Jod Na Nawood is not a nice person. Considering his occupation, the outer-space equivalent of De Niro and Pesci hijacking trucks in GoodFellas, maybe that should have been obvious. But this is the Star Wars Galaxy, where you can personally slaughter younglings and blow up entire planets but still get a cozy fireside ghost appearance once you die. We’ve been taught to forgive much worse. We’ve also been taught, via Han Solo, that preposterously handsome and charming lawbreakers are heroes at heart more often than not.
Well, Jod appears to fall firmly in the “not” category. Though his charisma and fast-talking power him through the beginning of the episode, as he repeatedly avoids being airlocked while Captain Brutus and his men try to penetrate At Attin’s Barrier, that’s not what actually gets him to his destination. To do that, he shoots the helpless Brutus to death at point blank range, beheads SM-33 with a lightsaber, bullies and mocks four frightened children, and threatens to kill their parents if they talk. That last bit is textbook child abuser stuff, and Skeleton Crew is having Jude Law say it to a little blue elephant boy.
This unexpected display of guts is all the more surprising given Skeleton Crew’s limitations, which are still very much in effect. Before this rewardingly nasty stretch, this episode’s script, by series creators Christopher Ford and Jon Watts, relies heavily on the kind of “kid in a kid’s adventure movie” dialogue that marred the earliest episodes.
“It was a really fun adventure,” Neel says of their journey. “Half the time I was about to die, but that’s what a real adventure is like.” I’m not sure little kids would be quite so sanguine about having their lives threatened by assorted murderers and getting in seven or eight car crashes in a few days, as these ones have. Little kids in a TV show, sure, but it’d be nice if Ford and Watts at least pretended to be constructing some kind of actual reality here. More than that, though, it’s just not a very interesting or original sentiment. Same goes for Wim’s whine that “Once we get back, everything goes back to the way it was.” Just have him say “It’s our time down here” like Sean Astin in The Goonies and have done with it.
The point behind both boys’ laments is that their time in space is drawing to a close. They’ve made it back to At Attin, and with SM-33’s help they can presumably fly back through the dangerous Barrier the way his old captain did the first time.
The kids’ problem is that Jod and his frigate full of buccaneers got their first, and he’s realized the same thing — the ship probably has unique capabilities that enable it to reach the planet. Indeed, it turns out it’s a ship from At Attin’s Mint, so the giant bug zappers that blow up vessels attempting to reenter the planet’s orbit won’t zap it. Though the kids cause some trouble by having SM-33 sock him right in his cool space-pirate helmet, Jod comes to, decapitates the droid, pilots the ship down, and poses as a Republic Emissary in order to enter the mint. (The kids are too scared of him by now to alert anyone that he’s a pirate.)
The Mint itself is located deep underground, reached by one of those giant subterranean elevator platforms you see in video games a lot. The first vault he’s shown to contains an absolutely mind-boggling amount of money, and is just one over a thousand. Jod practically bathes in a cascade of coins at one point. He’ll never go hungry again.
But he’s been hungry before, that’s clear enough. Not in the endlessly hustling way he described to his fellow pirates while rallying them to his side last week — I mean this guy suffered, and suffered young. The pointed way he calls the kids “weak, sheltered, spoiled children” feels rooted in resentment that he wasn’t afforded the luxury of being those things. And though it seems unlikely he’s going to cut them all down in the middle of their touching reunion deep in the Mint the way the final shot implies — he’s got like five miles of security droids between him and the surface after all — he at least threatens their families as though envious they had families at all. It’s been a hard knock life for Jod Na Nawood, and now he’s paying it forward.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
