Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Star Wars goes all Amblin in the Goonies-like Skeleton Crew.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew - Season 1
All debate around the future of Star Wars will have to wait—Skeleton Crew is not a new hope. It could never be. It wasn’t even a case of adjusting expectations, since it’s delivered precisely on what was promised: The Goonies in space. And you can’t really coax back people who’ve turned on a franchise for becoming nothing but cheap consumerism and nostalgia by wiggling in front of their faces a show that’s taken the setting of one classic ’80s movie (it’s post-Return of the Jedi, much like The Mandalorian) and shoved it into the plot of another.
Yet, Skeleton Crew will work a treat for the still-faithful. Its creators are Jon Watts and Christopher Ford—the former directed the most recent Spider-Man trilogy, the latter had a screenwriting credit on Spider-Man: Homecoming. These are films I’d argue display a real knack for delivering cynical franchise material (especially if we’re talking a certain set of third-instalment cameos), with such a force of sincerity that it’s hard to genuinely resent them.
And that’s pretty much how the first episode of Skeleton Crew unfolds. A quartet of kids—the dreamer (Ravi Cabot-Conyers’s Wim), the comedic relief (Robert Timothy Smith’s Neel, who’s a cute elephantine alien species), the tough cookie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s Fern), and the tech whizz (Kyriana Kratter’s KB)—discover a buried spaceship that sends them shooting off to places unknown. There, they encounter pirates. There are stories about cannibals, dusty skeletons, and a peg-legged droid (Nick Frost’s SM-33).
Their home planet is American suburbia, Star Wars-style, with their intergalactic boxes of cereal, intergalactic school bus, and intergalactic shining of flashlights through tall glass. Stranger Things ends next year, after all, and something needs to fill the Amblin void.
The whole pint-sized quartet is sweet, and infectiously enthusiastic, and there’s something oddly refreshing about seeing the world of Star Wars at the same eye level as we all (most likely) experienced it for the first time. Wim is enthralled by tales of Jedi heroics, and there’s an unfolding mystery about their home planet At Attin, a hint of isolationism, that nicely explains why these stories would feel especially fantastical and exotic to these kids, as they play imaginary lightsabers out in their cul-de-sac.
And it all really kicks up a notch once Jude Law walks into view. He’s had a hell of a run in recent years—Vox Lux (2018), The Nest (2020), and Firebrand (2024)—when it comes to playing unseemly and borderline repulsive men. And he’s taken that sense of ambiguity, mixed it in with that A-lister charm, and given us an antihero in Jod Na Nawood who carries a genuine air of mystery about him. He’s a pirate, it seems, yet also a Force user. A former Jedi? Something darker?
It’s in episode three—the second directed by The Green Knight’s David Lowery, who conjures simple but effective images—that Skeleton Crew really starts to get promising. A weird owl appears. It’s Goonies-esque, but not Goonies regurgitated. The current catchphrase of Star Wars fans has, of late, become “not everything can be Andor”. That’s true here. But, also, not everything should be Andor. And there is an open and welcome space for stories like Skeleton Crew—the ones that might seem small in scale, but big in heart.
