Skeleton Crew Skeleton Crew 1.08 (SEASON FINALE!!!) - Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

This finale had some good moments and was generally well executed, but narratively, I don't really know how impactful it really was. The action was mostly solid, even if the visual concept of suburban warfare didn't land for me. I do admire that Jod remained the villain to the end, and that he did indeed possess some genuine Force sensitivity. The secret of the Supervisor being a droid was fine, but the showdown in the tower felt too protracted. And sure, Wim getting the lightsaber is a fair enough payoff, but wouldn't the real kicker have been if he pulled the lever using the Force? I also appreciated that there was long enough of a gap between KB's supposed death and later revealing her survival, rather than most of these split second fakeouts.

But gee, everything finished up in a hurry. I thought for sure the arrival of that Rebel Blockade Runner meant someone of significance would show up to reintegrate At Attin to the New Republic, and also hint at any future use for the planet and its valuable mint. It felt like the story just stopped rather than actually concluded. This was the shortest season finale of any series to date, and it certainly felt that way.

So while the kids of course had their grand adventure with respective character arcs, I'm left wondering if any of this really mattered in the grand scheme of the saga.

6/10

 

Will watch this tomorrow. Have managed to avoid spoilers

 

I will say this- for a brief moment, I wondered if it was going to be revealed the father had the force and he was going to flip the barrier switch.

 

If that's true, I really hope they release those deleted scenes in some fashion.

 

Jod talking about his master being hunted down by ‘them’ and ‘they’ made him watch when she was killed. Is the ‘they’ Inquisitors? Did Job become an inquisitor because he had no choice? Instead of being a zealot he focused on his own survival.

 

Could very well be plausible! Thought that as well because he is alive so it means they made him watch and then spared him… so probably took him with them but then he ended up with pirates? Was not a good inquisitor because well… let’s say it out loud… a lot of empty threats but not really prone to hurting innocents as far as we saw!
I want more backstory!

 

He is a survivor, I wouldn't be surprised if his way out of the inquisitorious was through the pirates. Out of the frying pan into the fire as they say. He seems like a guy who has pretty much had hope snuffed out at every turn, no wonder he's jaded.

 

Binged from the third episode all the way to the finale tonight. Helps when most of the episodes are around 25 minutes long.

 

Oh yes, and also, don’t think he had a nice childhood before he was found by the Jedi, he says he was “living in a hole” and it seemed like her finding him was the first good thing to happen only to then be destroyed shortly after… seems like he was found and trained a bit AFTER or shortly before order 66? Seems after to me…
But, about being a Jedi, he was an apprentice though, he had a master, so he may be a Jedi no more but… is an apprentice a Jedi? Sure is for me, a Jedi in the making but still a Jedi?
Jod will come through I am sure …

 

Wow, they actually stuck the landing. So proud of them.

(Make sure you let the executive suits out of the closet they were locked in during production so they couldn't sour it with their mandates)

Nice to see the Blade Wing's superlaser again too

 

Fern still needs to race Bonjj Phalfa.

 

Visually impressive, otherwise quite mediocre. Didn't feel like a finale. Whatever happened to Jod? Who arrived at the end on the Corvette ship, and why? The attempts to create tension were just bait and switch, that happened far too many times. Did anyone seriously believe KB was in any danger? Or any of the characters, really? Even SM-33 was "unexpectedly" fixed. There were really no consequences to any of it. The whole thing felt strictly by the numbers. Props to the show for being its own self-contained thing and not having some MCU-like cameo from the other Mandoverse stuff, but as its own thing, it felt weirdly unsatisfying by the end of it. Maybe less action and more closure and adding some more meaning to the whole thing? Meh.

Supervisor being a droid was disappointing. He also got destroyed way too easily and conveniently. "Droid running the city" has become a cliche at this point. Would have been more interesting if it was that old pirate captain from the hologram, who took over the planet in secret, or something like that. Kinda like what Jod was trying to do.

Overall, this show felt just hollow. It did very little with its characters, and what it did was just not that interesting and by the numbers. In retrospect, the whole "parents trying to find their kids" subplot was pointless. Their supervisor being a droid was not even a surprise to the parents, they knew all along. There was not really anything sinister or disturbing about At Attin, no dark secrets under the cover of that perfect utopia, as many had thought.

Also, if the supervisor knew about the Jedi being traitors, why do they keep making REPUBLIC credits and referring to themselves as a Republic world and expecting a Republic emissary? Jedi were declared traitors literally in the same speech as the Republic ceased to exist and was transformed into the Empire. The Empire also discontinued the Republic credits, and changed currency to the Imperial credits.

It did not feel like the show really expanded the mythos of Star Wars in any meaningful way. Again, the whole thing just felt weirdly hollow, it threw in a bunch of mystery boxes, half of them were not answered, and the answers to the other half were not satisfying or meaningful in the larger context of Star Wars.

 

That was a fun finale to end season 1 with potential season 2. I liked that Jod remains a bad guy in the end. The action was fun and liked seeing B-Wings again. Return of owl lady, nice. Good character momments with kids and their parents. So SM-33 will just love on At Attin? The end i have no problem with. We get sense that someone important is coming like Leia.

 

Fun! I enjoyed it well enough, it had some tense and funny moments (mainly with Wim's dad), and some visual masterstrokes (that pirate ship looked great on At Attin - War of the Worlds vibes), though I think it was definitely the weakest episode of the season.

The show had done a good job of avoiding dumb things, but then they went and had the X-wings shoot down a massive starship above a heavily-populated area as a means of protecting the heavily-populated area. It's just such a glaringly idiotic thing to do, and in that moment, the show veered into JJ land. And it was the first episode where the consequences of things got fluffed. Too many super dangerous situations with no harm done. I mean, did the speeder bikes really have to get shot at for ten minutes from a bunch of pirate ships above them? It just started to feel like Spy Kids in these moments. Too much ridiculous action.

As for the broader galactic picture, the main question I have is: what was this mint? The New Republic seems not to have been able to access it, and the Supervisor's last message about the Jedi was that they were traitors. So I assume it became an Imperial mint after the fall of the prequel era Republic, and then the New Republic never discovered it. So my guess is that the First Order, or proto-First Order, had access to it and controlled it, and that's how they were financing their plans and SKB and stuff like that. I suspect those questions were to be answered in subsequent seasons, but I think a season 2 is highly unlikely. Ancillary material for this one, I guess.

In any event, though I really enjoyed the show, and would like those questions answered, this felt like a stopping point. A conclusion to the story told by these characters. I don't see a good way to tell a story around those questions anway. The New Republic has now discovered the mint, will likely investigate to find out how it was being used, and then shut it down or repurpose it (jettisoning the authoritarian setup, of course) for the New Republic. So I don't know if there would be a great story in that, or anything more for these characters to do in that. Until they grow up.

Anyway, happy overall with a fun show. But they didn't stick the landing, IMO. It just didn't maintain the quality and sense of real danger and human stakes that the rest of the season did. The finale needed to be more than a conventional action setpiece, and it really didn't go beyond that.

The season was contending with Mando S1 and S2 for me, but the finale ultimately places it well below those two. So Andor, Mando S1 and S2, Skeleton Crew, and then the rest. Not much of a candidate for a rewatch, but I really enjoyed the time spent watching it.

The implication was Leia. That didn't need to be answered, IMO. I'm glad they didn't feel the need to tie that up with a bow.

ETA: In case I’m misunderstood, I enjoyed the finale a good bit. Just didn’t think it matched the quality of the rest of the season. Though finales are tough for me. Conclusions often require contrivances that are hard to hide unless you’ve crafted a perfect narrative. And so the contrivances were just more visible here than before. In a way it was almost inevitable that I’d enjoy this a little less than the rest. It’s a rare show that truly sticks the landing, and for me those shows almost become legendary. This one isn’t legendary, but very fun and well-made. Kudos to the showrunners for that.

 

When I was a kid, new Star Wars coming out was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. The release of “Episode 1” was amazing once it was explained to me because I knew that if there was an Episode 1 and an Episode 4, that there had to be an Episodes 2 and 3 coming eventually. But after the prequels had caught up to the original story I yearned for there to be new Star Wars on the horizon again. My dad told me that the story had already finished. The good guys had already won and there would be no one left for them to fight. I understood the narrative importance of not undoing that victory just to make a sequel, but that still felt like a massive cop out as a reason not to make any new Star Wars content. It’s a big galaxy, full of scum and villainy. There was no way all the interesting potential storylines had been exhausted with the death of Palpatine. So I decided to try and come up with an idea myself to prove that it was possible. My first thought was that the whole galaxy does not need to be in danger. 1 planet is certainly large enough stakes to get the viewer invested in a story as long as you introduce characters who live there to care about. It’s easy to conceptualize a villain in the aftermath of Endor that has enough power to oppress a planet, so the next hurdle is why doesn’t the New Republic just flex their muscles and stomp them? You can invent any number of BS reasons why they won’t or can’t in this situation, but that kind of idea was deeply unsatisfying to me. So that kind of results in answering its own question. If the solution is they do come in and do their job and eliminate the tyranny at first chance, then that has to be end of the story, and the plot has to be about the journey to get there, where we get the big payoff where we can call on our friends to save the day after struggling in the dark on our own. It was so obvious to me as a 12 year-old that a story like this would hit in Star Wars, the one issue I could acknowledge was that it might seem a little silly to ship a smaller pirate adventure as Episode 7 when the first 6 where all so grandiose, but that’s just a marketing problem that doesn’t reflect anything about the quality of the content. After all, why couldn’t Star Wars do a TV show if you wanted expectations to be more appropriate? On top of all that, when they finally announced they were going to do a sequel trilogy with a real, official 7,8, and 9, the one thing I wanted with no idea what the overarching plot-line was going to be was finally a live action B-wing combat sequence. Every other Rebel fighter had at least 1 moment, as brief as the Y-wing’s might be, but technological limitations had robbed us of the B-wing in its introduction, and we simply hadn’t got a second chance at live action content set post Endor for 30 years since. Alas, even in this regard the ST was a complete disappointment as the New Republic navy was shockingly absent in the entire trilogy, and their beneficiaries the Resistance only operated the most nostalgic of fighters. Even JJs slight tease with Endor 2 was wasted by copying the B-wings role of showing up to do nothing from Endor 1. I typed all of this so that you would understand, when that barrier went down and New Republic B-wings swooped in to free the planet from the grip of pirates in the year 2025, a single tear rolled down my cheek at witnessing this glorious moment. This show was literally the post-Endor content that I’ve always wanted.

 

You don’t even need a threatened planet to make a good Star Wars story. It can be a threatened neighborhood, or family, or group of friends, or even just one person. And it doesn’t even need to be a singular villain doing the threatening. Could be a tough environment, a complicated world, what have you. As long as you make the questions the character(s) are facing big ones, existential on either a philosophical or physical level or both, they can achieve that character of grand myth. That’s what I hope for from The Dawn of the Jedi. And I sort of wished Skeleton Crew didn’t have to threaten the entirety of At Attin to tell this story. That bit felt the most contrived. It could’ve just been Jod putting the kids’ lives, and that of their families, in peril, and I think that would’ve been more than enough. As long as the revelation of the Great Work being a big lie created the existential stakes that are helpful in giving Star Wars the grandeur we expect from it, that would’ve been enough to make it a proper Star War.

ETA: One thing I’ll always be grateful to this show for was portraying the New Republic as the “real good guys.” Finally, Lucasfilm went there. I just wish they didn’t have the New Republic X-Wings threaten everyone on At Attin’s life by shooting down a massive ship above their city. But that was just clunky action storytelling, and not a commentary on the New Republic…

 

Thought it was a good finale - but once again this show suffers from some of the episodes being way too short.

Really thought Jod would go down with his plunder similar to Long John Silver

Would of been good to see how the folk of At Attin responded to finding out theyve been hidden for years and years but each to their own.

Not sure if a second season is plausible due to this being shot in 21/22 and the kids being a lot older now - unless a big time jump

 

yup, this is exactly what I said, after finishing it.

Agree with the rest of your post, also. A very fun/at times fantastic show, that made me laugh more than any other SW thing has, and good characterisation.
But the finale, could have landed a lot better than it did (no pun intended)

 

I acknowledge that shooting down the pirate frigate over the city was not the best choice. However, the frigate was firing on the city on the city any way. Maybe they did it just Wim didn't have to take his assessment.

 

Would’ve been a cool detail to have the New Republic demonstrate some kind of police action for the situation. For example, bring in a large craft, like the one from Andor, that can tractor beam the pirate ship and hold it. Or perhaps X-wings surrounding the pirate shift after disabling the hubs, and doing a sort of collection tractor hold on it. Something interesting like that which both doesn’t endanger the entire city and shows some tech progress by the New Republic, suited to their policing role. Missed opportunity, IMO. And it really hurt my enjoyment of the denouement.

 

Hmmm... this episode felt reflective of the series as a whole for me. Some good moments, but ultimately inconsequential, creatively safe (IMO) and probably what I would have imagined Disney Star Wars to be back when Lucas sold it. I suspect it won't move the dial in terms of wider audience appeal/engagement.... but people won't hate it. It is of a consistent standard, and ultimately a solid show (which is where maybe Lucasfilm were coming from?)... and I'm thankful that it was watchable, even if I though it somewhat predictable/pedestrian. 6/10.

 

It means they expect another season to expando the lore and give more answers.

I got the feeling that was exactly what Disney wanted from this series.

 

Phenomenal series. Great job Disney. This was a top-tier show alongside Andor. I know it hasn’t been doing great numbers so far with audience size, but I have a feeling it might be a slow-burn sleeper that blows up a year from now with word of mouth. I sincerely hope we see more of Jude Law’s Jod in some form or fashion. Overall I give the series a 9/10

Kole’s Show Ratings
Andor: 9/10
Skeleton crew: 8.5/10
Mandalorian: 7.5/10
Ahsoka: 7.5/10
Acolyte: 5.5/10
Boba Fett: 3/10 (not counting the excellent but random Mando episodes thrown in the middle)

 

The pirate ship was leaving, did the NR have a choice? What could they have done differently given the heat of the moment?