[COLUMN] Skeleton Crew is Star Wars About Star Wars | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains broad spoilers for the first seven episodes of Skeleton Crew.

Skeleton Crew airs its finale this week. The show is interesting, particularly as an example of pop culture nostalgia. It blends George Lucas’ science-fantasy framework with the 1980s children’s films popularized by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, effectively pitching itself as “Star Wars meets Stranger Things.”

However, as the show has progressed, it has evolved into something more interesting and more complicated. In particular, Skeleton Crew feels like a very broad and very generalized exploration of what Star Wars is and has become over the past decade. In some ways, Skeleton Crew plays as a sort of commentary on Disney’s management of the Star Wars brand following their purchase of Lucasfilm in October 2012.

It makes sense that Skeleton Crew would be reflective. After all, it is the last in the current wave of Star Wars streaming shows. The first rumblings about it emerged in February 2022. This was at the height of the streaming boom, just months before “the Great Netflix Correction” of July 2022 that would send the industry into chaos. A year later, in July 2023, Bob Iger would acknowledge that Disney planned to “pull back” on producing Star Wars and Marvel content.

Over the past couple of years, Disney has pivoted away from streaming and back towards theatrical. The company is planning to bring the streaming Star Wars shows to the big screen with the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu next year. Skeleton Crew is the last original live action streaming Star Wars show to premiere between now and then. The only other live action Star Wars streaming shows on the docket are the second (and final) season of Andor and a second season of Ahsoka.

Although it’s hard to identify such a moment without the benefit of hindsight, Skeleton Crew might represent the end of an era for Disney’s management of the Star Wars brand. It is the last evidence of the company’s aggressive expansion into streaming, treating the medium as a new frontier that it could colonize with existing intellectual properties. In some sense, Skeleton Crew is the last echo of a party that ended years earlier.

The basic plot of the show follows four children who are whisked away from their sheltered lives on the planet At Attin to embark upon an adventure through a strange and hostile galaxy: Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), KB (Kyriana Kratter) and Neel (Robert Timothy Smith, Kacie Borrowman). They end up aligned with a rogue who goes by the alias Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) and the droid SM-33 (Nick Frost, Rod Ramsdell).

When footage from Skeleton Crew first premiered, there was a minor controversy over At Attin. True to the influence of movies like The Goonies or E.T., At Attin is presented as a sort of space suburbia. It is markedly different from any planet that has ever appeared in live action Star Wars before, a world of school buses and white picket fences. Obviously, Star Wars has always had a very retro 1950s aesthetic, populated with diners and hot rods, so suburbia makes a certain amount of sense.

However, At Attin didn’t stand out because it was a throwback. It stood out because it was mundane. The planet was dull and boring. It was a planet of the galactic middle class, of office workers and administrators just going about their business. Wim obviously longed to escape At Attin, just as Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) wanted to leave Tatooine, but Wim would have been leaving behind a much more comfortable and much less grim existence.

Whether intentionally or not, At Attin feels like a perfect commentary for what Star Wars has become under Disney. Star Wars used to be an event. A new Star Wars movie was a defining pop culture moment. However, under Disney’s stewardship, what was once rare and infrequent became regular and routine. Under Disney, Star Wars fans were inundated with movies and shows. They were drowned in “content soup.” Star Wars ceased to be special. It became ordinary and generic.

Building from this premise, Skeleton Crew becomes a meditation on what Star Wars has become. After all, Skeleton Crew is a story about legends and history. Within the world of Skeleton Crew, everything has been mythologized. It is about “fables.” Wim obsesses over The Tales of the Knights. Jod regales the children with stories whispered by pirates. In that sense, it’s hard for Skeleton Crew not to be about Star Wars, which Lucas himself described as “a modern day fairy tale.”

Over the course of Skeleton Crew, the kids stop at various planets. Those planets have secret histories that have been covered up and plastered over. At one point, they land on At Achrann, “another planet co-founded with At Attin.” It is a mirror of the suburban bliss that the children have known, a world locked in a state of perpetual warfare as factions deface monuments and tear each other to pieces. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for what it feels like to talk about Star Wars online.

Then, SM-33 guides the children to an old pirate world that has gone by names like “The Demon's Rest” and “Battle World.” SM-33 promises to take the children to the lair of famed Captain Tak Rennod, “a lone mountain where bubbling pits of mud hide the mangled corpses of the Captain's foes.” However, the droid is shocked when they are greeted upon arrival by “a pleasure yacht.” The planet has been turned into a luxury resort, “Lanupa.”

SM-33 is grossly offended by the gentrification of his old home, where “the fighting pits” have been turned into a “sensory gymnasium” and the lair that Rennod “carved straight into the mountain rock” has been remodelled as “the spa.” Everything is gentler, softer, kinder than SM-33 remembers. All the rough edges of the planet have been sanded off, replaced with cushions and pillows. Lanupa has become a retreat for the galaxy’s upper classes.

In some ways, this reads as a none-too-subtle joke about Disney’s infamous (and troubled) efforts to fold Star Wars into their theme park empire. In some ways, it evokes the recently closed Galactic Starcruiser Hotel. The warning that “children are not permitted” on Lanupa even recalls ongoing debates about how Disney should deal with adults who want to enjoy the luxury of its resorts without being bothered by children.

However, Lanupa also offers a broader commentary on the Star Wars franchise. It represents the conversion of what was once an outlaw haven into something much more corporate. Star Wars was the creation of George Lucas and his collaborators, a deeply strange and personal work that broke many of the rules of how films could and should be made. This extends to the prequels. The Phantom Menace was described as “the most ambitious independent movie ever made.”

This reading makes sense. Pirates have long existed as metaphors for artists. This was the central thematic thrust of Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, which found the pirates and buccaneers of the seven seas gradually brought to heel by the capitalist machinations of the East India Trading Company. Lucas and his fellow “movie brats” must have seemed like pirates as they swept through the New Hollywood of the 1970s.

In contrast, under Disney, Star Wars has become much more corporatized and much more anonymous. It is no longer guided and shaped by artists, but dictated by the demands of shareholders. The studio has a habit of parting ways with its creators, while endings are often reworked and reconfigured. Like the remodelled Lanupa, modern Star Wars perhaps exists primarily for the satisfaction of “the Banking Clan.”

This reframes the larger show. Much of Skeleton Crew is about the idea that the Star Wars universe is particularly hostile to children. Wim is ignored and neglected on At Attin. Children are employed as foot soldiers on At Achrann. Kids are banned from Lanupa. At various points, the children are threatened and cajoled. They are never made to feel like they belong or that they should be included. They are often treated as a hindrance or a burden.

To put it simply, the Star Wars universe as presented in Skeleton Crew is not welcoming to children. This perhaps reflects the franchise’s ageing fanbase, the increasingly worrying sense that Star Wars belongs exclusively to fans in their forties or fifties. This obviously raises questions about the long-term viability of the brand, but it also clashes with George Lucas’ repeated assertion that Star Wars is “a film for 12-year-olds.”

This all fits with the revelation of why Jod is so eager to take the kids back to At Attin. It turns out that bland suburbia of At Attin is home to “the last Old Republic Mint.” Or, as Fern puts it, “It’s where they make money.” One imagines that Bob Iger feels exactly the same way about Lucasfilm. Star Wars should be a license for Disney to print money. It should be a resource that can be infinitely exploitable. If the studio can navigate all these competing tensions, there is treasure to be found.

As such, Skeleton Crew feels like a meditation on the current state of the Star Wars brand, and the various tensions simmering through it. It is, perhaps, a skeleton key to understanding what exactly is happening within the Star Wars franchise.