A “forgotten temple” is anything but…

Skeleton Crew arrives after the excellent and outrageously cancelled The Acolyte. It is therefore hard to watch a new show and care because the expectation is that it’s likely to be cancelled pretty quickly regardless of quality or what it does – especially if it is diverse.

Which is a shame for many reasons and not least of these is that Skeleton Crew is good fun. It is firmly grounded in 1980s adventure movies with very strong nods to The Goonies, the animated Treasure Planet, The Explorers and (h/t Matt Sylvester) Flight of the Navigator to name just a few.  Even down to a skeletal remains of a former crew member whose head tips over when looked at, the references are loud and clear and brilliant fun for those among us who are old (or old enough to remember those movie reference points).

For those who are younger and for whom a moving skeleton scaring a bunch of kids is brand new, the show offers a rich set of characters who feel very much themselves from the beginning without being too cliched. It helps that the show can also layer in monsters, weird aliens, spaceships and Star Wars lore.

Like the recent Lego outing ‘Remake the Galaxy’, the first among equals of the piece dreams of Jedi as heroes and wants nothing more than to encounter one, as if they’re the Istari of the Star Wars universe and he’s a hobbit, which in many real senses is a good analogue for the plot.

The tone here, which includes horror, humour, action and family conflict, is handled really well and captures that sense of messiness in something like The Goonies. It is something you rarely see these days when kids movies are extremely focused, not messy at all and generally all threats are clearly signposted, hyper-realised and with extremely clean palettes.

The grunge here is almost palpable and deeply welcome as a result because most kids understand grunge through lived experience in a way that they’ll never live the sanitised cleanliness of a Pixar or DreamWorks movie.

The stakes for the kids are fairly clear after these first two episodes but the prologue set up a mystery they’ve not yet properly encountered (at least from their point of view) so there’s definitely more to come.

Of the adult leads Nick Frost stands out as the voice actor for SM-33 (get it?), the peg-legged first mate the kids encounter. His script is funny and he delivers it with excellent characterisation. I could watch an entire series with just him.

Jude Law doesn’t really feature in these first two episodes but the little screen time he does get suggests something complicated. It will be fun to see where that heads.

Verdict: Skeleton Crew is off to a strong start – with lots of potential – and I’m looking forward to the next instalment.

8/10 peg legged droids

Stewart Hotston