Richard Donner’s The Goonies has been the film that Skeleton Crew has been compared to ever since it was announced and as a bare bones comparison it’s pretty one to one. A group of kids are on an adventure to find a mythical pirate treasure; in The Goonies it was to save their home and here the treasure is the home. Skeleton Crew has been leaning heavily into ’80s kid friendly cinema but was hitting more of an ET and Stand By Me vibe. With this fifth episode, the show enters full on Goonies territory but with one exception – it’s way better.
Some grown men may live their lives believing the Goonies never say die but in reality the film is really just a lot of noise with stereotypical characters and it lacks any real heart. Skeleton Crew has a slaughter house full of heart and, while the characters are archetypes, they are all feeling fully rounded rather than one note. These kids are smart, daring, and care but are still kids and are written as such, they say they are not tired but fall asleep, they’re told not to touch thing but the do. Also, they have an important thing that most kids in ’80s film didn’t – parents that care.
Checking in with the parents is where we pick the story back up after them being absent in the previous episode. Desperate to find their children, the parents are taking it upon themselves to find out what’s happened but their home world, At Attin, which originally appeared to be a utopia, now feels like a totalitarian state. They are trapped in this environment and there is someone always watching with everything controlled by a faceless supervisor. How much the parents are aware of is unclear but they clearly know they are in a dangerous situation. Skeleton Crew is a show that is riddled with mysteries but, unlike other Disney+ shows, it is not being precious with then and I’m confident all will be answered in a satisfying way over the next three week.
After this brief interlude, we cut back to the kids and Jude Law’s Jod for the rest of the episode. Pirate droid SM-33 gets switched back on after going into kill mode last week and delivers a exposition dump that sets up this week’s episode. They are on the famous pirate ship called the Onyx Cinder which was captained by legendry pirate Tak Rennod and Rennod had hidden the coordinates to their home in his secret lair at a place called Skull Ridge Mountain. While having an ongoing storyline, this show has fallen nicely into a planet of the week format. The crew get so information, visit a planet, solve a problem, then move on. A classic format, very Incredible Hulk. So we hit hyperspace for this week adventure.
Before they arrive at Skull Ridge Mountain we get to spend some time with Jod and Wim. Everything is starting to get on top of Wim as he realises that real adventure isn’t like the stories about Jedi that he reads on his datapad. He’s homesick and misses his father and we see that Jod is beginning to step into the parent/mentor role. But the interesting thing is that Jod starts to use very Jedi coded language when talking about attachments and reality. In the second episode he was speaking how people would imagine Jedi to speak; here he is reading straight from the Jedi playbook. Here I think the show has revealed it’s hand and we are dealing with another Order 66 survivor, except this one no longer follows the Jedi code.
Once they reach the destination, it’s revealed that Skull Ridge has been redeveloped as an adults only resort and episode becomes a pure delight in a weird, pacey, Star Wars way. Very faster, more intense. We get the kids disguising themselves as odd little adults, an alien bounty hunter who recognises Jod but calls him by yet another name, Jod’s old crew coming hunting for him, a Hutt taking a mud bath, Cthulhu-esque monster with the very on the nose name of Cthallops who just wants to hear a good story, and a whole load of pirate booby traps. This is where it really becomes The Goonies as they are basically following a pirate map to find pirate treasure but there is a genuine threat here as we see these traps kill.
When they find the hidden pirate lair, which conveniently has a lightsaber as one of its treasures, they trigger a message from Captain Rennod which solves one of the mystery of the At Attin. The planet is remaining mint for the Old Republic, who every controls the planet literally has a license to print money. This triggers the biggest twist of the show so far as now that Jod has the answers he needs he turns on the children proving that they really did have a lot to learn about pirates. You know that this turn isn’t going to be black and white, he does it so easily that he could have done it at anytime but he is now in control and wielding the weapon of a Jedi. This is a legitimate cliffhanger to an episode in a time when a lot of Star Wars television has the habit of randomly cutting to black.
A big shoutout goes out to Jake Schreier, who helmed this episode, and outside of Star Wars, this a promising sign for Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, which will be his next project to be released. His handling of this episode was spot on, it moved fast yet remained coherent and every beat landed, be it comedy or drama. Skeleton Crew has finally made Star Wars appointment television again and it is great to have that feeling again. It now just needs to stick the landing in the coming weeks.
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