*All the Jod-related spoilers*
It might be odd that Jod is the first character I’m writing about from Skeleton Crew. After all, the kids are the heart of the show, and I love all four of them for different reasons. But for my money, Jo is certainly the most interesting character on the show, and that’s why I want to start with him.
Our young heroes first encounter Jod when they’re thrown into the brig on a pirate spaceport. Jod is a fellow prisoner, and he rescues them with the aid of the Force. Wim is immediately thrilled to be meeting a real live Jedi, and Fern is just as immediately suspicious of the robed figure sedately intoning wise-sounding aphorisms.
Unfortunately for Wim, it doesn’t take long for Fern’s theory to bear out. In their escape from the spaceport, Jod has to be cajoled into rescuing SM-33, he takes some serious gremlin measures to get away when the ship is caught on a refueling line, and the kids soon learn that he has aliases for days. By the end of the episode, he’s pointing out that he never actually called himself a Jedi, Wim just assumed he was.
Within this, I love that Jod isn’t a Jedi, but he is Force-sensitive. Fern’s early suspicions extend to thinking his use of the Force is some sort of trick, and Disney-era Star Wars has already shown us that’s possible, with con man Haja Estree on Obi-Wan Kenobi. But a couple episodes later, we get confirmation that Jod really can use the Force. It’s not an easy “Jedi or fraud” dichotomy, and I like that. It’s reflective of the complexities of the character as a whole.
So we have Jod, loose cannon scoundrel and almost certainly down-and-out pirate captain, making a deal with four lost kids and their droid buddy to help them get home. He’s lured in by the legends of their planet’s eternal treasure, and for a while, Jod keeps up his end of the bargain—sort of. He does snoop around the ship for valuables, he does literally serve himself first when the kids are tired and hungry, and he does briefly joke that he’s considering trading them for livestock. But he also saves them from a tight spot, jumps into action when SM-33 goes haywire, and brings some major aggravated-dad energy when trying to wrangle the kids to look for clues on an ancient-pirate’s-hideout-turned-luxury-spa-planet.
It’s only a matter of time before Jod betrays the kids. When they finally get the coordinates to return to At Attin, the lure of eternal treasure leads him to challenge Fern as captain. “You can’t fight us, we’re just kids!” she cries as he holds a knife to her throat. “It’s not fair.” But Jod is undeterred. When he claims the Onyx Cinder, the kids narrowly escape getting captured by him, and he avoids a brutal dispatch from his former crew by leading them to At Attin, where the pirates invade and attack the bewildered civilians. He tries to boil his pursuers in acid, he kills his mutinous first mate who’s already incapacitated, and he cuts off SM-33’s head with a lightsaber.
Yeah, Jod is a bad guy. He’s ruthless, duplicitous, and self-serving. He doesn’t challenge Fern because he knows it’s the only way to take charge as the one grown-up in the room, he’s not secretly working against the pirates the whole time, and he doesn’t have an eleventh-hour redemption. But I think it’s important that we see just how awful he can be, because it draws such an interesting contrast in the moments where he does pull his punches.
For all of Jod’s casual violence, he goes out of his way not to hurt the kids. When he challenges Fern, he definitely threatens her and scares her, and he grabs her and holds a knife to her throat. But he doesn’t hit or shove her once, and he never gives her so much as a superficial cut with the knife. The whole time they’re “fighting,” he repeatedly tells her to yield, even pointing out that she needs to physically say the words to make it official. Once she does yield and he becomes captain, there’s no reason for Jod to order SM-33 to take the kids prisoner. It wouldn’t be hard for him and 33 to kill them, and it’d be easy to simply leave them for dead in a boobytrapped pirate’s lair. Taking them prisoner would be a hassle he doesn’t need, but that’s the order he gives anyway. Similarly, when they all get to At Attin, Jod is quick to threaten the kids and their parents with his newly-acquired lightsaber, but again, he doesn’t actually hurt any of them. He tells the other pirates to stop attacking, saying they use the civilians as forced labor, and he seems genuinely upset when the Onyx Cinder is shot down with KB inside.
None of this is to say that Jod is really “good.” Clearly, he’s not. But I love that it’s not entirely black and white, that there are certain lines the dangerous pirate doesn’t want to cross, even when it gets in the way of his treacherous plans. I like really his backstory, growing up as a starving street kid who’s briefly taken in by a Jedi on the run. As he tells the kids, she was only able to teach him a little before “they” caught her, forcing Jod to watch as they killed her. His experience of the galaxy is one where everyone is out to get you, and the “pinpricks of light” can’t outweigh the danger. In Jod’s mind, everything is kill-or-be-killed, meaning he has to look out for himself first because no one else will. His past trauma and deprivation don’t make his actions right, but it makes them understandable. What an excellent character to add to the larger universe of Star Wars!
