Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Review: The Young, Fresh Energy the Galaxy Desperately Needed

The Star Wars TV landscape has started to feel crowded in the half-decade since the galaxy far, far away made its jump to the small screen. We haven’t had a new Star Wars movie in five years, but there have been numerous TV projects hitting Disney+ every single year, widely ranging in quality from season to season. The relentless release schedule for these shows has made a once-timeless franchise feel tiresome, creating less and less excitement for each new show. Needless to say, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew faces an uphill battle out of the gate, needing to rise above the noise and quickly capture the attention of an exhausted fan base.

It’s a tough situation to be in, especially when Skeleton Crew doesn’t boast any major connections to other Star Wars stories, but that is perhaps this show’s greatest strength: It has the freedom to create something that feels new and fresh, while still holding on to the whimsical spirit that made Star Wars so great in the first place.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is a more family-friendly adventure than we’ve seen from the franchise’s TV fare to this point — but don’t mistake “family friendly” for “this is a show for kids.” There have been a lot of comparisons made to The Goonies and, while I don’t totally see them as one-to-one counterparts, the overall tone is easily the biggest similarity. Skeleton Crew features kids in most of its lead roles, but it’s just as much for the adults tuning in as it is for young fans the same ages as its stars.

From co-creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, Skeleton Crew occupies its own little corner of the Star Wars galaxy, and thrives with the opportunity to exist mostly by itself. The series follows four kids, who live on a seemingly mundane planet, as they discover a secret ship buried out in the woods. They accidentally power the vessel up and are sent on an adventure to far away, dangerous corners of the galaxy.

Near the beginning of their journey, the young group encounters a mysterious, potentially very powerful man named Jod Na (Jude Law). There’s clearly a lot more to him under the surface (his backstory emerges as one of the most interesting elements of the plot), and some of the kids are rightly skeptical, but circumstances deem their partnership necessary.

This is “Star Wars: Four Kids and a Scoundrel,” which is exactly the type of fun and breezy series that Star Wars has desperately needed. Skeleton Crew isn’t unpacking the history of Force users or taking audiences into the dark and deadly underbelly of bounty hunters. It’s an adventure of a lifetime for a group of kids who happen to get saddled with maybe the most charming jerk we’ve seen in Star Wars since Han Solo. It’s a recipe for a wonderful time, and everyone involved makes the most of the opportunity.

The show’s four young stars — Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, and Robert Timothy Smith — are all beyond delightful. It’s so impressive to see these kids not just perform well on their own, but to watch how effortless their chemistry with one another feels. The group fires on all cylinders when they’re on screen together, the way you’d expect to see the cast of a long-running sitcom go back and forth.

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It’s fun to watch their characters figure one another out on the fly, trying to deal with very kid-level issues while also making sense of this completely new world they’ve been thrust into. That youthful energy from the characters helps give the audience the energy and sense of wonder that we’ve been missing the last several years. By letting these fascinating, complicated, and very curious kids be our gateway into the story, Skeleton Crew tosses aside the cynicism of adulthood and fan culture, replicating that feeling of watching something like Star Wars for the very first time. Now, Skeleton Crew isn’t the same kind of revolutionary experience as George Lucas’s 1977 sci-fi classic, but it invokes some of the same feelings, which is still a huge win for the franchise.

Speaking of the original Star Wars, Skeleton Crew also does a great job of bringing back the old-school feel of the aliens inhabiting the more devious pockets of the galaxy. There’s so much puppetry and practical costuming happening in each of the three episodes that were made available for review. Watts and the creative team went out of their way to make Skeleton Crew feel like a place that could surprise you around every corner. Every bit character that pops up has a design that’s just different enough from anything you’ve seen before that it’s easy to take up a little more interest in them.

While Skeleton Crew does take a little longer than one might like for it to really get going, there’s no slowing the ride down once it starts. By the end of the two-episode premiere, you’ll have no problem getting hooked on the journey, even if you weren’t quite sold in the opening minutes.

With a fantastic cast and an absolute all-star lineup of directors behind the camera (The Daniels, David Lowery, Lee Isaac Chung, among others), Skeleton Crew sets itself apart as the most purely enjoyable small-screen adventure that Star Wars has embarked on. It doesn’t quite hit the highs of Star Wars: Andor, nor does it fill in the franchise gaps like Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Skeleton Crew is wise enough to distance itself from previous TV ventures. This is the kind of Star Wars series we should’ve been getting all along.

Rating: 4 out of 5

The first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew are now streaming on Disney+.