‘Skeleton Crew’ is up to something ...

The new ‘Star Wars’ show teases a mystery at its core. PLUS: HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’ makes a Snape offer, the live-action ‘Snow White’ trailer exists, and is ‘Dune: Prophecy’ now doin’ enough?

‘Skeleton Crew’ is up to something ...
Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter and Robert Timothy Smith in Skeleton Crew. / Lucasfilm

Hello! It’s the first Friday edition of Popculturology this December. Wild that we’re in the final month of 2024. It looks like Moana 2 is going to crush the box office again this weekend. Have you already seen it? Are you planning on going over the next few days?

There’s also plenty of holiday viewing that you can do at home. We’ve already checked off Christmas Vacation (will definitely watch this one again), Elf and Love Actually. Gonna save the Patrick Stewart version of A Christmas Carol until we’re a bit closer to Christmas.

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“C’mon, girls, seriously where are you from?”

Skeleton Crew, the new Star Wars series, premiered this week, with the show’s first two episodes going live on Disney+ on Monday. The show takes place after Return of the Jedi, with its opening narration noting that “since the fall of the Empire, the New Republic has maintained order.”

From its first episode, Skeleton Crew seems to be a pretty straightforward show. A group of kids from a pretty idyllic although somewhat sterile planet find a spaceship, head off into space and meet up with a pirate and possibly Jedi played by Jude Law. There are callbacks to the original Star Wars movie, alien creatures and a new droid voiced by Nick Frost.

At one point during the show’s first episode, I posted that it’s funny how Disney has repeatedly made the New Republic look incredibly lame, whether it’s in Skeleton Crew, The Mandalorian or Ahsoka. They’re pretty much inept and often more worried about the bureaucracy than things like, oh, I dunno, making sure the Empire doesn’t rise again as the First Order. The kids in Skeleton Crew have to worry about a big assessment at school that’ll put them on a career track.

But then toward the end of the first episode, a few things started to not make sense. When the show’s kids were taken into space, they remarked that they had never seen stars. Never seen stars? In Star Wars? For some reason, their planet, Att Attin (yes, that has to be a play on AT-AT), is surrounded by a barrier that prevents them from seeing the stars. Ships aren’t allowed in or out.

Things got even weirder in the second episode. The kids wound up at a pirate port after SM-33, the ship’s droid, had no record of Att Attin. At this port, pirates were repeatedly confused when this specific planet was mentioned, with someone even saying that “Att Attin is a myth.”

So, um, what’s going on here?