In Skeleton Crew, what’s a minor near-death injury among friends?

Skeleton CrewThe children tasted for the first time a Star Wars stapler last week when they realized that not everyone around them was exactly in their best interest. Naturally, this week several of them are taking a closer look at the bonds they hold do and put them to the greatest test. Which happens to include a giant trash crab?

“Zero Friends Again” sees Fern, KB, Neil and Wim literally dumped in the dumps after they narrowly avoid Jod, who had to add “doing Anakin Skywalker to some young ones” to his list of pirate crimes – and of course , being children, the first thing they should do is argue about what to do next. But there’s something different here than the usual petty squabbles that this quartet get into all the time Skeleton Crew so far: Jod’s betrayal of them, as well as the intruding reality of the situation they are in when they find themselves truly abandoned as Brutus and his crew take “Sylvo” off-world for trial, the rifts between their relationship begin to show. This is especially true of Fern and KB, as the latter struggles to explain to the former exactly why she can’t go along with a risky plan to climb a huge rock to get back to her ship.

Why she can’t figure it out when KB decides to follow Wim–who immediately decides that the nearby junk consortium will definitely take them to someone who can help – in one direction while Fern and Neal go to the rocks. KB’s augments have corroded from time spent in such a humid environment, slowly shutting down her motor function. Star Wars has long had an interesting history with the portrayal of cyborgs and the disabilities associated with them, and more often than not this story is fulfilledfrom when Darth Vader is referred to as “more machine than man” to how trivially frequent Skywalker’s limb lopping seems. But in one incredibly tender scene – starring Kyrianna Crater and Ravi Cabot-Conyers – when an exhausted KB guides Wim through the process of replacing her corroded fuses, we probably get what’s Star Wars‘ better insight into disability and chronic illness.

Not only do we actually get to see the reality of KB’s lived experience with her augmentations—not just the immediate threat that the alternative without them is death—but her frustrations around the people in her life, especially Fern, trying to treat her as capable of does anything, even when she very clearly needs accommodation and understanding of her capabilities as a person with disabilities. It walks the fine line of all disability narratives and avoids many of the pitfalls that these narratives are prone to. It’s not that KB is bitter about her assistants or that other people are telling her what she should and shouldn’t be capable of: it’s that she herself is able to communicate those conditions and have people listen to her. Fern’s desire to accommodate her best friend by telling her she can do anything any other kid can do (including climbing a precarious cliff!) doesn’t match the reality that KB needs help and space to set her own boundaries and her own struggle to communicate, which is a perfect match for Wim’s own empathetic nature, allowing her to come to this realization on her own while he deals with repairing her appendages.

This isn’t a supposed “very special episode” moment, but a genuine part of the relationship between KB and Wim that is interestingly paralleled in the other teams between the kids. It’s very telling that we cut from this candid conversation about KB setting her own limits on Fern and Neal, with the former deciding that the only answer to Neal’s complaints about not being able to climb as fast as her is to find rope and tie them together so he can practically pull it up at his own pace. And there’s even a parallel to Jod’s storyline in the episode – driven to face Brutus’ sentence and given a pirate code-mandated time to appeal the stay of execution, what Jod offers instead is advertising information for At Attinrather than any serious or meaningful relationship with his former crew, showering them with promises of loot and the dreams they’ve always dreamed of. The “Zero Friends” of the title may be a line from KB fearing that if she was honest with Fern she would lose her best friend, but it’s actually Jod: lonely cheater plays one last trick after another as the children he left behind along the way find themselves more united than ever.

i.e. after are almost eaten by a giant crab and a giant garbage slag droid. It’s a little weird to go from one big set piece to the next right at the end of the episode, but it’s the crucible of fire that allows these kids to really shine together as a unit (especially after KB and Fern get together for a nice little bit). Together and understanding their strengths, they can achieve the impossible – and do so not only when Fern and Neal rescue KB and Wim from the junk, but when they all board the Onyx Cinder and manage to free it from the clutches of the droid from the dump. Maybe it wouldn’t be Star Wars if their reward for strengthening these bonds was simply a better understanding of each other, of course: in order to escape the droid, they all have to trust that Fern knows what she’s doing when she presses a button on their Cinder SM-33 controls said never to touch, detonates the battered skin of the ship’s hull to reveal a shiny, shiny version of the vessel hiding beneath its grimy appearance.

Now they have their chance to get home (thanks to the coordinates stored in KB’s augs, of course), even with Jod and the pirates looming on the horizon. But they can face it with a better understanding of each other, one that will encourage them to feel like they can take on the entire galaxy…which they may need by the end of it all.

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