Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (season 1)

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew takes us back to a galaxy far, far away, but this time as a coming-of-age adventure. Set five years after the events of Return of The Jedi, the story focuses on four children who stumble upon a hidden spaceship on their home planet. What starts as innocent curiosity quickly spirals into an unplanned journey through the galaxy’s perilous reaches.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E1&2) Review

Billed as “The Goonies in Space,” the first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew have managed to exhibit hints of that classic 80s adventure. Only time will tell if the showrunners and cast will be able to bring it all home.

                   

Arguably, the show’s most impressive feature is its visuals. Despite its budget of only $136 million (a paltry sum when compared to the debacle that was Star Wars: The Acolyte, which cost the House of Mouse a reported $230 million for the same number of episodes), so far, it has done an excellent job of creating believable locales and aliens that all seem to rely strongly on practical effects, giving everything and everyone a very tactile feeling that helps the audience lose themselves in the story.

Although he has gotten the top billing, Jude Law doesn’t make a full appearance until the last seconds of the second episode, and while everyone should know by now that he’s an excellent actor who almost certainly will be able to help elevate things, the absence of his commanding presence was somewhat noticeable in these first two installments. This void was mostly felt in the performances of the two young ladies who comprise 50% of the show’s main quartet. Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who plays the “tough as nails” rebellious hotrodder Fern, often seems out of her element as she plays at being tough and aloof (difficult emotions to convey for many but most especially for that of a fourteen-year-old girl who has been a theater kid for the majority of her life). Likewise, her BFF KB, played by Kyriana Kratter, is hidden behind a clunky cybernetic visor for most of her time on screen, which seems to hamper her ability to emote.

Both girls are actually generally fine; however, in addition to likely lacking the necessary life experience, the main problem for the two is one of comparison. Unlike the ladies, who are often awkward, distant, and mildly forced, their male counterparts are charming and likable, have good chemistry together, and are believable and natural in their respective roles. This should be especially surprising to anyone unfortunate enough to have watched the Jack Black-led Dear Santa on Paramount+, which also costarred Robert Timothy Smith, who does a shockingly good job from beneath several pounds of alien costume as Neel on Skeleton Crew but who was stiff and stilted on the aforementioned streaming monstrosity.

With all of that said, the first two episodes suffer most from three issues. The first is especially true in the initial episode; the pacing can drag as the audience waits for the show to get to the point. However, the second is exhibited by far too many Disney Star Wars series. Instead of writing contained three-act stories with satisfying conclusions that also expand on what has come before hinting and teasing at what is yet to come, Skeleton Crew episodes are detrimentally short offerings with only two acts that wait until the last few minutes to give audiences the most compelling bits as cliffhangers to the following week’s installments.

But what holds the show back the most is that the main quartet and their motives aren’t particularly interesting. Whereas The Goonies was overflowing with fun, well-defined characters with laser-focused motivations, the main quartet spends most of the first episode behaving as generally normal kids with everyday personalities living normal mundane lives. It’s not until the second episode that the direction of their journey begins to take shape. However, the introduction of Jude Law’s character, one which seems immediately compelling, as well as his earlier stated gravitas, promises to tie these loose threads together. Fingers crossed.

At this point, if you haven’t somehow been completely disillusioned with Disney Star Wars, it may still be best to at least wait a few episodes before starting this series. Right now, the quality is dancing on the edge of a knife, and if it somehow manages to be entertaining throughout, assuming that they keep the same two-act plus cliffhanger formula, it will almost certainly be better watched in chunks.

PARENTAL NOTES

PG Appropriate Action

• There are some intense scenes, but while intimidating, the results of the action are fairly tame.

Not Exactly The Bunny Ranch

• In the second episode, the kids make their way to a rather rough planet, and in a brief couple of moments, there is a woman in a very tight and sexy outfit. In one of the scenes, she is posing outside of a seedy bar, trying to entice men to enter. In fairness, by today’s standards, it is a very tame outfit. The only skin revealed is that of her sides around mid-drift level.

WOKE REPORT

Put a Chick In It…

• Kathleen just can’t stop herself. There are four leading children—two boys and two girls—and the two girls are tough and rebellious hot-rodders with bad attitudes. The two boys are nerdy, smaller than the girls, and marginally less mature than the ladies.
  • There are a couple of reasons why it didn’t affect the woke score more than it did. First, while snotty, the girls make their fair share of mistakes, and the less snotty one even calls the other out on her behavior toward the boys. Second, this early on, it seems likely that the girls’s attitudes are merely facades that will change over the course of the show as the boys begin to step up more and more. Should this fail to be so as the series continues, the Woke-O-Meter will be adjusted accordingly.

Does It Look Like White Boy Day To You?

• The only white male child in the main cast is hidden beneath an alien costume, and I don’t recall seeing any other white male children in the background. However, I saw this at a screening and couldn’t pause and rewind to double-check.

What’s Not Woke

• Family, in general, is treated as very important, and dads are treated that way specifically.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E3) Review

Picking up immediately from where episode 2 left off, the third installment of Skeleton Crew continues the series upward trajectory as a fun and self-contained adventure that doesn’t rely on nostalgia to do all of the heavy lifting. In this installment, Jude Law’s mysterious Force-wielding character helps the children in their escape attempt from the pirate stronghold. However, his true motivations remain a mystery.

As expected, Jude Law’s presence immediately raised the overall quality of the show, lending gravitas and comfort via his prodigious talent and natural charisma. However, the show continues to struggle with finding its voice, almost entirely due to the fact that it won’t definitively pick a character from whose perspective the show flows. Instead the perspective uncomfortably floats from child to child.

If anything, it seems pretty clear that in lieu of making the young human boy, Wim, the main character (the obvious choice), the showrunners seem bent on unnaturally forcing Fern into that role. The problem is that her character is too jaded and pissy to comfortably fit as the lead of a whimsical adventure. Rather, she makes sense as a foil for Wim’s exuberance and optimism, which would much more organically fit the tone the show seems to be striving for.

Despite some agenda-driven content and a healthy dose of convenience, at times literally steering the ship, the cast and crew have managed to make a mildly entertaining episode of Star Wars entertainment.

PARENTAL NOTES

Watch Your Damn Mouth

• Jude Law’s character says “damn” or a variation thereof at least twice.

WOKE REPORT

Admiral, There Be Lesbians Here

• And it only took getting to the third episode before Disney couldn’t hold back any longer. The opening scene introduces us to one of the main children’s two mothers.
  • The scene lasts for a minute, maybe two, and the camera doesn’t focus on them.

Dad, Dad, Daddio

• In the opening scene, the children’s parents have gathered to talk with the authorities, but only one dad is present.
• In one scene, the main group sits around a table, and one of the children unnaturally asks them, what does your mom do? He doesn’t ask, “What do your parents do,” or “What do your mom and dad do?” It’s pretty obviously an excuse to remind the audience that one kid has two mothers.
• The only dad shown in the program sits silently, weak and ineffectual, as the mothers try to figure out how they are going to save their children.
  • The only other adult human male is a scoundrel and a liar.

If A Chick Can, A Chick Will

• Of course, the little Asian girl shows signs of having the Force. The boys were little more than whiny background characters in this episode. It seems as though the show is trying to push them into the background in lieu of the older, snarkier girl.
• Can’t boys have a boy-centric adventure anymore? The Asian girl took control this week, and the two leading girls are rightly skeptical about Jude Law’s character from the start. At the same time, the boys have been relegated to secondary characters who behave like goofy puppies that instantly trust him.
• This episode only strengthens the likelihood that Fern will end up being the snarky girl boss that the previous two episodes hinted at.
  • The episode goes out of its way to keep the male characters from their natural leadership positions, with Fern forcing Jude Law’s character into an agreement of obeisance that quite frankly makes no sense.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E4) Review

As the series reaches its midpoint, episode 4 is a disappointing entry, far more reminiscent of Disney’s other recent Star Wars flops than of the fun-sized adventure series that the first three episodes seem to promise. In it, uninteresting secondary characters with undeveloped story arc-neutral backstories are introduced as little more than road bumps in what turns out to be yet another fetch quest in the last five minutes, possessing a solution that presents itself with all the difficulty of spreading room-temperature peanut butter on toast.

So far, the series hasn’t brought audiences anywhere near the edge of their seats, and if things don’t turn around quickly, they’ll be asleep in their chairs before you can say, “Baby Boba bit a bunch of bitter bacta.”

Episode four also all but solidifies in carbonite our earlier concern that the boys were being shuttled to the outer rim of the show’s overall narrative in lieu of the less compelling and unpleasant Fern. In this entry, the cute one (Neel), who is barely holding the show together via pure aesthetic, expresses his complete bafflement at violence even though his character was introduced while having an imaginary lightsaber duel with his buddy (something that most little boys can identify with). Of course, experiencing “real” violence is quite a bit different than play violence, but his pacifism doesn’t ring true and only serves to water down the boys even more.

Meanwhile, Wim, who at first seemed like the natural focus of the program, has become little more than a background joke who continually espouses moronic ideas to be shot down by the pissy Fern. Even Jude Law is sidelined for 90% of this meaningless episode.

PARENTAL NOTES

Nothing Happens

• I mean it. Nothing happens in this episode. There’s no chance of something inappropriate.

WOKE REPORT

Boys Go To Jupiter To Get More Stupider

• From the main cast, all of the male characters have been supplanted by ladies. Neel is openly cowardly. Wim is a joke and, in the way, more than anything. Jude Law is useless and in the background.
• The showrunner’s desire to make Fern the leader is apparent and amateurish. In this episode, Wim tells her, “You’re amazing, Fern,” despite the fact that she’s literally been wrong about everything. All that she’s managed to do is maintain an unwarranted and unearned arrogant, unpleasant demeanor.
• This episode introduces another young girl who is a warrior equal to the grown male warriors in her tribe.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E5) Review

Oh, good, another fetch quest. Benefiting from an ever-present time crunch and almost never-ending, if low-level and safe, action and the fact that the narrative focus is on Jude Law’s character, episode five manages to pull the series out of the nosedive that the previous entry steered them into- but only just.

To say that the writing has become inconsistent is no exaggeration. The show’s insistence on heaping the bulk of the focus onto the unlikable Fern at the expense of the natural lead protagonists (aka the boys) regularly robs episode 5 of any momentum and all of the fun. She’s out of place and miserable, but everyone else is written as though they are dunderheads, so there’s no one to root for. Even the other female character has suddenly transformed into little more than a human simulacrum with no concept of how to interact normally in everyday social situations- evidenced by her not knowing how to hi-five.

PARENTAL NOTES

Cursing

• Jude Law’s character says “damn” at least once.

PG Intensity

• There are some PG-level intense scenes

WOKE REPORT

Why Let The Boy Be Awesome When We Can Subvert Expectations

• Toward the end of the episode, there was a singular moment in which it looked like Wim was going to have a really fun, very Goonies-esque moment that would have been a great payoff for the character and the audience- one that would have signified a new trajectory for the character. Instead, he completely flubs his moment and ends up looking like an even bigger waste of space than he’s been thus far. I’m thankful that my son doesn’t want to watch this series because I wouldn’t let Kathleen Kennedy and Crew drain the testosterone from him.

Fern Golly

• Forty years ago, the boys who instinctively understood how to adventure would have put Fern in her place. By mid-season, she would have come around and been a pleasant crewmember ready to help. But Disney can’t abide nature and keeps artificially force-feeding us this snarky, bratty girl with no leadership qualities as the ultimate be-all and end-all.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E6) Review

Nothing happens.

WOKE REPORT

More of The Same

• This episode artificially forces some lip service toward a slight dynamic change- attempting to soften Fern and gel the group together -but it’s really just more of the same dynamic with the boys being idiots and the girls being awesome.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E7) Review

Well, thanks to a rather unexciting series of coincidences, the gang has made their way back home, but not before Jude Law and his diverse band of space pirates beat them to it.

While some series manage to fit a considerable amount of story into 30 minutes, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew does the complete opposite. Each half-hour installment feels like 20 minutes of filler with a 10-minute long set for a cliffhanger to next week’s entry.

By now, the characters have fallen completely flat, and even Jude Law’s Jod holds no interest.

PARENTAL NOTES

I Am The Law

• Jude Law’s Jod executes a character by shooting him point blank in the head. It happens just off screen.
• Jod threatens to kill the children by waving an ignited lightsaber dangerously close to their faces.

WOKE REPORT

More of the Same

• Wim is once again made to give up his opportunity to have a single moment in which he could be heroic, so that Fern can have the glory.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:finale) Review

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is the perfect example of “And Then This Happened” storytelling. Rather than building a narrative around a lattice of organic causality, each episode served as its own fractional adventure that only carried the main cast to the story arc’s planned conclusion via convenience and plot armor.

The result for Skeleton Crew is that, by the finale, we’re left with a cast of two-dimensional and boring characters who are more or less unchanged from how they began the series as well as stakes about which no one watching cares.

PARENTAL NOTES

PG-Level Violence

• Some intense fight scenes are appropriately marked as PG (i.e. a lot of laser fire and explosions with no one visibly being injured.

WOKE REPORT

Scissor Wives

• The lesbian mothers are a little more prominent in this episode but still barely in it.

Help A Brother Out

• They absolutely refuse to give Wim a single “cool” or successfully heroic moment. This episode came the closest with him successfully keeping Jude Law’s lightsaber away from him with help from Fern. They also let him pose with the lightsaber lit.

Dark Side of The Moon

• The only white guys in the entire program are the evil pirate played by Jude Law and those in a tribe of barbarous apocalyptic survivors who unsuccessfully tried to use the children as bait for their enemies.