TV Review: ‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’ Episode 7 Puts Character First For The Better

Like the best penultimate chapters of a serialized story, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew‘s seventh episode, “We’re Gonna Be In So Much Trouble”, efficiently moves all its characters and plotlines into place for the imminent conclusion. In doing so, it resolves some of those plots and character arcs while leaving others for the big finale. To the credit of the episode (and the series’ sharp writing overall), as the series heads into its last episode, the biggest question left to be answered is less about what is going to happen next in the plot. Instead, it’s centered around what a particular character is going to do, and the way the answer will speak to the arc of that character. 

If the central plot of Skeleton Crew is “a group of kids get lost in space and need to get home”, then “We’re Gonna Be In So Much Trouble” resolves that plot early in its runtime, with the sleek, now armor-less Onyx Cinder dropping out of hyperspace by At Attin well before the end of the episode. Importantly, it arrives after Brutus’ (voice of Fred Tatasciore) pirate vessel, and thus, its juvenile crew is yet again in a place to impact the arc of Jod (Jude Law). 

With Brutus’ crew unable to pierce the toxic cloud Jod rightly recognizes as the barrier keeping At Attin safe and cut off from the rest of the galaxy, he comes the closest yet to being blown out the airlock (the Space Pirates version of walking the plank). Only the timely arrival of the Onyx Cinder gives him the opening he needs to not only survive, but ultimately, regain control of his crew (after the pirates capture the Cinder and the kids, in turn, grab Brutus in Chekhov’s Loading Bay Claw, allowing Jod to execute his former first mate and segue the crew’s greed and general affection for him into resuming his captaincy). This, in turn, leads to Jod turning heel to a greater degree than at any other point in the series. Re-donning his helmet from the prologue of episode 1 (thereby confirming that was Jod for anyone who didn’t recognize Law’s body language and delivery beneath the mask) and thus becoming more outwardly inhuman, Jod takes the kids hostage, all pretense of friendship or mentorship gone. 

Even after Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) takes advantage of the loose legality of the pirate code (really more guidelines than rules, after all) to bring SM-33 (voice of Nick Frost) to their side and escape from the pirates, Jod’s heel turn gets worse, as he stows away aboard the Onyx Cinder and emerges to threaten the kids and, pointedly, their families, at the point of the lightsaber he acquired from Tak Rennod’s lair in episode 5. This hits hard for Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), seeing the weapon of his heroes wielded against him. But by earlier showcasing the kids’ parents’ effort to break the barrier and get a message out — effort which included a bravura sequence in which each is stunned in turn by security droids as they hand off the communications MacGuffin like a demented game of football —  the episode does the work to make Jod’s threats hit harder.

Thus, by the end of the installment, the biggest question heading into the finale has to do with Jod. Is he the amoral pirate of “You’ve Got A Lot To Learn About Pirates” and “We’re Gonna Be In So Much Trouble” suggests him to be? Or is his late-season heel turn setting up an ultimate face-turn in the finale, establishing that, at heart, he’s more the person who made a point to try and comfort a homesick Wim; a scoundrel, but a Han Solo-esque scoundrel with a heart of gold. However Jod ultimately breaks, it’s a testament to the quality of the show that it’s the question around which it built its finale. 

New episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew air Tuesdays on Disney+.