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.

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.

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.

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.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (S1:E6) Review

Nothing happens.

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.

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

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