Skeleton Crew | The Star Wars series that would have worked even better as a movie

Star Wars Skeleton Crew, starring Jude Law
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As Star Wars adventure Skeleton Crew reaches its climax, we wonder whether it would have been more successful as a movieā€¦ Spoilers ahead.


NB: The following contains spoilers for the entirety of Star Wars:  Skeleton Crew season one.


There appears to be some unwritten rule that a season of TV can’t end on an entirely satisfying note. Frothy Star Wars spin-off Skeleton Crew, for all the explosions, tussles and heroism in its final episode, somehow managed to end on a muted ellipsis rather than an intriguing question mark or ā€“ god forbid ā€“ a definitive full stop.

With his plans to plunder the planet At Attin of its gold reserves in tatters, the villainous Jod Na Narwood (Jude Law) watches as his stricken ship crashes in the distance. But as New Republic X-Wings soar past and his pirate comrades flee, Jod simply cracks an enigmatic smile. Is it disbelief that his scheme has gone so spectacularly wrong, or is it a flash of cunning?

Given that Skeleton Crew spent several episodes building up to the events paid off in the finale, it all felt a bit abrupt, didn’t it? We see Wim, Fern and their young friends bimble off, their adventures over for now, while Jod… well, who knows what will happen to Jod. Rather than hint at how he might use his wit to evade capture, the episode simply leaves us guessing. The episode wrapped up so quickly, in fact, that your humble writer half expected there to be a Marvel-style stinger after the credits. There wasn’t.

The conclusion aside, Skeleton Crew is arguably the most enjoyable small screen Star Wars outing since Andor, and with its Amblin-inspired story and tone, provides a pleasing contrast to that earlier show’s icy tour of fascist bureaucracy. Rather than overload itself with connections to wider Star Wars lore, Skeleton Crew is simply content to tell a good, old-fashioned pirate adventure, like The Goonies crossed with Joe Dante’s Explorers. 

In this regard, Skeleton Crew feels of a piece with the Star Wars that George Lucas envisioned in 1977 ā€“ it being a traditional tale lightly decorated with space ships, droids, hidden planets and other sci-fi fantasy ornaments. There are moments in Skeleton Crew that feel so cinematic, in fact, that this writer can’t help wishing that it had been brought to the screen as a movie rather than a TV series.

Although Skeleton Crew’s eight episodes are brief ā€“ subtract the credits, and it probably only runs for about four hours or so ā€“ its need to tell a story in discrete chunks begins to tell in places. A hint of repetition sets in as its young leads repeatedly set down on a planet, get into some mini adventure, then take off again for the next. A plot strand involving their parents’ attempts to raise a distress signal feels like unnecessary padding.

It’s also telling that, aside from a brief prologue, Jude Law’s Jod isn’t properly introduced until the end of the second episode; a movie would almost certainly have gotten to this part of the story sooner. As pleasingly-drawn as At-Attin is ā€“ it’s like the San Fernando Valley suburb from E.T. stretched out to an entire planet ā€“ it’s when Jod appears that the story truly clicks into gear.

Read more: Skeleton Crew | Is this the boost Star Wars needs right now?

One of the most entertaining Star Wars characters we’ve seen since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, Jod is a mass of enigmas and contradictions. Law’s performance is so agile, so filled with charisma, that Jod is somehow able to do something reprehensible in one scene and have you empathising with him the next. 

This is especially apparent in episode 8, where Jod holds Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and her mother (Kerry Condon) at lightsabre point, and threatens to bring the entire planet to ruin when his fellow pirates descend and lay waste to the place. But at the same time, Jod clearly doesn’t really want to hurt anyone ā€“ he’s not evil, as such, but rather an opportunist driven by greed and desperation. His explanation as to how he got his Jedi powers is even quite moving.

star wars skeleton crew
Credit: Disney/Lucasfilm

It’s probably a coincidence, but Skeleton Crew and its depiction of Jod has vague echoes of Whistle Down The Wind ā€“ a British drama from 1961 in which a group of children mistakenly conclude that the bearded man they discover in a barn is none other than Jesus Christ. What they don’t realise is that the man, named Blakey, is actually a dangerous criminal wanted by the police.

Similarly, Jod’s Force sensitivity leads Skeleton Crew’s young cast into thinking he’s a Jedi, when he’s actually a spectacularly devious pirate and all-round wrong’un. Both stories are, in part, about childhood innocence colliding with the cynical, sometimes cruel harshness of adulthood. 

Of course, the characterisation and acting in Skeleton Crew is excellent in general. Ravi Cabot-Conyers and Kyriana Kratter, as Wim and KB respectively, are superb young performers; Neel (voiced by Robert Timothy Smith) is so likeable that it’s easy to forgive the manipulativeness of his character design. Like Grogu before him, he’s been expressly invented to melt hearts, launch memes and sell toys, but he’s so sweetly conceived that it’s difficult to be too curmudgeonly about him. Likewise pirate droid SM-33, brought beguilingly to life thanks to Nick Frost’s shiver-me-timbers voice work. 

Read more: Star Wars | The scruffy-looking joy of A New Hopeā€™s unrestored theatrical print

The rest of the grown-up castmembers are more thinly drawn, but then that’s largely a byproduct of them being characters that fill out a plot rather than drive it. It’d be like if The Goonies were closer to five hours long rather than two, and occasionally cut away from its young cast’s subterranean antics to their parents, peering into drains and fruitlessly asking the police to send out a search party. It’d still be a fun enough adventure with scenes like these, but it also moves at a much zippier pace without them.

Pacing aside, there were moments and images in Skeleton Crew that also could have looked quite spectacular on an enormous screen. One notable high point came in episode 6, in which the heroes are led on a merry jaunt by an army of harmless-seeming trash crabs, only to discover they’ve been tricked into meeting the crustaceans’ gigantic, carnivorous parent. (Better yet, this wonderful sequence was achieved, in large part, practically.)

Massive crab ahoy in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.
Honestly, the massive crab is ridiculously cool. Credit:Disneyā€™Lucasfilm.

With strengths like these, it’s almost a shame that creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford’s series is in danger of becoming lost in Disney+’s churn of films and shows. The duo have talked about their enthusiasm for a second series, yet ratings data puts the future of Skeleton Crew into doubt. It’s almost as though, by making so many shows set in the same universe ā€“ The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, The Acolyte to name a few ā€“ Disney runs the risk of turning Star Wars from the rarefied, almost mythical beast it was to a generation of kids in the 70s and 80s and into just another piece of intellectual property. 

Perhaps if Skeleton Crew had been realised as a one-off, feature-length event ā€“ and given a short showing in cinemas before appearing on Disney+ ā€“ it might have garnered more attention than yet another Star Wars TV series, particularly after the mixed reception to The Acolyte. There were even precedents for this in the 1980s; Caravan Of Courage (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle For Endor (1985) were both made-for TV movies aimed at a younger audience. (They werenā€™t classics, admittedly, but were a fun diversion if you were under 10 years old.)

At any rate, Skeleton Crew ā€“ for all the niggles laid out here ā€“ has an innocence and charm seldom seen in modern film and TV. If there’s any justice, its audience will grow through positive word-of-mouth, and we’ll eventually see its characters ā€“ not least that absolute cad, Jod ā€“ return for another adventure. Maybe Lucasfilm could even give them a movie next time, instead…

All episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew are streaming now on Disney+.

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