Skeleton Crew: This Could Be a Real Adventure / Way, Way Out Past the Barrier
A rewiew of the first 2 episodes of the latest 'Star Wars' TV series
Filed under: Recaps & Reviews
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew dropped its opening episodes and it's a wonderful mix of both old and new. Set in the time before the close of the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy, it gives us an interesting view of New Republic society. But more interestingly it gives us a view of something never seen in Star Wars before: suburban life.
We open with not a crawl but a series of short updates setting the stage. The New Republic says it's a force of order, but as we saw in The Mandalorian it's at best inefficient and at worst downright bad at it. The Hyperspace lanes are full of pirates and we get an opening homage to the original Star Wars with a New Hope-ish boarding sequence that gets the pulse pounding.
We then cut to suburban life, and it's wonderful! Star Wars has traditionally been a series with environments that are extremes, which are cool but at times exhausting and can kind of cause you to disconnect from the material. Tatooine, an entirely desert planet from pole to pole; Hoth, a planet entirely made of ice; and the ecumenopolis of Coruscant, a planetwide city inhabited from where the buildings scrape the sky to the rotten core. These are all cool, but they all feel alien to the majority of the viewers. These are unique settings, but when a film or show feels like you could have found yourself in that world, it can really resonate in a way that carrying you to unknown worlds can't.
Wim, Fern, KB, and Neel are our through line and they hit all the kid adventure movie trope characters. Wim is the dreamer, Fern is the bad ass wannabe rebel, KB is the smart kid, and Neel is a stick in the mud. But this being Star Wars, Wim dreams of being a Jedi, Fern races hover bikes, KB is a cyborg, and Neel LOOKS like an Ortolan (you know, Max Rebo from Jaba's Palace) but is a TOTALLY different species according to series creators. This hits all the right notes: we have hover bikes with tassels on the handlebars, we have kids who own Jedi action figures pretending to have lightsaber duels with their friends on the street and being made fun of, and we have school sucking the life out of the kids' youths. If Spielberg directed a Star Wars film, this is how I'd imagine it.
Some of the most fun touches are the little easter eggs and the unique settings. At Attin (the planet the kids call home) is a highly managed community. Suburban homes all surround a mid-rise, medium-density city. This isn't the hive of scum and villainy we find on Tatooine or the dangerous world of Level 1313 on Coruscant. This is a world where latch key kids get a handful of credits shoved at them by single parents who love them to heaven and back but are run off their feet just trying to survive and deal with their own baggage. This is a world where kids struggle to figure out how they fit, but not as "The One" but as an Systems Analyst down in Galactic Accounting. This makes the mundane fantastic and the fantastic mundane and it's easy to connect with.
Add to this the fact that Ravi Cabot-Conyers (Wim), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Fern), Kyriana Kratter (KB), and Robert Timothy Smith (Neel) deliver great performances. We don't get much from the parents save for Wim's father Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe) and Fara (Kerry Condon) who all rock some hardcore 70s looks but genuinely seem to love their kids.
This is all really fun and breathes something we've been missing into Star Wars: youth. I've honestly quite enjoyed the various Star Wars movies and television shows on different levels, some more than others. I think they've all added new and interesting elements, but for the most part they've been trying to cater to too many audiences. You have the extremes of Rogue One and Andor trying to add a dark and cynical edge, which is neat but not going to land with the kids. Then on the other extreme you have The Young Jedi where Yoda is teaching Younglings with an animation style that is like Blues Clues comes to Star Wars and is not going to land with older fans. In the middle you have everything else so far: The Mandalorian with its crowd-pleasing Grogu and its badass Mando; Obi-Wan and The Book of Boba Fett as weaponized fan service; Bad Batch, Ahsoka, and Tales of the Jedi continuing Feloni's cartoon legacy; and then you have The Accolyte, which I feel is under-appreciated and had more blowback than it deserved, but still had a lot of weaknesses.
What's missing? That niche that The Battle for Endor filled: adventure films and fun ridiculous stakes that blow the doors off the story. That's what we get in Skeleton Crew. We have to see where this goes, but it's off to a strong start, and for the Star Wars fans there's a lot of easter eggs that are just perfect.
Tags: Star Wars, Skeleton Crew, Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Jude Law, Kerry Condon, Nick Frost, Tunde Adebimpe
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