The best version of Star Wars probably exists inside the mind of a child. When kids in 1977 wanted Star Wars action figures for Christmas, they couldn’t get them (yet), so an empty box could be purchased instead. By many accounts, kids relied on their Star Wars imaginations — and the box became a hit. When Obi-Wan Kenobi casually mentioned to Luke Skywalker that he “fought in the Clone Wars,” the hazy version of that conflict wasn’t necessarily better than when we saw that onscreen two decades later, but it was purer. Whatever you dreamed could be happening at the fringes of what was seen in Star Wars was not only cool as hell, it was cool precisely because it was hidden.
The latest Star Wars TV series hitting Disney+ — Skeleton Crew — is the most valiant effort on the part of the franchise to capture this exact paradox. The show aims to give us all the Star Wars toy box, but also leave us longing for more. The trailers have not conveyed the true Skeleton Crew vibe, probably because the show is trying to keep a few secrets close to its space vest. But here’s why Skeleton Crew is better than anyone expected and why you should be excited to watch it with a Star Wars newbie. It feels like you’re playing Star Wars, only this time, with pirates.
Knowing that Skeleton Crew is a pirate show is perhaps more important than knowing it’s a Star Wars show. The fact that this element wasn’t more present in the marketing of the series is a bit baffling. The musical score from Mick Giacchino is totally piratical, and will instantly remind you of Hanz Zimmer’s Pirates of the Caribbean. This isn’t to say that Jude Law’s mysterious ex-pirate captain Jod Na Nawood is a direct parallel for Captain Jack Sparrow, but I’m also not not saying that.
Creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have talked a lot about the influence of Amblin films like The Goonies, but there’s also a healthy dose of Treasure Island here, in the best way possible. Nick Frost as the voice of a stereotypical (ARRR!) pirate droid named SM 33 is jarring at first, and utterly endearing by the time you get through the second episode. At times, Skeleton Crew feels like somebody decided to inhabit a random Doctor Who episode, quadruple the budget, and go even harder on the basic pitch: pirates, but it’s space and Star Wars. At certain times in the third episode, when a particular animal alien reveals herself, it feels like Douglas Adams’s ghost is dancing a jig. This kind of sci-fi galaxy is supposed to feel kooky and Oz-ish, and in Skeleton Crew, that very George Lucas-impulse to through a bunch of random creatures in every scene works perhaps the best it has since the original Mos Eisley cantina scene. The entire second episode basically takes place in a wretched hive of scum and villainy and the scum are all pretty delightful and the villainy is fairly convincing.
But what is Skeleton Crew actually about? Well, that’s a fairly easy question to address even if answering it sort of makes the show sound silly, or worse, low stakes. Four kids — Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), KB (Kyriana Kratter), Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), and Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) — find what Wim thinks is part of a Jedi Temple in a random field, but really is a crashed pirate starship. Before you know it, the hyperdrive’s been activated and they’re lost in space. The rub here is that the planet these kids are from is pretty much isolated from the entire galaxy, meaning they know nothing about what’s really out there.
If you care about Star Wars-y stuff, you’re mind is suddenly racing. Why is this planet hidden, and why do the rest of the Star Wars people out there think it’s a myth? But, if you’re a member of most of the viewing population, for whom the Star Wars continuity has gotten increasingly alienating, the basic conceit of Skeleton Crew is a subtle reset. What if there were truly naive characters who could explore the Star Wars galaxy for the first time with child-like wonder?
Essentially, with a strange little sidestep, Skeleton Crew has accomplished just that. Although it’s about four 10-year-olds who fall in with a Star Wars pirate captain (Law), the journey is all about getting home and figuring out what’s up with their mystery home to begin with. The idea that your hometown can seem mysterious when you return to it later in life is a fairly common experience, but like all good Star Wars analogies, this one is kicked into hyperdrive.
None of this clever setup would work, however, without great performances and good pacing. While some might groan when I tell you that Jude Law’s face doesn’t even appear until the end of the second episode, these installments fly by. Unlike recent Star Wars shows — ranging from great to meh — the pacing in Skeleton Crew is perfect, to the point where you might forget you’re watching a Disney+ Star Wars show, and instead, you know, just a great 80s movie. There are very few moments in Skeleton Crew that take you out of the basic aesthetic of this faraway galaxy, which is something else refreshing about the series. The deepest cuts to the rest of Star Wars — at least in the first three episodes — are truly deep enough to not be distracting. Sure, you might recognize an X-wing, but there’s no moment that is similar to The Mandalorian’s “OMG is that a baby version of Yoda!”
Instead, the surprises in Skeleton Crew are seemingly contained to the world that we’ve been presented with, inside of this show. The Star Wars aesthetic helps, but it’s also possible to imagine this show as a standalone sci-fi series, one where Jude Law’s magical powers are just spells he’s casting, rather than using the Force.
To be clear, Skeleton Crew benefits from the Star Wars world-building aesthetic, but mostly because the makers of the series know how to deploy that aesthetic without getting into the dreaded territory of fan service. Yes, there are some requisite shout-outs, including a very familiar opening scene in the first episode, but luckily, this series is very much its own thing. In a sense, it’s like in making Skeleton Crew, Watts, Ford, and their collaborators seem to have pored over a map of the Star Wars galaxy, and noticed that there are a lot of spots that are uncharted, unexplored, and unexplained.
If you’re looking for the hard-hitting politics of Andor, or the quiet, ponderous gritty mystery of The Acolyte, this is not the Star Wars you’re looking for. This is certainly a throwback to a slightly simpler time, in which Star Wars could feel like family entertainment, without actually being a series of watered-down adventures for kids. Calling Skeleton Crew a kids’ show would be totally inaccurate, in the same way Stranger Things is not a kids’ show. These four young heroes have just taken their first step into a larger world, and if we’re lucky, the ride will never end. If Skeleton Crew clicks with the general public, this could be somebody’s first great encounter with Star Wars — an unexpected development for older fans, but a welcome one nonetheless.
