Star Wars: Skeleton Crew: You Have a Lot to Learn About Pirates

December 26, 2024 1:01 PM - Season 1, Episode 5

The crew tries to track down the coordinates of At Attin, following a lead to a legendary pirate's den, while the children's parents slowly realize that the government will not help them.
posted by suelac (9 comments total)

The bizarre stuff with the spa played oddly with the sudden turn to violence, when the children realized that Jod really isn't a good guy.

I kind of loved how Jod spouting the Jedi dogma about attachments and so forth show how entirely hollow it actually is.

And I think it's clear now that he's not some random Force user who didn't get formal training: he either studied with a trained Jedi, or was at the Temple at some point. Maybe he's a washout? According to Legends, young trainees who didn't get picked for knight training by 13 went into the Service Corps to be explorers, agricultural specialists, or medics. Maybe he did that, and that's how he survived the Purge?

Anyway, I did enjoy that!
posted by suelac at 1:05 PM on December 26

I loved this episode. Just when you think they might be teasing a redemption arc for Jod, he gives emotionally incompetent advice to Wim, drowns their pursuers in acid and fully takes the mask off by threatening Fern. (Not precluding a redemption arc later, but it sure isn't happening now.)

The attachment talk was an interesting bit of character insight. That plus Wim's lightsaber misfire definitely had me thinking about the wisdom of Jedi choices.
posted by EvaDestruction at 2:42 PM on December 26 [2 favorites]

Fun episode. Got to love a plot-driving pit of acid
posted by eustatic at 4:56 PM on December 26 [2 favorites]

also, we haven't yet got a lot of star wars' giant creatures in the mix, like with Mando and Bad Batch, but in this series, we got a giant helpful squidotter guy with a Cthulhu name? good choices. thank you, star wars.

probably the creature budget is going into the pirates, Sm33, and neel and AugraOwlCat which, hooray. nice to get a star wars giant creature this ep, too
posted by eustatic at 6:38 PM on December 26 [2 favorites]

probably the creature budget is going into the pirates, Sm33 and neel

Sm33 is surprisingly a practical puppet with some cgi to remove the puppeteer and punch-up the effect. There’s more cgi for the space-mouse that lives in his eye socket than for Sm33 himself. Similarly Neel is a performer in a suit but most of the head is animatronic.
posted by nathan_teske at 7:45 PM on December 26 [1 favorite]

With Jod only ever using the same basic push/pull trick with his gloved hand as his one "Jedi power", I'm thinking he's actually just got a cybernetic hand with some sort of repulsor in it and he isn't a Force-user at all. Especially after they went through all the trouble of showing the anti-gravity spike trap as an example of how that would work.
posted by haileris23 at 11:02 PM on December 26 [1 favorite]

With Jod only ever using the same basic push/pull trick with his gloved hand as his one "Jedi power", I'm thinking he's actually just got a cybernetic hand with some sort of repulsor in it and he isn't a Force-user at all.

As seen in Cracken's Rebel Field Guide
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:31 AM on December 27 [1 favorite]

SM33. Smee. Oh my god. I just got that.

Jod is in the middle of a Long John Silver arc. Bad, but not all bad. He didn't go ahead and kill Fern, after all, and he's going to rescue the kids, for sure.
posted by surlyben at 3:57 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

Jod flipped from bro to sleemo to hero to zero like four times this episode, great stuff, all action, the actor is putting in some good work
posted by eustatic at 7:03 PM on December 27