Skeleton Crew episode 4 reviewed
Can't say I remember no At Attin
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: The gang of kids, along with Jod and SM-33, exit hyperspace near a planet within a nebula that looks very much like At Attin. Upon landing, they are confused and alarmed. The city’s layout is exactly like the one they remember at home—down to their individual homes—but everything has been reduced to a bombed out wasteland. Fern orders SM-33 and Jod to remain with the ship and SM-33 invokes a condescending “babysitting protocol.” The kids explore and are quickly captured by a scouting party of child soldiers, part of the Troik tribe, who warn them there’s a rival Hattan war party nearby that’s stolen a herd of Eopies from the Troik. The Hattans do show up with Eopies, but also a Clone Wars-era droid battle tank that has seen better days. Hayna, the young scouting party’s leader, leads the kids back to her home base—which is the remains of what the kids recognize as the school. Hayna’s father is the tribe’s leader, and amid some flowery talk of treating children as equals, manipulates them into agreeing to train with the tribe’s weapons. Wim, Fern and KB think blasting away at targets is great fun, but Neel’s heart isn’t in it. Hayna, curiosity piqued by Neel’s more introspective nature, takes him to the roof where most of the tribe lives in squalor. Neel is served a ration of food but he then chooses to give it to a couple of starving kids he sees nearby. Hayna is baffled by this, but also touched. She shows Neel a large, Clone Wars-era anti-spacecraft gun mounted on the roof, which, she explains, is the only reason the Troik are safe from Hattan attack here. Neel suggests fighting is inherently wrong and that the Troik and Hattan should work out their differences instead of constantly raiding each other and living in fear and hatred. Then he walks that back, admitting that he’s afraid of everything so Hayna shouldn’t listen to anything he says. There is clearly an opposites attract chemistry developing between the two.
Back on the ship, SM-33 discovers Jod going through the kids’ things—and paying entirely too much attention to Wim’s Old Republic credits. SM-33 starts to rough Jod up as a thief, mentioning that At Achrann is a dangerous place. At Achrann, it turns out, is the planet they’re on, one of the nine “Jems of the Republic” of which At Attin is the only survivor. Jod questions SM-33 about At Attin, as the droid clearly has some knowledge of the place, but receives only the standard, “Can't say I remember no At Attin,” in response. At this point the Hattan war party surrounds the ship and Jod, frustrated by his complete and total inability to gain control of any of the situations he’s been thrown into, drops to his knees and says, “Just shoot me now.”
The Troik leader promises to take the kids to the “Fallen Sanctum” which may contain star maps and other navigational aids once they prove their loyalty by helping the Troik recover their stolen Eopies from the Hattan. Hayna explains the Troik depend on the Eopies (it’s implied for meat, hides and as beasts of burden) and that thier loss would mean increased suffering for the already poverty-stricken Troik. Fern, alarmed that Wim and KD are treating this as another adventure, orders them to run as soon as the shooting starts. The Troik leader then reveals he views them as nothing more than cannon fodder, as he orders the kids to scout ahead to find the Hattan force, or be executed. Pitying Neel’s abject terror, Hayna steps up to lead the kids so they have at least a chance of surviving. Tension mounts as the move up the canyon, until the fog clears to reveal Jod and SM-33 leading the stolen herd of Eopies. Jod claims he bargained with the Hattan for them (using Wim’s credits) and trades the herd for the freedom of the kids. Hayna, impressed that the conflict was resolved without bloodshed, leads them to the Fallen Sanctum, which corresponds to the Supervisor’s Tower on At Attin. Hayna tells Neel that his weakness (fear) also makes him kind, and she will try to remember the lessons she’s learned from him when she someday succeeds her father as leader of the Troik. She then kisses Neel on the cheek before departing. Neel, it turns out, is a lover not a fighter.
At the top of the Fallen Sanctum (which has a working elevator, despite being a bombed-out ruin) they find colums with the names and galactic coordinates of the Gem Worlds: At Achrann, At Aytuu, At Arissia, At Arvain, At Acoda… before they find the coordinates of At Attin have been deliberately destroyed. This proves too much for Fern, whose cool facade finally cracks. Of the four kids, only she is mature enough to realize how in over their heads they are, how they almost got killed under her leadership and are still no closer to finding home. Wim tries to boost her spirits by pointing out that she has kept them all alive. Fern does not take compliments well and absolutely goes off on Wim, saying a few words of encouragement aren’t enough to make everything better and help her figure out how to get out of this mess. She’s not a droid that obediently does what it’s told… And the lightbulb goes off for Fern. She realizes the previous captain ordered SM-33 to “forget” everything about At Attin, and the data is likely still there. She orders SM-33 to tell her everything he knows about At Attin and the droid, facing conflicting orders, grudgingly tells Fern he was in this very chamber years before when his original captain murdered every crewmember who’d seen the coordinates of At Attin before ordering SM-33 to destroy the coordinates on the column. He then reveals the old captain also ordered him to rip limb from limb anyone who starts asking about At Attin. SM-33 goes into combat mode and attacks Fern, Wim and KB. Jod’s blaster fizzles out as he tries to blast the rogue droid. Out of nowhere, SM-33 is pelted by rocks. Neel, overcoming his fear, distracts the murderous SM-33 from the other kids. SM-33 charges Neel but Jod throws himself on the droid’s back, managing to flip the off switch and saving the day.
Disturbances in the Force: Before I get into my thoughts on the episode, two things friends had to point out to me because I am dumb—first, SM-33 is a visual pun on “SMEE” from Peter Pan. I mean, duh. How could I not get that? The second is that the title of episode 3, “Very interesting… as an astrogration problem,” absolutely has to be a reference to “Very exciting… as a luggage problem,” from Joe Versus the Volcano. Granted, this is a pretty obscure reference, but the lines are delivered exactly the same way. I’m embarrassed I missed it because Joe Versus the Volcano is one of my wife’s favorite movies and I’ve watched it at least a dozen time. Oops.
There is a lot to unpack in this episode. Things got a whole lot darker. Presumably At Achrann was once a suburban paradise planet like At Attin, but something went very, very wrong, turning it into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style hellscape. The fact that the main cities on the two worlds were laid out exactly alike underscores the cookie cutter nature of modern suburbia. Fern, and later the other kids, gradually realize they could very well have ended up as child soldiers like Hayna had a similar collapse happened on At Attin. Fern, for the first time openly acknowledging the depth of their peril, was a very nice touch, as was Wim’s dawning realization that the grand adventure he’s on may have real and lasting consequences.
The star of the episode, however, is Neel. Relegated mostly to comic relief or worrying how much trouble they’re going to be in once they get home, he shows much more substantial depth of character here. Yes, he’s afraid of everything, but that’s because he can see the potential pitfalls ahead. He can also see the possibilities of a better world where individuals help rather than hinder each other. He wants to live in a win-win universe rather than a zero-sum universe, although the callowness of youth leaves him unable to articulate his thoughts clearly. And yet, despite his aversion to violence and focus on self-preservation, he does not hesitate to take on SM-33 when his friends are in danger. Make no mistake—Neel had zero chance of surviving a fight with SM-33. He reacted instinctively, and gave Skeleton Crew its first truly iconic moment.
References to other Star Wars works continue to simply exist as opposed to drawing attention to themselves. The Eopie were first seen on Tattooine during The Phantom Menace. They’re a plot Macguffin, nothing more. The droid tank from that same movie plays no substantive role in the episode, but deftly conveys the fact that 1) the Hattan are armed and dangerous, and 2) they have access to nothing better than 20-year-old, broken down, obsolete weaponry. Had At Achrann been occupied by separatists during the Clone Wars? It doesn’t matter here, but it piques my curiosity. That’s quality world building there.
This is easily the best episode thus far. I don’t want every episode to be as dark as this one, but the contrast makes the preceeding three installments better. The kids may be wearing very thick plot armor, but the rest of the galaxy is not and there are always consequences.
That said, there are some definite issues with this episode. First up: Jod’s appearance with the Eopie herd to save the kids is hand-wavy in the extreme. He has no knowedge of their captivity, and the Hattan are unlikely to sit down and explain to him, “Look here, we stole this herd of Eopie from the Troik, who have added four child soldiers to their ranks—likely against their will. They’re about to attack us to try and get these animals back, and we plan to kill them all when they do so. What’s your offer?” This whole bridge from Jod saying “Shoot me now” to riding to the rescue makes less and less sense the more one thinks about it. Rather than selling the Eopie to Jod, what’s to keep the Hattan from simply killing Jod and taking the ship, the credits and the droid? All of the above would be of great value to them and they’ve already shown they have no aversion to stealing. And Jod’s transition from captive to liberator isn’t shown, and is therefore suspicious. Did he talk his way out of captivity by the Hattan? Was he able to leverage his sketchy Force powers into a kind of Jedi mind trick? I have no idea. This may be explained in a big reveal a few episodes down the line, or it may simply be a case of “We’ve written ourselves into a corner that’s too complicated to resolve without a lot of exposition, so let’s just have it resolved off-camera and be done with it.” Again, hand-waving. I can live with that, but thus far the writing’s been a higher level than that, so I will continue to question what actually went down.
As for the coordinates of At Attin being destroyed and the kids no closer to finding their way home, it strikes me that they do have the coordinates of all the other hidden Gem Worlds. If they all have identical city layouts like At Attin and At Achrann, it stands to reason the central tower also has columns with the coordinates of the other Gem Worlds. SM-33 gave no indication of having visited those planets, so there’s a reasonable chance that the missing coordinates survived on at least one of the remaining seven worlds. Sure, they were all “destroyed” in the distant past so various incarnations of the post-apocalyptic scenario likely awaits. Short of sifting through SM-33’s garbled memory bit by bit, it strikes me as their best option going forward. I don’t think they would’ve dropped the names of four additional Gem worlds unless the showrunners planned to visit at least one of them, but I’ve been wrong in the past. Next Tuesday can’t get here soon enough…
Skeleton Crew episode 1 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 2 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 3 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 5 reviewed.
Skeleton Crew episode 6 reviewed.