The Kids, the Pirate and the Fairy Tale: What Skeleton Crew and Narnia Share

Some of the best stories help re-enchant the ordinary

Four kids find a secret doorway that leads them away from home on a magical and dangerous adventure. Some believe in the magic, but some remain skeptical. They’re betrayed and have to learn who they can trust. The adventure changes each of the children for the better and enables them to become who they are destined to be.

That’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but also Skeleton Crew, the latest Star Wars series on Disney+.

Slight spoilers for Skeleton Crew

The show is a fun mix of 80s movies like Goonies and classic pirate tales like Treasure Island, all set in the Star Wars universe. Skeleton Crew establishes the genre guardrails, but instead of feeling constrained, it uses those to tell a better story. You’re drawn in with the kids as they explore the universe on their accidental adventure.

Skeleton Crew is not groundbreaking, prestige Star Wars like Andor, but it is enjoyable, which makes it a breath of fresh air among many of the recent self-serious projects. Skeleton Crew is not bogged down by lore and broader connections. It’s not simply another piece of content developed to push forward the machine of a cinematic universe; it’s a show with engaging characters involved in a compelling and self-contained story.

Concepts from earlier in the season are paid off by the finale. Viewers are rewarded for remembering moments and conversations, not left wondering if the writers were even paying attention to the story. While there could be room for another story connected to Skeleton Crew, the show doesn’t leave central plot points to be resolved years down the line in another season or some other movie or show.

Skeleton Crew is a fun space pirate story, the type that Disney should do more of, but it’s also more than that. It’s a fairy tale. Like the Narnia stories, Skeleton Crew re-enchants the seemingly ordinary world of the viewer, giving us new eyes to see what has become disenchanted.

Skeleton Crew is not simply another piece of content developed to push forward the machine of a cinematic universe; it’s a show with engaging characters involved in a compelling and self-contained story.

The four kids in this story are from At Attin, which they believe to be the universe’s most boring planet. Initially, it looks like idyllic but generic suburbs in space—manicured lawns, people walking “dogs,” and kids playing outside. They go to a boring school designed to prepare them for predetermined careers with manufactured purpose.¹

But the children discover a secret spaceship in the woods, which takes them across the galaxy and into the schemes of pirates searching for treasure. When they find their way back home, they realize there is more to their home planet than they realized. There’s a giant blaster on the roof of their school and a hidden vault under the streets. Adventure is not just out there; it’s at home, too. But it’s more than just those unusual features that give them a new appreciation and understanding of their home.

When the protective barrier surrounding their planet is taken down, everyone looks up and sees the stars for the first time. Despite being surrounded and threatened by invading pirates, they all take a moment to stare up in amazement at the heavens that have been above them but out of their sight this whole time.

Some of the best stories help us see the extraordinariness in our ordinary surroundings. Scenes we have taken for granted can suddenly take on new significance after the right story. C.S. Lewis believed this is what made fairy tales so powerful. He was drawn to the stories that awoken this sense of joy, that helped him see past the drab and dull haze cast over our lives to the shining reality underneath.

In “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” republished in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, Lewis talks about the difference between the longings encouraged when reading a “real world” story and those stoked by a fairy tale.

Does anyone suppose that he [the fairy tale reader] really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?—really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing.

In the fairy tale, we see the adventure and believe it could happen to us. We begin to check the wardrobes or closets in our home or explore the forests near us because maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a secret world or a forgotten spaceship. But even though we never come across those, we do discover so many interesting aspects we would’ve otherwise missed. Our real world has become a little more enchanted.

In his review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Gods Return to Earth,” republished in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, Lewis talks about how it is the fairy tale transforms the ordinary.

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then it is the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

Skeleton Crew is not The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia, but it does help to dip the ordinary in myth and let us see our world through the lens of a galaxy far, far away.

1. For a Star Wars show geared toward a younger audience, Skeleton Crew has a lot of significant things to say about work, capitalism, AI, surveillance, parenthood, and more. Not all of those comments may be exceedingly profound or unheard of, but the show has themes worth discussing. Other shows for an older audience have tried to exhibit depth and failed. In that sense, Skeleton Crew is impressive and stands out among recent fare.