jon Burgess
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres with its first two episodes on Disney+ on December 2, 2024. New episodes stream weekly on Tuesdays through January 14, 2025.
There’s a familiarity to Star Wars: Skeleton Crew that you can feel in your bones. Disney+’s latest spinoff series is playing with a pointedly familiar premise, but it finds something compelling to do with the fact that unless you’re the same age as its young cast you’ve probably seen something very much like this kids-vs-pirates adventure before. It could all very easily verge into obnoxiousness, but it gracefully manages to avoid that in the first two (of eight) episodes thanks to the way it hints at something under the surface.
That familiar feeling comes from a nostalgic vibe that Skeleton Crew proudly wears on its sleeve: The plot follows a group of kids, each with at least one easily identifiable defining personality trait, who strike out in search of excitement and eventually find themselves aboard a pirate ship while on the run from bloodthirsty criminals. Yes, it’s all explicitly inspired by The Goonies, but also any number of kid-friendly (or at least kid-starring) adventures like E.T. or Stranger Things–though an opening scene of pirate brutality makes it clear that this show isn’t exclusively for the littlest Star Wars fans in the family.
Rank The Star Wars Movies and TV Shows
Rank The Star Wars Movies and TV Shows
The plucky kids of Skeleton Crew live on the off-putting and vaguely ominous suburban sprawl of a planet called At Attin, where parents work late and leave their kids home alone after school, where the cool kids race bikes and where everyone has a yard, a lawnmower, and a two-car garage. You get the sense that there’s a Space Target just down the road and that the adults are concerned about their New Republic property taxes (we’re in the same post-Imperial, pre-The Force Awakens time period as The Mandalorian).
Or you would, if there were anyone old enough to be scruffy-looking on At Attin. That’s one of the first things that suggests that there’s something interesting (and perhaps genuinely smart) happening here: Other than the parents of main kid Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) and his Milhouse-coded best friend Neel (a Max Reebo-style elephant boy played by Robert Timothy Smith), these kids hardly ever seem to encounter any adults. Their bus driver is a droid, their teacher is a droid, the security guards watching the school are droids, and the only grown-up at school is a woman who gives the kids a primer on the joy of contributing to the “Great Work” of At Attin with boring, bureaucratic government jobs. Jude Law, Skeleton Crew’s main adult cast member, makes only the briefest of appearances in the premiere episodes.
There are a lot of questions surrounding a strange hatch (perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to the TV work of Star Wars’ own J.J. Abrams?) but it takes some assistance from two more At Attin kids to get going on that: Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) who has a Bad Attitude but is very smart and good at school, and her friend KB (Kyriana Kratter), who has a tech-y headset and can do computer stuff. The kids are all pretty broad in terms of characterization and performance, but that’s not automatically an issue. Real kids aren’t fully developed humans yet, and so it makes sense that these particular adolescents don’t know who they are and are probably going to learn about that over the course of this adventure (again, even if it is easy to sum them up by one character trait, just like Mouth, Chunk, and the other Goonies). So far, they’re all likeable–which is not always a given in the Star Wars cannon.
Luckily, there’s also plot momentum to focus on in these first two episodes, with the kids (literally) stumbling into adventure and accidentally rocketing out of their otherwise peaceful and uneventful patch of the suburbs and up into space in a pirate ship. In what could be Skeleton Crew’s cleverest hook, though, they don’t leave that new Star Wars setting they spent so much time developing entirely behind; The deceptively boring suburban planet of At Attin is apparently home to some weird mysteries.
It’s all fun, if a little barebones (skeleton pun intended) but how fun it will be over the course of the season – and if it earns another one, unlike The Acolyte and The Book of Boba Fett – is going to depend entirely on whether or not Skeleton Crew can maintain a good balance between the space adventure and the kids having opportunities to act like actual kids. If the action is too intense, it loses the breezy, family-friendly appeal of a show primarily about kids; if the kids are too childlike and annoying, then it becomes a show about a robot babysitter—and that sounds lousy.
Speaking of the robot babysitter, the ship that the kids accidentally hijack has a single crew member: A broken-down pirate droid named SM-33 who is voiced by Nick Frost and hits a slightly discordant comedic note. Now, Skeleton Crew already has an endearingly groany sense of humor about piracy, with every glimpse into the universe of Star Wars’ space pirates being stuffed with more cartoonish imagery than the average miniature golf course: everybody has a hook hand, or a peg leg, or a yarrrr accent, or a helmet that looks like a tricorne sailor hat (we haven’t properly met the pirate villains yet, but at least one of the buccaneers was even part of Gorian Shard’s pirate crew in The Mandalorian’s third season). After all of that, it’s literally naming a character after a famous Disney pirate that’s too cute by a parsec.
If there’s one notable issue in these early episodes beyond that groan, it’s that everything outside of the practical set of the kids’ spaceship feels very “filmed on The Volume”—the virtual set technology used on The Mandalorian and other Star Wars shows. The problem with The Volume is that it looks nice, and it encourages more interesting, all-digital sets than what you would’ve seen in The Phantom Menace, but it always feels hollow and empty. Just big, vacant expanses of Star Wars that lack the gritty, lived-in feel of the original trilogy it’s emulating. And while there’s no reason to doubt we’ll have some flashy space action at some point, there’s not much to speak of thus far.
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