TV Review — ‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’ Is More Than ‘The Goonies’ In Space

Much has been made in the lead-up to Star Wars: Skeleton Crew‘s debut of the way the series is channeling nostalgia for general type of kids-focused action-adventure movies of (principally) the 1980s — the so-called “Amblin’ Nostalgia.” Drawing inspiration from movies like E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, The Goonies, and Stand By Me (the same kind of inspiration channeled by later projects like Super 8 and Stranger Things), Skeleton Crew features a group of plucky kids, riding (hover)bikes through their intergalactic, but suburban-coded neighborhood, disobeying their parents in understandable ways, and stumbling across secrets and adventures that, on paper, are much bigger than their ages would suggest they can handle. Yet, for as much as Skeleton Crew is “Goonies in Space”, what its first episode, “This Could Be A Real Adventure”, makes clear is that it’s more than that. It is very specifically “Goonies in Star Wars.” This is a story about a group of kids as familiar with the broad strokes of Star Wars storytelling as the audience. While still trafficking in the kind of nostalgia becoming all-too-familiar in Star Wars storytelling (and arguably, all genre storytelling everywhere), it does so in a manner that elevates the nostalgia. 

“This Could Be A Real Adventure” opens with a sequence that is like lots of other contemporaneous Star Wars projects in the way it’s designed to make us think about other, earlier Star Wars stories. We get a ship attacking another ship, a forceful boarding of marauders while the nervous crew waits to repel the attack, a helmeted figure striding through the chaos of battle to grab his target by the throat and accusing him of treachery and misdirection. In the same way that The Mandalorian (in whose specific timeline within the larger Star Wars narrative Skeleton Crew is taking place) makes audiences think of earlier Star Wars characters like Boba Fett, Yoda, and Luke Skywalker via Din Djarin, Grogu, and a CGI de-aged Mark Hamill face, this opening is pure “beginning of A New Hope.” 

Yet after that opening — which also includes the betrayal by the aptly-named Brutus, a Shistavanen wolfman (one of my favorite aliens from the cantina scene) of the aforementioned helmeted figure whose identity is, I guess, supposed to be a secret but seems pretty obvious based on what we know of the casting and the diction/mannerisms of the actor behind the helmet — the premiere dives into a deeper and more far-reaching kind of nostalgia. When Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is introduced, he is, essentially, playing with his Star Wars action figures. There are no specifics, but the general notion of good vs. evil as espoused in the form of laser sword-wielding space wizards is as familiar to Wim as to kids all over our world. When he meets his friend, Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), while waiting for the school bus, they exchange a series of actions mimicked on playgrounds all over: two people dueling imaginary lightsabers, sounds and all. Here, the point isn’t to make viewers remember other Star Wars stories, it’s to make it clear that, in some form at least, those stories are familiar to the characters themselves. 

As the rest of the episode unfolds, with Wim eventually discovering a mysterious hatch in the woods and crossing paths with Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), reminiscent of both Han Solo in her attitude and Luke Skywalker in her desire for power converters, and her friend KB (Kyriana Kratter), the series establishes even more firmly in the kind of Jungian monomyth that lies at the core of Star Wars. Like Luke himself, Elliot (Henry Thomas) from E.T., and Bastian (Barret Oliver) from The Neverending Story, Wim is the product of a broken home, his mother deceased, his harried father caught up in the work of the vaguely sinister bureaucracy governing their society. Like those other protagonists, Wim yearns for something more than a life of predetermined civil service, for a titular “real adventure” out there beyond what he knows, like the Jedi characters he fantasizes about and draws on his little spaceworthy Etch-A-Sketch. Again, this characterization isn’t trying to remind us specifically of Luke watching a binary sunset, or Anakin (Jake Lloyd) wanting to visit every star in the sky, or Rey (Daisy Ridley) donning an old Rebel pilot helmet as she waits for her life to begin; it’s tapping into the deeper emotions and myths that animate the engine of Star Wars storytelling. 

“This Could Be A Real Adventure” perhaps takes a bit too long to get going, circling back to hit some of the same beats before the inciting incident occurs and the plot kicks into gear. But the time is nevertheless well spent, establishing its central characters and the general outlines of their homeworld, At Attin. All four of the core child actors are great, coming across as natural but not cringey. After lots of pre-release talk of the use of physical effects, sets, and props, much of the episode seems to be made using the Volume — but even there, it seems appropriate for the cloying, omnipresent world from which the kids are inadvertently escaping. All in all, this is a successful start for Skeleton Crew, not just because it taps into the aesthetics of crowd-pleasing kid-centric adventure movies of the ’80s or is reminiscent of earlier stories in a galaxy far, far away, but because it taps into the heart of what makes Star Wars great.  

New episodes of Skeleton Crew are released on Disney+ every Tuesday.