This review contains full spoilers for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Season 1, Episode 5.
A funny thing happens in this episode of Skeleton Crew, and that’s not counting the surprising number of good jokes (“What’s a concubine?” being a standout): A character expresses fond memories for a thing from their past, only to discover that it has changed and isn’t as great as it used to be. It ponders if nostalgia is a trap and asks whether you’re doomed to disappointment if you put too much stock in it. Doesn’t this seem explicitly heretical to the basic concept of the “Star Wars crossed with Goonies” mash-up that is Skeleton Crew?
Skeleton Crew doesn’t quite pull a Last Jedi and ask the audience to question whether or not they’ve wasted their lives, but SM-33’s realization that his old boss’ pirate lair, Skull Ridge Mountain, has been turned into a luxury spa is immediately followed by the most explicit Goonies riff that the show has done yet. A character literally walks around talking about how the thing he used to love has been “ruined,” and then the kids find themselves in a series of underground tunnels filled with old pirate traps (though, yes, the first one is definitely the “Penitent Man” from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade).
Short of Captain Fern forcing Jude Law’s Jod Na Nawood (who gets even more nicknames in this episode, including Dash Zentin and Jodwick Zank) to do the Truffle Shuffle, it could not be more clear what they’re going for here, and that makes 33’s little background subplot seem very pointed. It doesn’t feel like Skeleton Crew is actively undermining itself, if only because the backlash against Last Jedi was so pronounced that Star Wars will probably never do something so smart ever again, but it was at least some thoughtful foreshadowing of the fact that this Goonies riff wasn’t going to work out very well for the Crew.
Wim is concerned at the beginning of the episode that this adventure hasn’t been as fun as he thought it would be, and if that wasn’t true then, it’s absolutely true by the time Jod orders 33 to reactivate the acid pool trap they had evaded earlier—which violently kills the Crew’s pirate pursuers offscreen. Nobody should’ve been too surprised once Jod started holding Fern at knifepoint, demanding that she surrender her captainship to him so he could force 33 to fly him to At Attin without needing the kids, as this whole adventure was already off the rails by that point.
Also, is it any wonder that Jod’s advice to a crying Wim was to simply forget about his family and live without any “attachments”? He’s fun to have around, and the mystery of his Force powers (which gets readdressed in this episode thanks to the appearance of a lightsaber) is so damn compelling, but he’s not a nice guy.
While the Jedi question remains unanswered, there are a few other curious developments in “You Have A Lot To Learn About Pirates.” For one, At Attin is apparently home to the last Old Republic mint, meaning that—if Jod can get access to it—he can get a limitless supply of a currency so valuable that people freak out when they see it. But we also have the ongoing mystery of At Attin’s Supervisor, a person(?) who the adults of the planet are pretty scared of. Also, the lair the kids are exploring was home to a legendary pirate named Tak Rennod, who appears briefly in a video message that is suspiciously garbled, meaning nobody (us included) can see what he looks like.
How likely is it that Tak Rennod is At Attin’s enigmatic Supervisor? 100 percent? He ditched the ship that the Skeleton Crew has since commandeered (we now know it’s called the Onyx Cinder) and is now living out every pirate’s dream of owning a whole planet that exists just to print money for him? Jod’s got to be picturing something like that when he double-crosses the Crew at the end.
The next episode might immediately walk that back, as this one did with SM-33’s heel turn, but here’s how it stands now: All of those beloved kids adventure movies where young people have a life-changing experience, all come home safe, and maybe they learn about growing up from a seemingly salty adult? The ones that Skeleton Crew has been trying very hard to remind you of from the first moment we saw the space-suburbs of At Attin? They were lying to you. Adventures are terrible and adults are mean.
