Star Wars is not obliged to be fun – Andor is probably the best of the TV spinoffs, and that’s hardly any fun at all. But its dud movies and series tend to be the dour ones, because its core business is to be a silly stellar adventure for kids, parents and adults who still have a lively inner child. Fun should be the default, and now the franchise has hit upon the sort of show it should have made years ago. As everyone online who saw the trailer correctly observed, the youthful Skeleton Crew is basically The Goonies in space. It is excellent fun.
At the start, Skeleton Crew is a rarity in another way: it’s urban Star Wars! For a while there are no dunes, souks, settlements styled like frontier towns, bustling ports, gleaming black space stations or caves where a worm with a million teeth lies in wait. Instead we are among trams, skyscrapers and bridges across city rivers on the comfortably Earth-like home planet of Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), an ordinary prepubescent boy. Wim’s dad (Tunde Adebimpe) is too busy to curb his adventurous tendencies; this curiosity is almost ready to include girls, but the cool girls Wim knows are a bit scary. A familiar coming-of-age setup, then.
