Four kids from a boring suburban planet find an abandoned spaceship in the woods behind their house. Within an hour they’re lost somewhere across the galaxy with a pirate who may or may not be lying about everything.
That’s Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, and it’s the strangest thing Disney+ has done with the franchise. Not because it’s dark. Because it isn’t.
The 2020s quietly became the decade of the space opera
Star Trek isn’t the machine it was a few years back, when Picard, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy and Discovery were all running at once. The genre didn’t slow down, though. It just moved addresses.
Apple TV has Foundation, its ambitious swing at replacing The Expanse, plus For All Mankind and the spinoff Star City. And then there’s Netflix, where Stranger Things spent five seasons proving that space opera wasn’t the only sci-fi subgenre having a moment. Horror, small-town mystery, nostalgic coming-of-age dramedy, sci-fi fantasy, all in one blender. It worked everywhere on earth.
Everyone went looking for the next one
Stranger Things got its own animated spinoff, Tales from ’85, and that did nothing to stop the hunt. Netflix put up I Am Not Okay With This, Locke & Key and Wednesday as candidates. HBO Max had IT: Welcome to Derry.
The one that actually landed came from the least likely place: the Star Wars universe, on Disney+, in 2024.
Skeleton Crew is set shortly after the defeat of the Empire. The four kids come from the planet At Attin, the ship they find takes them somewhere they very much did not plan to go, and Jude Law plays Joe Na Nawood, a pirate with the Force and an agenda. They hit real danger on the way home. But the show stays light, which is a hard turn away from where Disney's other Star Wars series have been living.
A photocopy of a photocopy that somehow isn’t
Here’s the loop. Stranger Things exists because its creators grew up on the original Star Wars trilogy. Skeleton Crew is heavily influenced by Stranger Things. By rights this should be a fourth-generation dub of a thing you already own.
It isn’t, and the reason is the kids. They’re believable. Their problems are recognizable, alien planet or not, and you’ll catch pieces of your younger self in them. That’s harder to pull off than it looks and most attempts don’t get there.
Worth noting how novel this is for the franchise. The original movies were always beloved by young viewers, and yet Star Wars has almost never handed the story to actual children. The closest it came before this was young Anakin sharing protagonist duty in The Phantom Menace, and everybody watching already knew where that ended. Sad from frame one.
Amblin, but interstellar
Skeleton Crew season 1 plays like an Amblin movie that wandered into a galaxy far, far away. Take the kid-adventure engine of Explorers or The Goonies, drop it into deep space, let it run.
The Expanse half comes from the shape of the thing. Planet to planet, jump to jump. Prime Video’s SA Corey adaptation is far darker and carries much heavier thematic freight, and this show doesn’t pretend otherwise. But the sense of scale rhymes.
What holds it together is the split: the small-scale character work and the camaraderie come from Stranger Things, the intergalactic scope comes from The Expanse. On paper those two don’t belong at the same table. Eight episodes later, you won’t be able to picture them apart.
[…] Disney has spent the last stretch of years handing its bad guys reasons. Syndrome had a grudge. Doris had a purpose. Scar got a whole backstory in Mufasa arguing that his cruelty was manufactured by how he was raised. The moral gray area is the house style now, at Disney and across the industry. […]