Review: Skeleton Crew, "Coming of Age" | Season 1, Episode 3
Go watch a Star War
“You can do anything. You’re a Jedi, right?”
Last week in the comments of the two-part premiere review of Skeleton Crew, one of you noted that the droid voiced by Nick Frost, SM-33, seems to be a deliberate nod to none other than the piratic sidekick to Captain Hook, Smee. I note that to start this week’s review of “Coming of Age,” for a few reasons. First, it’s a very smart call-out, since this show was emphatic about pirates being part of the fabric of this specific story, and there are few more famous fictional pirates than the men onboard Captain Hook’s ship in Never Land. Second, I failed to note that last week’s second episode, as well as this week’s installment, is a reunion between Jude Law and director David Lowery, whose last film was the slight but still underrated Peter Pan and Wendy for Disney+. And who played Captain Hook in that film? Jude Law.
Now, I’ll admit that when I first watched “Coming of Age” via screener, I thought as much about the world of Peter Pan as I did about one of Law’s earlier performances, as Gigolo Joe in Steven Spielberg’s impressive AI: Artificial Intelligence. Though I know that film has been divisive over the last quarter-century, I would hope that most folks can agree that Law is exceedingly effective as a charming cad who is, of course, programmed to be a charming cad, and is thus not entirely capable in handling a robot child that thinks it’s an actual child. That balance between being a charming cad and being someone who is not adept at dealing with kids is a big part of “Coming of Age,” which does a few things well but seems to be doing its best to keep a larger mystery at bay while teasing it out enough that I really hope it’s worth the coyness.