Star Wars is not obliged to be fun – Andor is probably the best of the TV spinoffs, and that’s hardly any fun at all. But its dud movies and series tend to be the dour ones, because its core business is to be a silly stellar adventure for kids, parents and adults who still have a lively inner child. Fun should be the default, and now the franchise has hit upon the sort of show it should have made years ago. As everyone online who saw the trailer correctly observed, the youthful Skeleton Crew is basically The Goonies in space. It is excellent fun.
At the start, Skeleton Crew is a rarity in another way: it’s urban Star Wars! For a while there are no dunes, souks, settlements styled like frontier towns, bustling ports, gleaming black space stations or caves where a worm with a million teeth lies in wait. Instead we are among trams, skyscrapers and bridges across city rivers on the comfortably Earth-like home planet of Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), an ordinary prepubescent boy. Wim’s dad (Tunde Adebimpe) is too busy to curb his adventurous tendencies; this curiosity is almost ready to include girls, but the cool girls Wim knows are a bit scary. A familiar coming-of-age setup, then.
But although Wim’s neighbourhood could almost be mid-century California – his family home has a cute touch of atomic-age interiors about it – this is still a galaxy far, far away. He pours greeny-blue milk on his cereal; his teachers are droids; he dreams of becoming a Jedi when he grows up; and his best mate, Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), might be a nerdy worrier in dungarees and chunky knits, but he’s also a blue biped with the thick ears and trunk of an elephant. A scary cool girl, Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), sports a flying jacket and rides a hover-bike through traffic at vertiginous speed, while her sidekick KB (Kyriana Kratter) is a tech whiz aided by a helmet/visor gadget that covers her eyes. Forming a bickering quartet, the four find something strange and wonderful in the woods, and are soon – thanks to Wim being an inveterate presser of buttons marked “do not press” – millions of miles from home, on an epic quest to find their way back.
On the Star Wars timeline we are in the same era as The Mandalorian, which is to say a period of upheaval after the fall of the evil Empire, when space is teeming with pirates. One such hunter of bounties is Jod Na Nawood, AKA Crimson Jack (Jude Law), a failed thief who meets the lost kids and becomes their untrustworthy guide, mentor and surrogate big brother as they stumble through traditionally fantastical worlds.
The capers and minor characters are classic Star Wars mischief – from a noodle joint where the house-special sauce is the innards of a large crustacean, cracked from the animal straight into your bowl by a six-eyed barman, to an owl astronomer voiced by Alia Shawkat and a cousin of C-3PO working as a nervous tattooist. For a tale where four children have to learn to protect themselves in an outsize version of the confusing, dangerous adult world, this show’s universe is nicely pitched, its perils just unsafe enough to be gently thrilling. When the kids find themselves manning laser blasters and fending off bad guys in aerial combat, they’re playing the ultimate video game, and it makes total sense.
Jude Law is held in reserve for the best part of two episodes, which is fine because the young cast members, with good chemistry between their contrasting personalities, are the stars. But when he finally appears, he gets it, judiciously giving his character the right amount of roguish threat. He’s too irresistible to be a proper villain and too dodgy to be a trusted friend. The girls see through him immediately; the softer-hearted boys might be right to give him a chance.
It’s not perfect. It rarely progresses from fun to funny (Nick Frost extends the list of British actors to be cast in Star Wars as the voice of a droid that seems to be set up as a comic foil, but which somehow doesn’t have many funny lines), and it’s not episodic enough for a TV series, feeling instead like a long movie that nobody wanted to cut down, so they’ve chopped it into 40-minute hunks instead.
You’re best advised to pretend Skeleton Crew isn’t there until the holidays begin, and then enjoy it non-judgmentally, sprawled en famille eating chocolates from a round tin. This less-serious Star Wars is an escape to a happy place.
• Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is on Disney+ now.
