Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episode 8 Review

This review contains full spoilers for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Season 1, Episode 8.

It may be weird to think of an episode that involves a pirate invasion, the assassination of a local government leader (who happens to be a droid), and the citizens of a suburban town being rounded up and forced to work as a celebratory victory lap, but that’s exactly what the finale of Skeleton Crew’s debut season ends up being. Everyone’s season-long arcs are paid off (or at least acknowledged), the mysteries are solved, and the bad guys are thoroughly trounced. If all of that feels a little disappointing, it’s just because… well, there wasn’t much else that needed to get done.

The Skeleton Crew formula, as much as there has been one (it only pulled the “kids follow a clue to a planet, have an adventure there, and move on” thing three times or so), is well-established at this point, and with the approachable, family-friendly stakes that the show has been going for, it would’ve been weird for this finale to go totally off the wall with subverted expectations.

No, all we needed was that final victory lap, ticking off the boxes of everything this show has done well so far. The kids each get a little moment, paying off their coming-of-age journeys (Neel gets to use the big turret on top of the school that was foreshadowed in episode four, KB gets to fly the ship, Wim gets to use Jod’s lightsaber, and Fern gets to have a bad attitude and push her mom into doing something reckless), and we even get answers to the last two lingering mysteries: Who is the At Attin supervisor and why does Jod have Force powers?

The resolution to the first question is predictable, though the “yeah, duh” manner in which it is waved away with is refreshing and feels consistent with the show’s faith in its audience (the adults all knew the supervisor was a droid.)

The reveal of Jod’s backstory, however, shows a clever amount of restraint. There’s not some grand mystery to why he has Force powers, no half-assed explanation that he’s somehow related to Emperor Palpatine. Jod was just some kid, living in the gutter somewhere, who was found by a Jedi and learned some Force tricks from her before she was executed. Rather than make Jod evil, though, this event just taught him that the galaxy sucks and that he has to do anything he can to find the few bright spots out there – even if it means killing or stealing. In fact, this episode, “The Real Good Guys,” is subtly a showcase for Jod in the same way that previous episodes have centered on specific kids.

It’s probably giving the character too much credit to say he’s not as bad as he seems, given the deranged glee that Jude Law exudes while repeatedly threatening Fern and her mom (he makes a face at one point that single-handedly explains why the era of Law as a romantic leading man is over), but there is palpable anguish in Law’s performance when his plan starts to go off the rails. At a certain point, it becomes clear that the only way he’s going to win is if he starts making good on his threats to kill these kids or their family members, and he really doesn’t want to.

Jod’s story is left somewhat unresolved, probably as a tease for a second season, but it is a smart choice that we don’t waste any time watching him get arrested or apprehended. The kids don’t even really care what happens to him, they just care about keeping each other safe. And so Jod’s left in the supervisor’s tower, watching his pirate friends all get killed with a sinister sneaky smirk on his face. Assuming he (and the show) come back, he’ll be up to something nasty, and though Law wasn’t always the most engaging member of the cast, he nonetheless does feel like a key ingredient in the show’s alchemy.

The episode does end on kind of a weird note, though, which feels abrupt and might leave you sitting through the credits for a Marvel-style stinger that never comes. With their school destroyed in the pirate attack, Fern jokes that Wim doesn’t have to take his big job placement assessment anymore (the thing he was avoiding in episode one). As the other kids leave, Wim looks up the sky in awe – now free of At Attin’s barrier – and sees New Republic spaceships flying by. He wants to have space adventures, we get it. That’s what he’s wanted for the whole season. And then the episode ends, as if this was some big, concluding moment. Yes, it was nice, we all like Wim, but it was an oddly quick and unceremonious final scene for what has been (against all expectations) a really fun season of TV.