Star Wars: Skeleton Crew: The Kids Are Alright

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It’s a popular refrain that Star Wars is all about its weird little guys, from Jawas all the way up to Babu Frik. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, the latest Disney+ series set in a galaxy far, far away, takes that to heart and introduces the weirdest little guys imaginable: children.

Skeleton Crew—or, as it’s been called by almost everybody since it was first announced, “Goonies Star Wars”—focuses on four kids from an orderly, well-heeled planet who accidentally hyperspace jump into a galactic adventure involving pirates, fake Jedi, and the kind of weird little guys you actually expect from Star Wars, like an alien who’s part owl, part cat, and entirely voiced by Alia Shawkat. Along the way they hang out with a charming rogue (is there any other kind?) played by Jude Law, and—oh yeah—discover a mystery that changes everything they thought they knew about their upbringing. Creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford have a very clear vision here—a wonder-filled, ‘80s-influenced kids’ adventure set in the Star Wars universe—and their undistracted pursuit of it results in a show that, based on the three episodes (out of eight total) that were provided to critics, can be both rousing and by-the-numbers in equal measure.

Let’s meet the kids. Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is up first, a typical star-gazing dreamer whose boyish love of Jedi adventure stories makes him stick out in this button-downed town full of kids who hope to become administrators and middle managers when they grow up. His best friend, Neel, played by Robert Timothy Smith, is the gang’s one obviously non-human member; he’s a young, nerdy Ortolan (the blue-skinned, elephantine alien race whose best-known member is the musician Max Rebo) who, unlike the single-child Wim, comes from a large, loving family. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Fern, a strong-willed rebel who’s also the best student in school and the daughter of a New Republic bureaucrat (played by Kerry Condon) who might know some secrets about their home planet. Her best friend and constant partner, the tech-proficient KB (Kyriana Kratter), cuts an otherworldly presence with her star-white hair, silver space suit, and Geordi La Forge-style sci-fi visor, but based on a glimpse of her parents in one episode, she’s almost definitely a human too (although one with a really advanced sense of style and personal branding). Together they discover a long-hidden space ship in a field near Wim and Neel’s homes, which promptly flies them all past the barrier keeping people in and out of their planet. (Why the privacy? Can you sense a season-long mystery?) Along the way they meet up with a surly, one-eyed droid voiced by Nick Frost and Law’s schemer Jod Na Nawood, a pirate captain known by a plethora of names whose intentions are almost definitely not pure.

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(I’d also like to note that Tunde Adebimpe, the lead singer of TV on the Radio, plays Wim’s work-harried single father in a role that makes you feel why Wim would rather run away to a space station full of dangerous pirates than stick around home for one more minute.)

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

That combo of suburban kids and (space) pirates instantly evokes The Goonies, Richard Donner’s 1985 film that was produced and whose story was written by Steven Spielberg, and whose enduring popularity with now middle-aged fans always felt predicated more on nostalgia than actual quality. (I’m the perfect age for The Goonies and yet didn’t even like it much as a kid. Sorry!) Fortunately Skeleton Crew doesn’t feel cynical the way that movie does, even if its swashbuckling parts are clearly factory assembled for maximum audience-pleasing. It starts off slow, with a flatness that preemptively squashes the sense of awe and wonder it’s aiming for, but it picks up quickly once the kids are off-planet in episode two; by the end of the third episode, after we meet Shawkat’s adorable alien critter and learn why every character is shocked by which planet the kids call home, Skeleton Crew seems poised for a richer, more exciting direction than the one promised by that reductive “Goonies Star Wars” tag. Hopefully it keeps moving that way.

The most interesting thing about Skeleton Crew so far is the disconnect between how its characters react to the predicament they’re in and how we, the viewers, react to it. It’s a weird situation where what’s unknown and adventurous to the kids—droids with attitude, space cruisers launching into hyperspace, galactic backwaters filled with scum and villainy—is old hat for us. It’s the basic stuff Star Wars has always been made of. The boring, humdrum suburb they unwittingly escape from, meanwhile, looks as much like the real world as Stars Wars ever has before, with its rows of cookie cutter houses and manicured lawns, which makes it feel odd, off, almost sinister (and not just because the neighbor who’s always out walking their dog is an Ithorian—or, as people without a Wookieepediac Star Wars knowledge would call ‘em, “hammerheads”). Their normal is abnormal to us because of how little it looks like Star Wars and how much it looks like our normal, like an uncanny valley version of the real world. We recognize the traditional signposts of middle class comfort and youthful anxiety—being late for the school bus, forgetting about the big test, taking care of yourself after school until your parents get home—but these mundane slices of real life are foreign to Star Wars as it’s been known for almost 50 years. The existence of the massive city Coruscant—basically Manhattan-meets-Tokyo as an entire world—suggests that a Star Wars planet of just subdivisions with two-story, single-family housing is possible, but actually seeing one feels like lazy flattery at first before turning into something unsettling. It’s like when you see a “normal” town at the start of an episode of The Twilight Zone; just from context alone it’s immediately, inherently creepy.

Skeleton Crew will no doubt be a more popular show than last summer’s The Acolyte, which dealt heavily in shades of gray while following its main character down what would traditionally be considered a villain’s path, but it’s also less daring, less provocative, and less memorable. It’s Star Wars comfort food, which is basically a redundant term, since Star Wars’ enduring popularity is due almost entirely to its comforting nostalgia. But it’s also a kind of Star Wars adventure we haven’t seen before, and that will be as crucial to its success as the kid-friendly focus; even though its influences are obvious and it all feels a bit like a Hollywood exec’s formula, Skeleton Crew takes a new, unchallenging angle on a beloved entertainment institution, and does it well enough that it could easily become the most universally popular Star Wars product since The Mandalorian. Who cares if it’s less like Spielberg (or George Lucas, even) and more like the Spielberg pastiche of J.J. Abrams’ Super 8.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres on Disney+ with two episodes on Dec. 2 at 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT. New episodes will be released weekly on Tuesdays.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

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