TV review
Over the past five years, Disney+’s “Star Wars” efforts have proved a mixed bag, with only one franchise-sustaining hit — its first entry, “The Mandalorian.” “Andor,” returning for its second and final season in April, proved the biggest critical success, but it didn’t draw the viewership of the mediocre “Obi Wan Kenobi.” “The Book of Boba Fett” was an artistic disaster. “Ahsoka” was embraced by a niche segment of fans. “The Acolyte” proved divisive — beloved by some, loathed by others — and was quickly canceled.
Since acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney’s attempts at these different flavors show just how difficult it is to get the space opera’s formula right. The latest series, “Skeleton Crew,” now streaming its first two episodes, is unlikely to improve Disney+’s “Star Wars” batting average.
That’s not to suggest “Skeleton Crew” is terrible. As an effort to create a “Star Wars” entry in the style of “The Goonies,” “Skeleton Crew” proves an entertaining enough adventure through its first three (of eight) episodes made available for review.
But will “Skeleton Crew,” a story disconnected from past “Star Wars” lore, appeal to fans of the animated series “The Clone Wars” and “Rebels” who were primed to see a live-action Ahsoka? Will it draw an adult devotee of the political drama of “Andor”? It seems unlikely.
Set after the events of “Return of the Jedi,” middle schooler Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) daydreams of being a Jedi when he should be paying attention in a classroom where his elephant-esque best friend, Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), fantasizes about the green-skinned girl seated at a nearby desk.
Then Wim finds a buried hatch to what he thinks might be a Jedi temple in the forest. Outside the hatch, Wim and Neel encounter rebellious classmates Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and KB (Kyriana Kratter), who wears a banana clip visor over her eyes like Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Unlike Geordi, KB doesn’t seem to be blind, so the visor’s purpose is unclear.
That’s not the only “Star Trek” reference in this “Star Wars” show: What happens next — that Jedi temple turns out to be a spaceship, which blasts off, leaving the kids lost in space — is a similar premise to the animated series “Star Trek: Prodigy.”
The first episode of “Skeleton Crew” presents homages to the original “Star Wars” film trilogy. When space pirates board a freighter and the pirate captain chokes a crew member, it’s a replay of the Darth Vader-choking-a-crew-member scene at the beginning of “A New Hope.” When Wim misses the bus and rides his motorized bike to school through a forest, it’s a reference to the speeder bike chase through Endor’s forests in “Return of the Jedi.”
Once the kids escape their home planet’s atmosphere and make a hyperspace jump to who-knows-where at the end of Episode 1, “Skeleton Crew” begins to chart its own course, albeit with a “Pirates of the Caribbean” vibe evoked in music and antisocial alien behavior at a pirate spaceport.
There they get tossed in jail and meet a mysterious fellow prisoner, Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law), who Wim assumes is a Jedi. His female companions are more skeptical.
Law is well-suited to play a potential scoundrel who threatens to complicate the kids’ goal of returning to their home planet. As for the child actors, Cabot-Conyers as Wim (the dreamer) and Armstrong as Fern (the straight-A student with a backbone who’s not afraid to rebel) stand out, perhaps because they’re the better developed characters in this series created and written by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts, who co-wrote “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” with Watts directing this “Crew.”
Beyond the youthfulness of its lead characters, what most sets this “Star Wars” show apart is the picture of middle-class domesticity it depicts in that first episode. Until now, audiences never saw “Star Wars” characters living in a neighborhood that looks like a futuristic version of suburbia from an ’80s Amblin movie like “E.T.” or “Poltergeist.” Eventually, “Skeleton Crew” explains this anomaly through the show’s plot, but this remains the show’s most unexpected and unique element.
That differentiator is welcome. Even most “Star Wars” fans will admit they don’t want “Star Wars” to always be the same. But when Disney+ ventures too far afield (see: “The Acolyte”), enough fans tune out to mark the effort as a failure.
“Skeleton Crew” doesn’t deserve that fate, but it’s clearly playing to the younger end of the “Star Wars” fan base with its leads and a wealth of curious supporting characters, from a monkeylike spaceport ferry driver to an owl-cat celestial cartographer. And that’s OK. Children have always been part of the “Star Wars” audience. Gen X fans of the original movies and millennial fans of the prequels just need to set their expectations for “Skeleton Crew” accordingly.
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