From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver. 

But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offender, never grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time. 

Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win. 

I reviewed the season finale of Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Jod Na Nawood is not a nice person. Considering his occupation, the outer-space equivalent of De Niro and Pesci hijacking trucks in GoodFellas, maybe that should have been obvious. But this is the Star Wars Galaxy, where you can personally slaughter younglings and blow up entire planets but still get a cozy fireside ghost appearance once you die. We’ve been taught to forgive much worse. We’ve also been taught, via Han Solo, that preposterously handsome and charming lawbreakers are heroes at heart more often than not. 

Well, Jod appears to fall firmly in the “not” category. Though his charisma and fast-talking power him through the beginning of the episode, as he repeatedly avoids being airlocked while Captain Brutus and his men try to penetrate At Attin’s Barrier, that’s not what actually gets him to his destination. To do that, he shoots the helpless Brutus to death at point blank range, beheads SM-33 with a lightsaber, bullies and mocks four frightened children, and threatens to kill their parents if they talk. That last bit is textbook child abuser stuff, and Skeleton Crew is having Jude Law say it to a little blue elephant boy. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Skeleton Crew is good clean fun. That may sound like faint praise, and in the context of, like, Mad Men and I, Claudius (and Andor, for that matter), it is. But in the context of The Acolyte and Ahsoka, the Disney Star Wars Universe’s last two TV outings? This show is an enjoyable, zesty enterprise, with big ugly creatures, cool little droids, frequently inventive action sequences, and Jude Law as a scoundrel who my even turn out to be a real scoundrel this time. It has a pulse and a purpose. It justifies its own existence by being entertaining. 

[…]

But even in Star Wars, you’re asking a lot of your audience’s suspension of disbelief in this sequence, when you probably could have just crafted an escape that didn’t depend on four little children all acting like a cross between R2-D2 repairing Luke’s hyperdrive while flying through space and Captain America keeping that helicopter from flying away with his bare hands. I enjoy space werewolves and space kaiju and space Urkel and space Kelly MacDonald as much as anyone, but they can’t compensate for underbaked writing, which is what keeps Skeleton Crew from making the jump from fun to special.

I reviewed last week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

One last thing: Wim. Sure, it’s funny to see him mean-mug Jod with a lightsaber in hand as if this is his moment of destiny, then promptly switch it on upside-down and drive it into the ground, knocking himself ass over teakettle. But “I wanted to have an adventure, and now I regret it because adventures are scary” is a movie motivation, not a real-person motivation. Luke Skywalker was a bored teenager wanted to see the universe, not have adventures in it. Indiana Jones wanted fortune, glory, and presumably tenure. The Goonies wanted to save their parents’ homes from foreclosure, for crying out loud. None of them was like “Oh boy, I hope I get into all kinds of danger so I can show how kickass I am!” It’s both unrealistic as a motivator and unlikeable as a personality trait. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

I guess some points about the kids’ comfortable lifestyle’s pros and cons are made in the back-and-forth between Hayna and Neel over the course of the episode, for what it’s worth. It makes you soft, but that softness is your strength, or something. They tried. I dunno, it’s little tough to take a lesson in heroism from a company selling out trans kids as we speak.

To me, the pleasures of this episode are a lot simpler to appreciate. SM-33’s creepy heel turn, Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s fine performance as Fern, Neel and Hayna’s charming friendship, some pleasantly Star Warsian armor and weapons designs, and a sense of forward motion almost entirely lacking from several of the franchise’s other small-screen efforts — that’s time I don’t regret spending long, long ago.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Without Law’s star power and talent, carefully honed over decades, the kid characters just don’t hold up by comparison. Wim remains simultaneously defiant and credulous, two annoying traits that make him hard to take under almost any conditions. Fern, whose ability to take charge of the situation made her the hero of episode 2, comes across as boringly one-note in her opposition to Jod’s very clearly necessary involvement in their escape. Neel is cute, obviously, but cloying, and the lack of nuance in his voice acting can’t be made up for by physical performance since it’s just someone in big blue elephant mask or whatever.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew

Aliens, droids, starships, a dangerous spaceport, a Jedi in hiding, and not a lawn in sight. Now that’s more like it! Directed with an eye for both creatures and color by David Lowery, this week’s episode of Skeleton Crew is good harmless Star Wars fun. That’s all I ask! Oh, and it also brings Michael Jackson’s Captain EO firmly into Star Wars continuity, for some reason?

I reviewed the second episode of Skeleton Crew, which is perfectly fine, for Decider.

There’s something disgusting about seeing lawns in Star Wars. Once, outside the living memory of many people who will watch Skeleton Crew, this franchise became a franchise because it showed people things they’d never seen before — or at the very least, remixed its disparate sources into something exciting and novel. Skeleton Crew opts for neatly rectangular patches of freshly mown grass, in front of tasteful two-story family homes with attached garages, lining a sunlit street down which cars drive as their occupants return from their commute to the city…in Star Wars. An entire galaxy to explore, and co-creators/co-writers Christopher Ford and Jon Watts (who also directs this episode) decided to recreate the environmentally ruinous, politically alienating post-war American suburb? My reaction was instant and instinctive: This is sick.

I reviewed the premiere of the new Star Wars show Skeleton Crew for Decider. (The next two episodes are much better, but good lord.)