At Planets

Last night's new Skeleton Crew was fine, I suppose. It mostly felt like filler, which is odd considering it was directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writers and directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is their follow-up to that awards darling? Well, okay. It was written, once again, like most episodes of the series, by Christopher Ford and John Watts.

The crew find themselves on a ruined duplicate of their homeworld, At Attin, called At Achrann. Immediately I thought, here's a budget minded episode. Sure enough, most of the sets from the first episode are reused here. Gangs, constantly at war, control this world and their costumes are all cobbled together presumably from whatever was lying around the Lucasfilm wardrobe department.

The show continues to not quite succeed at making the kids into Disney's Stranger Things crew. I wish they'd have let go of that idea early in development and reduced the number of children to two. At this point, Wim, supposedly the lead, feels totally superfluous. The kids should've just been Fern and Neel. KB is obviously meant to be the Spock but there's no time to give her the nuance a Spock character needs. They could've just made Fern a little more compulsively logical or dumped that whole aspect of the group entirely.

Now the kids are slightly more reluctant to kill people though they still seem oddly attracted to violence. Maybe it's because I've spent so much time around Japanese children (I've been working in Japan for the past four and a half years) who generally aren't as violent as American children. Still, there's something oddly forced about how into guns the kids are. It reminds me of the really odd moment at the end of the Obi-Wan series when Obi-Wan gave Leia a holster. It's like executives at Disney had a conference that concluded with the idea that kids love guns, no-one knows why, but every show should be stuffed wherever possible with moments of kids expressing their affection for weaponry. I mean, sure, I liked to play with toy guns when I was a kid and I still like violent video games now but the behaviour exhibited by these kids feels alien to me.

Neel's relationship with the girl soldier was cute and I liked the moment where he tried to describe Slap Ball. But the arc ended with one of those moments that often seem to come on Disney Star Wars shows where I know how the scene is going to end from the beginning. As soon as it started, I knew she was going to kiss Neel. At that moment, their whole little arc felt like something that came from a TV writing handbook.

I think Wim's question about the gang war being between children and adults was meant to be a reference to the episode of Star Trek called "Miri", which again shows the problem of trying to do Stranger Things without the ability to use actual pop cultural references. We would know why a kid in the real world would make that connexion but the only way we can get anything from Wim's observation is to see the show through a slightly detached, postmodern lens. It's one of those things that keeps the show from feeling organic and unlike an algorithm produced it.

Skeleton Crew is available on Disney+.