Main cast: Jude Law (Jod Na Nawood), Ravi Cabot-Conyers (Wim), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Fern), Kyriana Kratter (KB), Robert Timothy Smith (Neel), Nick Frost (SM-33), Kerry Condon (Fara), Tunde Adebimpe (Wendle), and Alia Shawkat (Kh’ymm)
Director: Jon Watts
The Real Good Guys concludes this show, and really, if the show had stuck to the pacing in this episode, I would have enjoyed the whole thing so much more.
This episode cements this show as yet another one of those Disney+ shows that suffer from serious pacing issues. A lot of things happen in this episode, things that could have been spaced out better over the last few episodes.
If anything, this episode only demonstrates that a few of the earlier episodes could have been cut out as those episodes, in hindsight, were just padding that ended up adding little to the overall arc of the story.
In this one, Jod Na Nawood finally gets the chance to do this thing, and I give this one to the people behind this show: they hadn’t turned him into some woobie bad guy that turned out to be the good guy all along type like I expected them to. Still, he reveals some woe is me back story here, so I have a suspicion that they have such plans for the second season—a second season that is unlikely to happen as barely anyone is watching this show.
This leads me to my next question: why am I getting his backstory now, in the finale of the first season? It’s not like they have no room because the kids needed character development. Those kids have zero of such, remaining one-note archetypes, and if anything, the kids are the weakest link of the show. This series appear to be scripted by people that have zero idea of what makes kids what they are, and as such, the kiddy characters come off as adults trying way too hard to appear child-like, and the result alternates between being patronizing to kids and “Hello, fellow kids!”
Oh yes, the plot. So, Ja Nut Deadwood gets to enact his plan to bring the pirates in, the kids try to warn the adults, and the adults don’t believe these kids until it’s too late, and all of a sudden, the good guys swoop in from nowhere to save the day, and that’s it.
Yes, that’s another classic Disney+ show in action—lazy writing, complete with ass-pull developments for climactic moments.
Anyway, this episode brings down the curtains on this season and it ranks a resounding “Who cares?” on my oogie-meter. As I’ve mentioned, many things happen here and oh my, there are bright lights and pew-pew stuff and some explosions and the kids screaming and screaming but… meh. It’s not like I’ve never seen anything like these done in a far more exciting manner.
That aside, the episode falls apart completely if I paused to think over what had happened, so all the bright lights and CGI done on a budget are just jingling keys designed to distract me from the fact that the Star Wars ride has long run out of gas because everyone involved in it just doesn’t have it to put together anything fun and exciting anymore.
So, yes, Stars Wars: Skeleton Crew is better than the last few Star Wars offering, but it’s still a meh show so… who cares? This show came, this show went, and the world can barely muster a shrug.
Still, that underage elephant thing is going to live forever in the perverted fan fictions and artworks of PDF files that live on Bluesky and whatever, so I guess that is one way this show has left an impact on pop culture.
