Because after three episodes, it is not immediately identifiable as dogshit.

That's how far the brand has fallen.

I am not exactly thrilled with it, but it was a slow day at work. Also, I am not as charmed as most people by children or the pirate aesthetic. When I watched Pirates of the Caribbean, I sat there stewing in the theater at the nonsensical liberties taken with history, and was stunned to learn it was popular. I had to go back and watch it again after adjusting my brain into a different story mode to actually enjoy it. When it comes to space opera, I have no problem with pirates as a concept, but the conventional pirate look is even less forgivable. They did this in the last season of the Mandalorian and I hated it. In particular. Among all the other stuff I hated about that show.

Also, I never liked kid movies or shows even when I was a kid. The first show I can remember watching was Bonanza. I remember that when they tried to make me watch "Little House on the Prairie" my mother sold it to me by pointing out Little Joe. After half a dozen episodes seen at various visits to my grandmother's house, that dog stopped hunting. The point is, I wanted to see some fucking cowboys getting shot. I was NOT interested in the escapades of farm children. I thought the "Wizard of Oz" was retarded the first time I saw it, because I had been exposed to the books, where the Tin Woodman has an axe for a reason. I liked "ET" the first time I saw it, because it was the original theatrical release and one of the first four or five movies I ever saw. When it came out on VHS years later, I was distinctly unimpressed. I have never seen The Goonies, nor has anything I have heard about the film made me the slightest bit curious. But people like "Stranger Things" despite a cast of the most repulsive-appearing children I have ever seen in one place. Seriously, the black one is the only one that looks like it didn't escape from the island of Dr Moreau. And from what I saw of the first two seasons, the character the show likes the best, the curly-haired one whose shpeech offendsh the earsh ash much ash Finn Wolfhard doesh the eyesh, is obstinately stupid when it comes to being aware of reality and his environment. Every now and then one of the other kids seemed like they might have a clue, but they all decided to buy into his delusions. By the end of the second season the only character I actually liked was the violent teenager, and I maybe half-liked the cop.

The relevance of that diatribe is that if you like Stranger Things because of the kid characters, you might like "Skeleton Crew". There is a willfully stupid kid who is out of touch with reality and has a mop of curly hair, because that seems to be required. There is a fat one who seems to be the same species as Max Rebo, the blue elephantine keyboardist in Jabba the Hutt's palace, and is even dumber but very weak-willed, and there are two girls. One of them is spunky rebellious tough girl and the other is her sidekick who has a visor somewhat like Lavarr Burton on Star Trek and is Oriental. I use that descriptor in particular, because she's very good with technology, so she kind of feels like she escaped from a thirty or forty year old script. Anyway, nonsensical shenanigans by the main idiot cause the quartet to get stranded in a rough part of the galaxy on battered old starship, with pirate types hunting them, and their only means of getting home is the on-board droid who has a pirate accent, a jury-rigged leg that does not bend well, functionally a peg, and has a vaguely skeletal appearance, with a missing eye and a rodent-alien living in the socket. This incredibly on-the-nose pirate droid is call SM-33. Get it? Smee? Also, they find Jude Law in a pirate prison, who is a bit shady but might be a Jedi or a pirate or a scoundrel with a heart of gold, who is somewhat frank about his hope for a reward if he helps them get home. It takes a while to get going and seems to count on you enjoying the novelty of a bunch of kids in ordinary suburban type lives in Star Wars, or else the familiar beats of every kids movie ever, while you wait for the plot to start moving along. There are some almost intriguing mysteries underlying their idyllic homeworld, which might be deliberate hints that all is not what it seems, or, given the writing quality of Disney Star Wars in general, plot holes and incompetent world-building.

If you like kid adventure stories, and pirates in Star Wars, who all have the accent, you might actually enjoy this one. For what it's worth, while some of the CGI isn't great, it does look like they are doing a lot more practical effects and puppets than is the standard these days. And for once, the insufferable, hypercompetent female lead of a Disney story is not obnoxious, because she's only hypercompetent next to her retarded male peers, and is otherwise not much different from those standard fare girls in kid's movies. She's actually the character I like the most, just because she has the closest thing to a personality that is not actually annoying and functional intelligence. Like, I could see her getting along with my nieces at that age.

What I am trying to convey here, is that my issues with "Skeleton Crew" are Me things, not shit writing things. And that makes it better than "Ahsoka", "The Acolyte", "The Mandalorian", "The Book of Boba Fett", and "Obi-Wan Kenobi".