I’ll be honest with you: I’m afraid for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. I’m fearful about how it will be received or if a group of people will try to tank it before most get to watch it. This show stars a little brown boy, an alien kid, and two whole girls in it, and one of them is Asian! That’s a ton of targets for terrible, bad fan actors on the internet. A lot of angry folks seem to love attacking stuff. I really like The Acolyte, and look at what happened to that. Yet maybe I shouldn’t start with my fears and should begin with what I like about this new show on Disney+. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is about a group of young kids who end up lost in the galaxy far far away from their home planet and trying to find a way back home. We meet Wim, played by Ravi Cabot-Conyers, as a young boy who dreams of adventure and Jedi fighting Sith lords. He needs to do this because of his stern but loving and overworked father, Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe), who is having problems connecting with his son as he is losing interest in school. Wim spends a lot of time with his best friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), his more down-to-earth friend who’s a tad more risk-averse; think Milhouse in The Simpsons regarding his character.
Things get interesting when these two best friends find something in the woods of their perfect Suburban neighborhood, and they end up meeting Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and KB (Kyriana Kratter), two cool girls who are also best friends who go around their town in cool speeder bikes. Fern is a precocious girl who ends up having to fend for herself more than other kids, as her parents, much like Wim’s, are more focused on work. KB is a super bright girl with these cool augments that give her some special abilities and allow her helicopter parents to monitor her constantly. With the kids ending up in something they never expected to, you get to see the dynamics of all four kids together. Fern and Wim try to outdo each other, and Neel and KB try their best to support the whole group. Much like real life, the girls are a bit more mature than the boys, and Wim causes things to go left pretty quickly as the kids end up in a cool ship taking them far away in space along with a cool space pirate droid first mate named SM-33, voiced Nick Frost.
The show is built around nostalgia, not specifically for past Star Wars but for being a child, having fun with friends, and discovering things. Playing make-believe with imaginary weapons and doing grand feats of fancy while, at most, in real life, just hopping off of a curb. In this series (through the three episodes), all the child actors are great in their performances and capture that feeling. The show has a very US feel regarding how an “American” lifestyle was mythologicalized in film and television for at least the last 40 years. It’s interesting seeing a space suburbia with a school bus and school and houses and all the stuff you remember from 80s movies. The speeder bike isn’t any different than seeing bikes in The Goonies. The show also plays with your expectations the most with Jude Law’s Jod, who ends up with the kids to try and help them while we don’t know his complete intentions, and that isn’t even the only mystery it sets up in this early part of the series. He brings a lot of charisma and familiar British Jedi Obi-Wan-like energy to this show. It’s fun to see him on screen. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is an excellent series for all ages that should bring the family together to watch a good show; you don’t need to know ages, era, or anything else to be entertained.
Score: B+
