervisor’s demise means the shutdown of all the security droids, so Wim, Neel, and KB are free to…honestly it’s a rather tedious amount of business they have to go through in order to save the day. My notes at one point read “they have to break into the tower to turn the power on to release the clamps to launch the ship to call for help to bring the X-wings to stop the pirates to save Fern.” That’s substantially more steps than were involved in the attack run on the first Death Star.
Anyway it basically works because Jod never follows through on any of his threats against the kids or the parents and has pretty weak Force powers. KB calls for help, Wim’s dad and Fern’s mom throw a switch that destroys the Barrier forever, and the New Republic’s X-wings attack and save the day. Like I said, the good guys flip the good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win.
It’s all very abrupt. It involves a lot of running from place to place to nothing particularly interesting. It necessitates Jod making the same threats over and over to diminishing returns, while never being smart enough to simply separate his prisoners so they can no longer conspire against him. While we do at least learn his origin at last — he was trained by a Jedi refugee before the Empire found her and executed her in front of him as a boy — in the end it doesn’t even wrap his story up neatly, since we never see his ultimate fate. The whole thing feels unfinished, as if it creators Christopher Ford and Jon Watts were interrupted in the middle of constructing it, like the second Death Star. I know I’m laying the Star Wars references on thick, but for this show, can you blame me?
Some of the lack of closure is no doubt down to hopes for a second season that may or may not materialize, but it’s not like this is the first show ever written with that in mind. Mostly it feels like the same kind of underbaked scripting that has afflicted the show on and off since the start, from its out-of-place suburban nostalgia on down. It’s a shame that the show that gave us Jod Na Nawood, a surprising and compelling villain in a franchise with precious few of those these days, couldn’t end up giving us more.
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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