Review of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episodes 1 and 2

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew launches with its first two episodes on Disney+ on December 2, 2024. New episodes will stream weekly on Tuesdays until January 14, 2025.

There’s a familiarity with Star Wars: Skeleton Crew that can be felt in your bones. Disney+’s latest spin-off series plays on an obviously familiar premise, but has something intriguing to do with the fact that unless you’re the same age as the young cast, you’re probably in for something like this kids-versus- Pirate adventures seen before. It could all very easily descend into the obnoxious, but in the first two (of eight) episodes it manages to elegantly avoid that thanks to the way it hints at something beneath the surface.

This familiar feeling is created by a nostalgic atmosphere Skeleton crew wears it proudly on its sleeve: The plot follows a group of children, each with at least one easily identifiable personality trait, who set out in search of excitement and ultimately find themselves aboard a pirate ship on the run from bloodthirsty criminals. Yes, it’s all explicitly inspired by the “Goonies,” but also by a number of kid-friendly (or at least kid-starring) adventures like “ET” or “Stranger Things” – although an opening scene full of pirate brutality makes it clear that this is the series is not just about Star Wars adventures for the little ones Fans in the family.

The brave kids of Skeleton Crew live on the repugnant and somewhat threatening suburb of a planet called At Attin, where parents work long hours and leave their kids home alone after school, where the cool kids race bikes and where everyone has a garden. a lawn mower and a two car garage. There’s a sense that there’s a space destination just down the road and that adults are worried about their property taxes in the New Republic (we’re in the same post-Imperial, pre-The Force Awakens era as The Mandalorian). .

Or you would if there was someone old enough to look scruffy at Attin. That’s one of the first things that suggests that something interesting (and perhaps really clever) is going on here: unlike the parents of the main child, Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), and his Milhouse-coded best friend, Neel (an elephant in the max- Reebo style). (Boy played by Robert Timothy Smith), these children hardly ever seem to meet adults. Their bus driver is a droid, their teacher is a droid, the security guards guarding the school are droids, and the only adult in the school is a woman who gives the children an introduction to the joy of contributing to the Great Work . from At Attin with boring, bureaucratic government jobs. Jude Law, the main character of the Skeleton Crew, only makes very brief appearances in the premiere episodes.

There are a lot of questions surrounding a strange hatch (perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to the Star Wars TV work). JJ Abrams?), but it takes some help from two other Attin kids to get this going: Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who has a bad attitude but is very smart and does well in school, and her friend KB (Kyriana Kratter), who has a technical headset and knows his way around a computer. The kids are all pretty broad in terms of characterization and performance, but that’s not automatically a problem. Real children aren’t fully developed people yet, and so it makes sense that these particular adolescents don’t know who they are and will probably learn something about it over the course of this adventure (although it’s easy to summarize). one character trait higher, just like Mouth, Chunk and the other Goonies). So far they’ve all been likeable – which isn’t always a given in the Star Wars storm.

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