Skeleton Crew episode 8 reviewed

The *real* good guys.

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: Igniting the lightsaber at the end of the previous episode was Long Jod Silvo’s way of establishing his authority as a Jedi/Emissary to the parents on At Attin while simultaneously scaring the kids into silence. He ordered the kids all placed under house arrest under the supervision of security droids—with the exception of Fern and her mother, Undersecretary Fara, who accompany him to an audience with the Supervisor. In the Supervisor’s tower, a thick layer of dust covers all the work stations, indicating nobody had visited for many years. The Supervisor turns out to be a giant, rotating computer, looking somewhat akin to the Master Control Program from the end of Tron sporting a supersized Hal-9000 cyclopean eye. Jod demands that his second ship be allowed to land, which the Supervisor agrees to, provided Jod can answer one question: The last transmission received from the Republic warned that all Jedi were traitors, so either Jod is lying about being a Jedi, or lying about being an Emessary. For a stodgy computer, the Supervisor caught Jod out pretty easily. Jod deflects stun fire from the security droids then buries his lightsaber to the hilt into the Supervisor’s eye, destroying the computer. That also shuts off power to all of At Attin, and security droids across the city collapse. Jod finds a big, mad scientist-style handle that will deactivate the defensive nebula around At Attin and is about to pull it when Undersecretary Fara offers safe passage for the pirate frigate through the nebula, as deactivating it would leave them permanently defenseless.

With the spying security droids deactivated, Wim tells his father that Jod’s lying and dangerous. His father is reluctant to believe this until the pirate frigate and fighters show up strafing the everloving crap out of the city. Jod announces to the citizens as they are rounded up that the pirates aren’t so much as robbing At Attin as they are occupying it. The citizens will continue the Great Work, but instead of minting coin for the Old Republic, they’ll be minting coin for the pirates. The kids, gathering amidst the chaos, decide to call owl cat Kh’ymm from episode 3 for help. To do this they need to steal the Onyx Cinder and fly it beyond the protective nebula to make the distress call. To accomplish this, the kids jump on their speeder bikes, which have self-contained power, and take off in a chase quite evocative of the FBI chasing Elliott and his friends in E.T.—albeit the FBI weren’t chasing them in flying skiffs and firing blasters like it was going out of style. Wim’s father, still half in denial and waiting for the authorities to restore order, commandeers a speeder bike and chases after them. Neel’s bike is hit, and he urges the others to go on without him as he has an idea to provide cover for the Onyx Cinder as it takes off. Upon reaching the ship, Wim and KB discover it is held in place by docking clamps and unable to launch. The only way to unlock it is to restore power, which is only possible from the Supervisor’s tower. Wim’s father, surprisingly enough, volunteers to go to the tower to accomplish this task. When Wim questions his father’s ability to succeed, dad Wendel proudly boasts that he’s a “Level SEVEN Systems Coordinator!” which is quite possibly the nerdiest thing ever uttered in a Star Wars property. Using Fern’s two-seater speeder bike, Wim and father race to the Supervisor’s tower, chased by pirates. They reach the tower and Jod is waiting to fight when the elevator opens to reveal Wim. Wim spins an absurd story that this is Jod’s last chance to release Fern and Undersecretary Fara and give himself up, because the Jedi are coming for him. Fern joins in the fiction-spinning. Jod is laughing at the ridiculousness of it, because he knows the Jedi are all dead. What he doesn’t realize is that Wim and Fern are distracting him so Wendel can reboot the power grid. When the city lights back up, Jod shouts in disbelief, “You brought your dad!?”

With the power back on, KB wastes no time in launching the Onyx Cinder. The pirate frigate sees her lifting off and turns to intercept the vulnerable ship. Enter Neel, who has made his way to At Attin’s lone anti-spacecraft turbolaser, conveniently located in the same place as the one from At Achrann. Neel opens fire on the frigate, destroying its port weaponry and allowing the Onyx Cinder to escape. Neel flees the laser as the frigate turns on him and destroys the gun with its starboard weapons. KB pilots the ship up through the defensive nebula with the aid of SM-33, who she partially reconstructed while waiting for the power to be restored. On the other side of the nebula she stops and transmits a distress signal to Kh’ymm complete with At Attin’s coordinates. But stopping was a mistake, as the pirate fighters made it through the nebula and disable the Onyx Cinder, which begins a freefall back to the planet below. Jod, who is really losing patience now, reveals his backstory where a Jedi on the run found him as a Force-sensitive child and taught him a little about how to wield the Force before the Empire caught her and tortured her to death while forcing him to watch. Then they watch as KB desperately tries to bring the Onyx Cinder in for a soft landing… and fails. Notably, there’s no big explosion following the hard landing. Jod blames her apparent demise on Wim’s defiance of him. And even if KB succeeded in getting a message to the New Republic, they can’t get through the defensive nebula. All the pirates have to do is wait them out. Thus begins a struggle to trigger the Barrier’s self-destruct. Wim and Fern are able to get ahold of Jod’s lightsaber while Jod struggles to keep Wendel from flipping the lever. Finally, cowering Undersecretary Fara joins the fray and helps Wendel throw the switch. The Barrier collapses in spectacular fashion. Right on cue, a squadron of X-wing fighters, accompanied by two B-wings, swoops in and absolutely savages the pirates. The B-wings literally tear the frigate apart like can openers. As the frigate crashes to the planet and the pirates abandon ship, Wim, Fern, Wendel and Fara race to the Onyx Cinder’s crash site to check on KB. She turns out to be roughed up but alive, as is SM-33. As they watch, a New Republic corvette emerges from the clouds of smoke to land amidst cheers from the liberated population of At Attin.

Disturbances in the Force: Does that look like the face of a happy man above? Not hardly. Jod is determined, untrustworthy and opportunistic, but he is not ruthless. Had he killed Wim, Fern, Wendel or Fara when he had the opportunity he would’ve likely succeeded. So he has a soft streak that is his undoing. It didn’t bother him to unleash the pirates on the population and whatever death and destruction that resulted in, but those were out of sight, out of mind. He has no qualms about killing those who threaten him. But those he has power over? That he has a problem with. Jod is left behind but Wim and crew, presumably to escape and scheme another day. I don’t think we’ll have to wait terribly long to see the fake Jedi return to action.

Also, it strikes me that had the pirates not gotten greedy and just emptied the vault at hand before fleeing, they’d likely have gotten away with an insane amount of loot long before the Republic ever showed up.

Episode 8 of Skeleton Crew proved to be the best season finale of a Disney+ Star Wars show since the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. It delivered the goods. It was a romp that raised the stakes while channeling that Goonies mid-80s preteen adventure vibe. Although it wasn’t to the level of Luke Skywalker’s appearance in season 2 of Mando, the fact that fans got to finally see the B-wings open a can of whoop-ass on a capital ship for the first time since their introduction in Return of the Jedi back in 1983 was an absolute squee moment for me (yes, I know there’s an episode with them in Rebels. That’s not the same. At all).

The finale showed thoughtful writing, tying the events back to other episodes in the series. Neel’s firing of the turbolaser, KB reaching out to Kh’ymm for aid, the X-wings on anti-pirate duty, the speeder bike chases, all tied the series together and brought it full circle.

There are some odd notes as well. Why go through the effort of bringing in the pirate Vane, originally seen in The Mandalorian, and give him nothing substantive to do? In all of his scenes he’s just a random heavy with little distinguishing him from the other ensemble of pirates save for the fact we’ve seen him before.

Am I the only one that finds the fact the Old Republic mint world was operated mostly by droids strange? In the midst of the Clone Wars whilst the Old Republic was battling the droid armies of the Separatists they’re gonna trust their economy to droids? And when are those folks deploying droid armies going to realize that running the droid soldiers or security units from a single shared nexus is a bad idea?

At Attin has a small population. Much, much smaller than I’d previously assumed. The cookie cutter suburbia isn’t just one of many on the planet. It’s just one of one. The one city on the planet has the population of a bedroom community. I’m wondering why humanoid life was necessary at all since it seems droids handled the vast majority of operations.

Why build a defense system that cannot be deactivated, only destroyed? And speaking of which, Fara reprogrammed the system to allow the frigate through but I don’t recall her doing the same for the pirate’s fighters. Was this a temporary, limited deactivation? Because those pirate fighters had no trouble chasing the Onyx Cinder back through the cloud. One wonders if the X-wings could’ve taken that same route in. And speaking of X-wings, we saw in season 3 of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka that the New Republic’s forces are stretched thin, so much so that they won’t respond to reports of Thrawn’s return or Imperial remnant activity around Mandalore. Yet here we have the Republic responding within minutes with significant firepower to a distress signal sent by kids about a pirate attack on a supposedly mythical planet? Yeah, that’s a stretch. And no matter how much I loved seeing the B-wings cut loose (they were mostly dropped from Jedi because they tended to vanish in profile when filmed against the blue screen technology of the time) there’s no getting around the fact that the battle at the end was little more than the cliched “cavalry riding to the rescue” resolution that so many horse operas relied on back in the day. That is poor writing, full stop. I’m not sure how to get around it beyond adding a running subplot with the New Republic trying to track down the pirate frigate amid rumors of At Attin emerging, but that would’ve added at least a couple of episode to the series and distracted from the kids’ storyline.

I guessed correctly about a droid supervising the planet, although that was an easy dot to connect. The Supervisor’s comments about obedience being important above all else worked beautifully in showing Wendel’s and Fara’s inability to function and make decisions for themselves outside a formal command structure. Their rebellious pre-teens were agents of chaos and much more able to readily adapt to the changing situations. But it also showcased their parents’ deep concern and devotion to their children, which enabled them to overcome decades of conditioning and take breathtakingly dangerous initiative.

in my analysis of episode 7, I said I couldn’t see how the Treasure Island narrative allowed for a Skeleton Crew season 2. I also said I couldn’t see how the series could resolve At Attin’s ultimate fate. The finale upended me on both of these points. The abrupt ending would qualify as a cliffhanger had not all of the outstanding main plot points gotten resolved by the show’s end. We don’t get to see At Attin’s fate. We don’t even get to see the kids go home. We don’t know if SM-33 “belongs” to KB or Fara or Wim now and there are questions about the Onyx Cinder’s ownership as well. It’s pretty clear that At Attin was forgotten about by the Empire in the aftermath of Order 66, but as it never withdrew from the Old Republic it stands to reason that it is a full member of the New Republic now. There’s a lot of potential for stories taking up right where this series leaves off, exploring the reintegration of this world that’s been cut off from the galaxy for decades. And there are rumors that the kids will cameo in Dave Filoni’s Mandalorian and Grogu film coming up in a few years, so there’s that.

My money’s on the further adventures of Long Jod Silvo, however. This series spent as much effort building up his character as it did the kids, and I could see Disney+ going a long way by building a series around Han Solo’s evil twin. Rogues are always interesting, and Jod’s shades of gray are shadier than most.

So, for the Too Long, Didn’t Read crowd my verdict is that this show is a great deal of fun and well worth your time. It does a good job of expanding the Star Wars universe and shows that there’s more happening in the galaxy other than stuff involving the Skywalker family. Am I happy they did a straight up retelling of Treasure Island? The answer’s still no. I think they could’ve done an effective homage by giving us something new, but as long as they don’t turn around and give us a Star Wars riff on A Christmas Carol complete with Force ghosts of Life Day past, Life Day present and Life Day future, I think I can forgive them.

Skeleton Crew episode 1 reviewed.

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.

Skeleton Crew episode 7 reviewed.