Skeleton Crew Episode 4 takes its cue from the Disney cartoon Flop

Contains the following spoilers for the final episode of Star Wars: The Crew of Skeletons.

Treasure Planet made history as Disney’s biggest animated failure at the time of release, but the film’s legacy lives on in 2024 thanks to the Star Wars franchise. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the Disney sci-fi film follows Jim Hawkins (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a teenage adventurer who is obsessed with finding the titular planet that holds the stolen gold of legendary space pirate Captain Flint. Star Wars: The Crew of Skeletons Episode 4 also borrows ideas from a mind-blowing space adventure — in a way, the plot of the Disney+ series resembles Flint’s forays into planets and stealing their treasures (in a good way).

Athens is home to one of the most mysterious Star Wars planets.and those feelings gain more credibility in episode 4 “Skeleton Crew”. After Jod Na Navud (Jude Law) and the young heroes of the show arrive on Et Ahran (a planet destroyed by the war between the Troik and Hattan tribes), they learn that there is no information about the children’s homeworld in a galaxy far, far away. Moreover, they discover that the coordinates to it have been destroyed after stumbling upon directions to other undocumented worlds, indicating that something fishy is going on.

The Orphanage is a bona fide secret planet much like the distant golden asylum in John Musker and Ron Clements’ underrated 2002 Disney film. Moreover, there are people (and droids) who wish to keep Athena and the treasure planet hidden from the rest of their respective galaxies.

Space pirates and abandoned worlds are a big part of Treasure Planet and Star Wars: The Crew, so it’s only natural to draw comparisons between the two stories to some extent. However, there are some elements of Skeleton Crew episode 4 that repeat certain plot beats from the Disney flop, mainly because of how they both feature robots hiding forgotten secrets.

In this episode, we learned that the old captain of SM-33 (Nick Frost) had his memory erased so that no one would know about Attin. Similarly, Captain Flint has the memory circuitry of the droid BEN (Martin Short) erased in “Treasure Planet” so he won’t tell anyone about the pirate’s stolen loot.

Episode 4 also reveals that the original starship captain Onyx Cinder killed anyone who saw At-Atin’s coordinates and ordered SM-33 to eliminate anyone who came close to revealing their secrets—which is what he tries to do after relaying the information to the children. It justifies it why Jodh Na Naud hates droids in “Skeleton Crew” but it also echoes the Treasure Planet storyline, which details that Flint has mined the planet to explode if visitors ever come across his loot. Let’s just hope our Skeleton Crew heroes don’t return to Attin and discover that explosives have been planted there too – they’ve been through enough trouble.

New episodes of Star Wars: Crew of the Skeletons air Tuesdays at 6:00 PM PT on Disney+.