Skeleton Crew episode 1 reviewed
This Could Be A Real Adventure
Skeleton Crew is a new series streaming on Disney+. It is set in the Star Wars universe and occurs at some vaguely-defined period between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
What happened: Opening text informs viewers that following the fall of the Empire, piracy has emerged and a serious threat in parts of the galaxy, despite the New Republic’s best efforts. The scene pans to a freighter being attacked and boarded by pirates, led by an intimidating, masked captain who sounds suspiciously like Jude Law. After heavy losses by both sides, the pirates triumph. Upon opening the shielded main vault, the pirates discover a single Republic credit lying on the floor. Enraged all their effort went to naught, the pirate crew mutinies on their captain.
On the planet At Attin, preteen best friends Wim (human) and Neel (blue elephant) play as if they’re Jedi and Sith while waiting for the school bus in their space-age suburbia. Wim longs for adventure in a society where most people end up as accountants, and the really successful ones become account managers. Neel thinks adventure is best left to make-believe. While riding to school, Wim sees Fern and her techie sidekick, KB, riding Fern’s souped-up speeder bike and thinks they’re way cool. The boys are also at that age where girls are increasingly less-icky than they’d like to admit. Both sets are facing some personal issue of great import: Wim and Neel are facing the dreaded Career Assessment Test, which will forever determine which type of accountant they will be for the rest of their life, while Fern’s bike is rendered useless by a corroded power converter—which puts a severe cramp in her plans to race some condescending older boys in a few days time. On the day of his test, Wim oversleeps and misses the bus. While trying to cut through wilderness on his child-sized speeder bike, he crashes into a ravine where he finds a mysterious, buried door he takes to be a lost Jedi temple. Truancy droids find him before he can investigate further, and back at the school he’s in serious trouble for missing the assessment test. Fern, in trouble herself, overhears Wim try to tell his furious father about his discovery, to no avail. Fern believes Wim has found something, though, something that might have working power converters she can scavenge. Wim talks Neel into helping him excavate the “Jedi Temple” after school. The girls tail the boys to the site and after some back-and-forth the boys are talked into digging out the door. KB manages to get it open and once all four are in, they accidentally lock themselves in. After following a power conduit in the overgrown, rodent-infested structure, they manage to restore power to the entire place. Wim, who had apparently found some type of control center, cannot resist pressing a blinking green button, setting off a chain reaction. The kids flee to the exit hatch only to discover they’re on a launching starship already far above the ground. Wim’s dad, who’d come looking for his son, sees the kids dangling from the open hatch before the ship soars into the night sky. The kids rush to the bridge in time to see the ship pass through the nebulous “Barrier,” giving the kids their first-ever view of the starry expanse of space. The ship then jumps to hyperspace.
Disturbances in the Force: I have lots of thoughts, most of them bouncing off each other in tangential ways. I think the only way to make sense of it all is to start with George Lucas. Lucas was a brilliant visionary at one time who developed the unfortunate habit of believing his own hype. Around the time The Phantom Menace came out, Lucas began insisting that Star Wars was a children’s movie and that all Star Wars films had always been children’s movies. I can understand why Lucas may claim this after the fact, as sales of toys and related merchandise made him a very rich man, to the point where he famously switched out Wookies for Ewoks in Return of the Jedi in large part because he believed the teddy bear-like Ewoks would sell more. Sadly, Lucas is either lying or deluding himself. Star Wars was a film enjoyable by all ages. That is a very different thing than a children’s film. Star Wars started off with a show of brutality when Darth Vader snapped a rebel’s neck and then proceeded to even darker with Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s smoking corpses on display in the Tattooine desert. Contrast that with Lucas’ latter-day vision of a children’s film in Phantom Menace, full of poop and fart jokes, along with cringe-inducing slapstick. Don’t argue—this is a hill I will die on.
Skeleton Crew tries very hard to be enjoyable by all ages and not relegate itself to a children’s show. It is not entirely successful despite not playing fair. The opening pirate attack echoes the original blockade runner sequence from Star Wars, right down to duplicate camera shots, parallel dialog and the pirate leader choking the freighter’s captain while holding him above the decking. It’s alternately impressive and distracting, clearly intended to evoke fond nostalgia in viewers. But folks, we haven’t seen anything yet. The very next scene we meet Wim, who is playing with Jedi and Sith action figures in a way that manages to not only evoke the childhood of every Gen X viewer ever but also Dark Helmet’s playing with action figures from Spaceballs. That’s some heavy lifting, there. And the hits just keep coming. There are echoes of John Hughes’ 1980s teen comedies and some heavy-handed visual references to the bicycle scenes from E.T. Above all, the ghosts of The Goonies overshadow everything. I was too old to really connect with The Goonies when it released and always found it a bit too cartoonish, too much a vision of what adults think kids want in an adventurous, wish-fulfillment movie. I know it is beloved by many so who am I to throw stones?
The visual and emotional references to everything 1980s, from Wim being a latchkey kid to Edward Scissorhands-style suburbia uniformity come fast and furious, to the point where I strongly suspect this project was presented to Disney as a Duffer Brothers-style sizzle reel, clipping together disparate scenes from the referenced properties to tell a semi-coherent story, but more importantly, convey an overall atmospheric mood. And it works, kind of. At least when the effect is subtle. The detention scene is just barely grazing Breakfast Club territory but doesn’t belabor the point. Other times the style draws so much attention to itself that it distracts from the story at hand. I almost expected Fern’s tiger mom, Undersecretary Fara (played by Kerrie Condon, who was Octavia in Rome), to forget her daughter’s 16th birthday at some point in the episode. That’s not great.
The cast, for their part, give it their all. They are believable, for the most part, but it’s no easy task. The episode consists of mostly setup for the main storyline and the narrative wobbles along at an uneven pace, at least until they get to the buried starship. Then the story literally, as well as figuratively, takes off. I like that Neel is played by Robert Timothy Smith, an actual kid, rather than a little person. That childlike essence in his mannerisms come through in ways that Warwick Davis’ young Greedo did not. I did have one big question here—the derelict ship was infested with at least one species of space rat and what looked like roots and vines had penetrated various sections of the ship. That doesn’t indicate a very airtight or space worthy vessel to me, yet the kids don’t immediately die of asphyxiation when the ship reaches orbit, so what do I know? The fact that the planet is hidden within a nebula and the kids all intellectually know what stars are but have never actually seen them before is an interesting touch. I wonder if that’s just a throwaway bit of worldbuilding or a hint at something bigger afoot. With a planet of accountants, I just don’t know what to expect.
Skeleton Crew episode 2 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 3 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 4 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 5 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 6 reviewed.