The penultimate episode of “Skeleton Crew” revealed another aspect of At Attin and its connection with Tak Rennod and the Onyx Cinder. The revelation about the planet is coupled with a bittersweet feeling that the adventure is coming to an end.
We see this with Wim, and as I have mentioned in several reviews before, we live vicariously through the characters of Wim, Neel, Fern, and KB. Like Wim and his friends, we don’t want the adventure to end. We do not want things to go back to the way they were. We want more. We want to see more of what is out there and meet new people along the way.
This episode made me feel the same way. It was a fun roller coaster ride that I wanted to continue without an end. But I have to tell my 10-year-old self that sometimes, all adventures have to come to an end.
However, Wim somewhat gets his wish in the form of a tractor beam pulling the Onyx Cinder inside the pirate ship commandeered by Captain Brutus. Little does the Skeleton Crew know that Captain Brutus is trying to get through the barrier that makes At Attin resemble a toxic planet. After a pirate tries flying into the planet only to be blown up, Jod deduces that the Onyx Cinder is the key to getting into the planet, prompting the ship to be pulled into a tractor beam.
When the Onyx Cinder is docked at the pirate ship, Brutus tries to get aboard but KB uses her ingenuity to trap the pirate captain with the ship’s clamp. Jod takes the opportunity to kill Brutus and become Captain Silvo again and has the Skeleton Crew captured by the pirates.
While Jod and the pirates try to figure out how to rip out whatever helps the Onyx Cinder bypass the barrier to At Attin, the message beacon sent out by the parents of the Skeleton Crew gets through the barrier and the holograms of the parents are shown pleading for the kids to come home and showing their love for them. Wim’s father’s hologram advises that a Republic Emissary would be needed to take them home but to not tell anyone else where they are from.
With the help of the pirate droid SM-33, the Skeleton Crew escapes Jod and the pirates on the Onyx Cinder. When the crew heads for At Attin, the pirates use their starfighters to chase after them but they are blown out of the barrier. SM-33 reveals that the Onyx Cinder is not blown because if was originally a ship from the At Attin’s mint.
When the crew finally reaches At Attin, the celebration is cut short when Jod is revealed to be on the ship. When SM-33 tries to attack the pirate, his head gets severed by the pirate’s newly acquired lightsaber. He orders the kids to get on the ground and put their heads down and bullies them as he tries to contact the pirate frigate.
This scene reminds me of an interview that Jod’s actor, Jude Law, did with Entertainment Weekly. In the interview, he talked about how Jod never had a childhood and that he looks at the kids of the Skeleton Crew with some disdain.
“And it’s kind of interesting, but a very revealing page in his past, I would say is that he’s not someone who’s had a childhood,” Law said in the Entertainment Weekly interview. “He’s someone who’s kind of had his childhood snatched away from him, and it’s why he looks at the kids sort of with disdain. They’re just small adults. Why don’t they understand they’ve got to get on and survive? And why are they so inexperienced? He has no real concept of innocence.”
Jod is clearly a jaded man who only wants the treasure for himself since he has never been fulfilled like the kids have. In this scene, I realized that the Skeleton Crew has what Jod does not: family and friends. Unlike Jod, the kids are fulfilled through their family and their friendship for each other, and that is something that Jod never had, and it is probably the reason why he has been so hungry all those years. Whether he was a Jedi survivor or a random Force user, Jod Na Nawood’s real treasure is not gold; it is having a fulfilled life. Something he had a sense of when he was with the Skeleton Crew, but he threw it away for greed.
In the words of Qui-Gon Jinn, it is Jod’s greed that is his powerful ally. We see this when he reaches the vault and cackles as he carries the dataries. His greed also causes him to threaten the kids by telling them that he will carve their parents with his lightsaber.
At the end of the episode, Jod makes good on his threat when the reunion between the kids and their parents is cut short as he walks toward them with his ignited lightsaber.
Jod’s origin story has yet to be told, but with his Force-sensitive abilities and the way he handles a lightsaber, it is still possible that he might have been a Jedi since he seems to be the age of someone who lived during the Clone Wars. Hopefully, we will get more insight into who he was in the past, or perhaps it will remain open to speculation.
I am also wondering who the Supervisor is. We finally got to hear his voice on the intercom of the planet when the Onyx Cinder landed on At Attin. Could he be Tak Rennod himself or connected to him somehow?
“Skeleton Crew” is now streaming on Disney +.
