Star Wars: Skeleton Crew: Can’t Say I Remember No At Attin

December 18, 2024 6:01 AM - Season 1, Episode 4

Our heroes face a surprise in a familiar setting.
posted by 1970s Antihero (13 comments total)

I'll admit, I kind thought it was a bit silly that the planet they visited was called At-Ackin or what not - but the similarity definitely creates the idea that these planets were colonized for a specific purpose or as a great ... work. My only other big complaint was how the episode was shot, a lot of backlight that made the faces of the adults (usually) hard to see. Maybe that was on purpose, though, to make them more indistinct and less readable, more scary or what not. There was otherwise cool lighting used elsewhere in the episode.

I thought it was interesting seeing the mishmash of off world things on this AA planet, be it the mud trooper helmets (see Solo) to the eopies, which previously had generally been something we'd seen on Tatooine (granted, my memory could be off on that - I could see the Clone Wars dropping them off in other places). Some of the weapons, such as the tuning fork style weapon, were reminiscent of the type of weapon carried by Boba Fett in the Holiday Special and of course, Din Djarin in the Mandalorian.

I'll also confess, it got kind of scary when SM-33 went off the rails right there near the end. I may need to be within arm clutching distance of my six year old when that scene comes up during a family watch.

I wonder if the original captain also went through Kim (Owlcat) to find this planet or found it another way. We definitely got One Eyed Willie (Goonies) vibes from SM-33's story of how the captain essentially killed off his crew to keep the secret of the treasure planet...secret. Though, I think the captain in Treasure Island essentially did the same through the passing of the spot or something? One must wonder if SM-33 was the one who plunged that dagger into the skeleton on the ship or not.

I'm struggling with Neel in a practical sense. Since his trunk and shape of his face tends to hide his mouth most of the time, it feels like he's just a static puppet head with a voice piped in after the fact. It helps that the actor seems to do a pretty good job with the VA and body movements, but it is a distraction for me, at least, especially during his long conversation this episode with the warrior parkour girl.

My assumption is that next episode, Fern or someone, just decides to go to one of the other planets to see if the hyperspace address for home is still intact on the sister planets.
posted by Atreides at 7:01 AM on December 18, 2024 [3 favorites]

Parkour Planet!

Limb from Limb!
posted by eustatic at 10:05 AM on December 18, 2024 [1 favorite]

Maybe, like Max Rebo, Neil needs music to properly express himself.

Could the big conical thing hanging from the ceiling of the supervisor's room a computer?
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 4:15 PM on December 18, 2024 [1 favorite]

I was thinking, oh darn you don't have At Attin's galactic coordinates, but you have what, _five_ other possible supervisor towers that might have the coordinates that SM-33 _didn't_ destroy?
posted by Kyol at 7:23 PM on December 18, 2024 [4 favorites]

Could the big conical thing hanging from the ceiling of the supervisor's room a computer?

Could the cake, in fact, be a lie?

And Neel really shone this ep. Give peace a chance, scruffy survivors fighting a pointless war! Let this be your last battlefield, to coin a phrase.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:27 PM on December 18, 2024 [2 favorites]

Also, if all the other AA planets got toasted, I wonder what made At Attin different.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:29 PM on December 18, 2024 [1 favorite]

This was a fun episode. It had a real Star Trek planet-of-the-week feel, where the heroic outsiders show the warlike inhabitants the error of their ways, but handled deftly.

My son remains gripped by the series, and so am I. The first episode, in a weird way, kind of modulated my expectations. I thought it would be more like an eighties kids’ film than it’s turned out to be. There’s a freshness to the slightly weird hodgepodge of influences that have gone into making this Star War.
posted by Kattullus at 1:57 AM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

I keep waiting for Disney to genuinely wrestle with the whole "child soldiers" thing inherent to so much Star Wars and they keep coming so tantalizingly close to doing so....
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 12:39 PM on December 19, 2024 [6 favorites]

They did it for all of about five minutes in Ahsoka, and that's probably the only five minutes of Ahsoka I think about regularly.
posted by Kattullus at 1:04 PM on December 19, 2024 [5 favorites]

I had the same thought during a rewatch that didn't pluck my brain the first time around. "Wait, wait, our kids from At-Attin are being recruited forcibly conscripted into this gang as child soldiers?!" On top of that, the leader of the gang is throwing them out front as bait/expendable.

It would have been pretty wild if Neel could have said something along the lines of, "You're a kid, like me, you shouldn't be fighting wars."
posted by Atreides at 2:25 PM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

Personally, I'm much happier with all that as the obvious subtext, so we can have better character dialogue, and thus, better characters
posted by eustatic at 6:02 PM on December 19, 2024 [5 favorites]

As an adult, I was a little underwhelmed by the writing in this episode, but I do think they're doing a good job overall pitching this at a level that's understandable and enjoyable across ages. The kids really sold the tension of going out on the raid, and the confrontation with SM-33 in the tower had heft - it felt scary and risky to see Fern undone by her own cleverness like that.
posted by EvaDestruction at 2:41 PM on December 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

I thought they were going to play up the distinction that he never said he didn't remember, just that he can't say that he remembers.
posted by RobotHero at 12:15 PM on January 26 [1 favorite]