This evening saw the debut of the seventh and penultimate episode of Lucasfilm’s live-action series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on Disney+, entitled “We’re Gonna Be In So Much Trouble,” and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
“We’re Gonna Be In So Much Trouble” begins on At Attin, where the parents of Wim, Fern, Neel, and KB are desperately trying to send a signal out of the barrier to their children. They have assembled a makeshift transmitter but as they are activating it in the woods they are pursued by the planet’s security droids, who proceed to stun them one by one when they track them down. Fortunately Fara (played by Kerry Condon) is able to send the device out into the atmosphere at the last second before being taken in custody by the droids.
Then, after the opening titles, we’re back on the newly transformed Onyx Cider, and all the kids are excited to be going home… except for Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), who doesn’t want everything to go back to the way it was before his adventure. Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) comforts him by saying she’s glad that he pressed the button to send them out into the galaxy in the first place. Meanwhile on pirate captain Brutus’s frigate, the crew has emerged from hyperspace to find nothing but an enormous “toxic maelstrom” where At Attin should be. At this point Brutus (voiced by Fred Tatasciore) is fed up with Jod’s (Jude Law) shenanigans, so he says it’s finally time to dump him out of the airlock. Jod pleads and begs for his life, trying every trick in his usual book of chicanery to change the pirates’ minds, but it’s the Onyx Cinder coming out of hyperspace nearby that finally grants him a reprieve.
The kids find themselves caught in the frigate’s tractor beam and hauled into the hangar bay, where Brutus finally meets his end, first clamped up in the Onyx Cinder’s loading claw and then executed by Jod, who grabs the captain’s blaster pistol off the ground and manages to reclaim the title for himself once more. The kids are taken hostage and Jod– back in his Captain Silvo helmet– intercepts the transmission from the parents, who spill some of the secrets of At Attin, including the fact that a Republic Emissary would know the location of the planet and how to come and go from its surface. Hearing his father’s message, Wim makes an ill-conceived attempt to attack the pirates, but the four children manage to get SM-33’s (Nick Frost) help by taking advantage of a loophole in the Pirate Code mixed with the kids’ game of “claimsies” from the first episode.
So it turns out that the Onyx Cinder is not a pirate ship at all, but instead was a ship used to ferry Republic credits from the mint on At Attin, and indeed is the only means by which passengers can safely traverse the barrier. But just as the kids have done so, Jod reveals that he managed to get back on the ship before it took off (the show doesn’t make clear exactly how), and suddenly slices SM-33’s head clean off with the lightsaber they found in Tak Rennod’s lair. Jod threatens the kids and their families if they don’t go along with his plan, and soon they have landed on the surface of At Attin, where the security droids are all too happy to take the “Republic Emissary" down to the underground mint. We hear an announcement from the elusive Supervisor (voiced by British actor and comedian Stephen Fry from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)– I feel like one of the big questions going into the finale is whether he’s really there– and the parents follow along down into the sub-levels.
Jod is awestruck by how many shiny new Republic credits there are in a single vault, and that’s just one of 1,139 on the planet (just one off from being a THX reference, but I’m sure that’s the joke). The kids are reunited with their parents on the landing platform outside the vault, but the joyful homecoming is cut short by Jod approaching the group threateningly and igniting his lightsaber. I thought this was a really solid and exciting episode overall, giving us a good amount of edge-of-your-seat action and information about At Attin while still reserving some details– like “Why don’t the residents of the planet know that the Old Republic isn’t around anymore?”– for next week’s finale. I think it’s also pretty much confirmed that Jod is the villain by this point as well, unless there’s a last-minute redemption for his character, but that seems unlikely to me now. Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari, Twisters, The Mandalorian) is another example in a growing list of contemporary filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of crafting compelling Star Wars stories on the small screen, and if he wants to, I hope he gets to continue working in A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
The season finale of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew will be released next Tuesday evening, exclusively via Disney+.