The first two episodes of Lucasfilm’s new live-action series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew are now available to stream via Disney+, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on episode 1.
The creators of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (namely Spider-Man: Homecoming collaborators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford) have made no secret that the inspiration for the series lies largely in the Amblin kids’ adventure movies of the 1980s like The Goonies and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and that influence is readily apparent in the show’s first episode. It opens with a big, exciting space-pirate attack on a New Republic ship, where we meet some menacing baddies like the wolfman-like Shistavanen named Brutus (inhabited physically by actor Stephen Oyoung from Twisters and voiced by Fred Tatasciore from Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur) and the helmeted Captain Silvo (this role is not credited to anyone, though I suspect it has something to do with the series’ adult lead Jude Law, who otherwise does not appear in this premiere episode). After the dust settles from the incursion, the pirates crew is irate to find that the ship’s hold contains only one measly credit, and the blame falls squarely on Silvo for the disappointment.
Then we cut to a polar opposite location and situation– a pseudo-suburban (though undeniably futuristic) neighborhood and household where we meet young Wim (Robert Cabot-Conyers, who Disney fans will know as the voice of Antonio in Encanto), who plays with crude Jedi vs. Sith action figures and imagines a more exciting life somewhere out there in the galaxy. Wim’s best friend Neel (Dear Santa’s Robert Timothy Smith) is a blue elephantine kid whose species currently goes unidentified– though we do know he’s not an Ortolan like Max Rebo– and the two are kind of the losers in their school. They both admire the cooler kids, especially the speeder-bike-racing girls Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong from American Horror Story) and KB (Kyriana Kratter from Disney Channel’s Bunk’d), the latter of which is an electronic-visor-sporting cyborg like Lando Calrissian’s pal Lobot from The Empire Strikes Back. When Wim oversleeps one night, missing an important test, he takes a shortcut through the woods near his home and stumbles across a hatch buried in a ravine, which he assumes is a Jedi temple like the ones he’s read about in histories of the galaxy.
We see that Wim’s stern-yet-distant father (Tunde Adebimpe, also from Twisters) and Fern’s overbearing politician mother (Better Call Saul’s Kerry Condon) are separately concerned for their children’s well-being, but that doesn’t stop the kids from sneaking back into the woods to break into the hatch– Wim had accidentally let the location slip during his shared detention with Fern– and the girls want to scavenge new power converters (get it?) for their hoverbikes from this clandestine location. But once they break inside, they discover that it’s not a Jedi temple after all, but an ancient starship that’s still in operation– after some quick tinkering on KB’s part. Naturally, Wim ends up pressing a button he probably shouldn’t have pressed and the ship unburies itself from the planet’s surface and launches into space, while Wim’s father– who’s been searching for his suddenly vanished son in the woods– watches helplessly from below. Aboard the vessel (which is functioning on autopilot) there’s a derelict droid that suddenly wakes up, but that’s nothing compared to the fact that our protagonists are launched into hyperspace, unaware of to what destination this adventure might be taking them.
As a big fan of both the Star Wars franchise and the aforementioned 80s movies that inspired this show, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is pretty much automatically right up my alley. And I would say based on this debut episode alone that co-writer/director Jon Watts and his writing partner Chris Ford have really knocked it out of the park so far. They’ve absolutely nailed the tone and spirit of their influences, while simultaneously bringing some very new ideas and intriguing locales to the established Star Wars galaxy. The cast– both young and adult– is full of ringers, and that’s before we’ve even seen Jude Law’s face pop up on-screen just yet. And as someone who has always loved the criminal underworld aspect of Star Wars (read: pirates) there’s an awful lot going on here that appeals to me as a tried-and-true devotee of the material. Obviously this installment is just the beginning of an eight-episode narrative, so there’s plenty more to unfold along the way, but I couldn’t ask for much more out of this starting point, which is chock-full of Star Wars Easter Eggs, genuinely moving character beats, and hints of adventure to come in A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
The first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew are now available to stream, exclusively via Disney+.