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Spoilers Skeleton Crew [Spoiler Discussion]

I don't think Jod wanted to kill the kids or their parents. He threatened them without a doubt. But every time he had a chance to harm them directly, he did not do so. He used the force to pull or push them away but never used the lightsaber to hurt them. He also gave up once the barrier went down and accepted his fate. He did not brutally murder anyone in anger in that control room. I think that the Jedi taught him how not to kill in anger or give in to hate. Jod was just greedy.

Jude Law plays handsome smarmy characters well. I liked his role in Captain Marvel as well.
 
I never thought we’d see the composite beam weapon on the B-Wing again, outside of video games at least
The squee was heard across the neighborhood. They made short work of the pirate frigate, as they should have.
I don't think Jod wanted to kill the kids or their parents. He threatened them without a doubt. But every time he had a chance to harm them directly, he did not do so. He used the force to pull or push them away but never used the lightsaber to hurt them. He also gave up once the barrier went down and accepted his fate. He did not brutally murder anyone in anger in that control room. I think that the Jedi taught him how not to kill in anger or give in to hate.
Yes. I agree with all of that. Giving the character of Jod this kind of depth made him interesting.
Jod was just greedy.
However, I think this statement needs some qualification.

We got the clarification of his past that I was looking for. Jod wound up on the path he was, that led to being a pirate captain, because the Empire killed the Jedi who was teaching him. After that, Jod was trying to survive in the Imperial galaxy, and piracy was how he did that. Loot was what his henchmen desired. We saw him explicitly appealing to their desires, to sway them, to save himself from execution at the hands of his former first mate. Commanding loyal henchmen was his security. (He will answer for their crimes, as well as his own; despite ordering them not to harm the citizens of At Attin, they had already made examples of those who resisted.) He wanted loot of his own too, of course. Perhaps he desired to retire from piracy altogether, once he'd amassed sufficient treasure. To say that he "was just greedy" is too reductive, IMO.

Incidentally, every time Jod had his mask on, I kept thinking of the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. Where did the mask come from? Did another pirate use it before Jod? Was it passed down from pirate to pirate? Or was the idea of concealing his identity during raids something he'd picked up from another pirate who'd done the same? Most of the pirates he ran with (if not all of them?) didn't seem so concerned about who saw their faces.

Before he became a Rebel commander, Han Solo worked for the bad guys, also to survive in the Imperial galaxy. Lucas may have erased from canon that Han shot Greedo from under the table entirely preemptively, but he did not change the fact that, when Luke, Ben, and Leia met him, Han was a drug trafficker. What Han did supported the spice mines of Kessel, itself a pit of evil, slavery, and death. Han's hands weren't remotely clean.
 
Yes. I agree with all of that. Giving the character of Jod this kind of depth made him interesting.

However, I think this statement needs some qualification.

We got the clarification of his past that I was looking for. Jod wound up on the path he was, that led to being a pirate captain, because the Empire killed the Jedi who was teaching him. After that, Jod was trying to survive in the Imperial galaxy, and piracy was how he did that.
No, it's more than that. He grew up in squalor. He'd had to scrap and claw just to survive his entire life. So he has really messed up priorities. He truly seems to believe that the only thing that matters in the galaxy is money. And he's willing to do whatever he has to in order to get it. He doesn't WANT to hurt people, but he will.

He sees the galaxy as an inherently dark, malevolent place that will not help people. The only way to truly survive in such a place is to never need help. By being blindingly rich.

Jod isn't capital E evil, like Vader for example. But he isn't misunderstood either. He's a greedy S.O.B. who is perfectly willing to hurt people to get what he wants. He's everything he says the galaxy is. A perfect foil for a group of kids who have learned that the galaxy absolutely doesn't need to be what Jod sees in it. That together they can be stronger than they could ever be alone, and that asking for help isn't a weakness when you haven't driven everybody from your life who might actually aid you.
 
The explanation at least covered why he never went dark side. He was never properly trained in the force. I was expecting his eyes to go yellow
 
A solid and satisfying, if not spectacular, conclusion. Very entertaining, but I felt like it was missing just some final element or button to tie it all together thematically.

That said, overall this was a delightful series and a very, very pleasant surprise. I'm definitely glad that they made Jod a bad guy (albeit a layered bad guy) and not the stereotypical lovable rogue.

I'd be fine if they did another season and also totally fine if they left this as a one-and-done.
 
No, it's more than that. He grew up in squalor. He'd had to scrap and claw just to survive his entire life. So he has really messed up priorities. He truly seems to believe that the only thing that matters in the galaxy is money. And he's willing to do whatever he has to in order to get it. He doesn't WANT to hurt people, but he will.

He sees the galaxy as an inherently dark, malevolent place that will not help people. The only way to truly survive in such a place is to never need help. By being blindingly rich.

Jod isn't capital E evil, like Vader for example. But he isn't misunderstood either. He's a greedy S.O.B. who is perfectly willing to hurt people to get what he wants. He's everything he says the galaxy is. A perfect foil for a group of kids who have learned that the galaxy absolutely doesn't need to be what Jod sees in it. That together they can be stronger than they could ever be alone, and that asking for help isn't a weakness when you haven't driven everybody from your life who might actually aid you.
Nope.

Jod stopped short of physically hurting the kids, even though they got in the way of what he was after. The proposition that he is "perfectly willing to hurt people to get what he wants" was demonstrated by @EmoBorg to be quite false, in the post I quoted. He might be willing to hurt some people, and when we first met Jod we did observe him leading a raid in which people were killed. But it was proven beyond all doubt that Jod was not perfectly willing to hurt or kill anyone who got in the way of what he wanted.

You've also totally missed the boat about the kids seeing something in the galaxy that Jod doesn't, when it comes to asking for help. Jod very much asked his henchmen for help, and he believed that his efforts to secure the treasure on At Attin would have a greater potential for success with them than alone and without them. This is proven conclusively by Jod's repeated and ultimately successful efforts to get the pirate frigate through the barrier. That doesn't mean that everything the kids learned, they learned from Jod. Far from it. But they did learn a lot from him. He assigned them stations on the Onyx Cinder which enabled them to form a cohesive team.

What the kids see that Jod doesn't is that the Republic are the good guys. They saw the New Republic come to fight the pirates on the spa and garbage planet. The audience saw that the X-wings engaged the Onyx Cinder on Kh'ymm's moon with non-lethal weapons. For that engagement the X-wings had some of their lasers swapped out and replaced with ion cannons. I'm not sure, but it's possible that the kids realized this as well.

But how can Jod trust the New Republic when he knows that the Old Republic fell and betrayed him?

If the series goes forward, and I really hope it will, I hope we see Jod assess the New Republic.
 
What a wonderful climax to such a fun and entertaining series! The action set-pieces were top-notch, the character and plot threads all came together very nicely! A solidly executed adventure story! My only real criticism is that the ending felt a little too abrupt. It really needed either a much stronger uplifting moment ala Goonies, or some sort of coda scene.

Is it weird that the thing that made me most happy was that we got to see B-Wings, and that they actually got to do something!? They've always been my favourites of the starfighters. They've been teasing how formidable they are ever since RotJ with all that one ubiquitous airbrushed promo shot of a pair of them taking out a Star Destroyer, but we've never got to actually see them do their thing in live action until now! (No I don't count those ugly, angular things in tRoS.)

No surprise that the Supervisor was a droid, but I really enjoyed the added touch of making it a giant astromech style head, with the same "facial features" as Artoo!

I appreciated that we got exactly what we needed of both Jod's backstory, and At Attin's and no more. Very economical storytelling! As suspected; Jod was indeed a bokken padawan, but more like Ezra than Kanan; a stray taken in and trained by an Order 66 survivor, except the Inquisitors seemingly caught up to them. It still leaves plenty of details to fill in (not least of which how he escaped said Inquisitors!) but still tells us the essentials.

Likewise with At Attin; we know the supervisor's last contact with the Republic was again linked back to Order 66. This does seem to settle the debate as to whether At Attin was of the Old Republic, or justy the old Galactic Republic, but it's still not clear-cut. For one thing; how did the Empire not take posession of it?
I could see a scenario where At Attin was of indeed of the Old Republic, but stayed in contact with Coruscant through the Supervisor's opposite number on Coruscant; another droid. When the Sith took over the planet, said droid was physically hidden, but still tied into the network. The Sith never found it or the planet, but even after the Sith Empire fell and the Republic restored, nobody was left that knew where it was hidden and so it remained "lost" as it continued to carry out it's programming; monitor and relay all priority messages from the Senate, and await reactivation. It's probably still there, buried in some hidden chamber, deep within the core levels.

Setups like this are probably how Palpatine gets the funds to create things like the First Order fleet.
I keep seeing this suggested, but I see neither the connection nor the need. Palpatine had over two decades to plunder the galaxy for his own ends; credits were never a problem. I mean think it through: somehow I doubt he set-up *two* separate autonomous military forces in the Unknown Regions (still annoyed by how stupid that whole plot was), only to stop short of adequately funding them. Much less that they've all just been sat out there in the three to five years since Jakku, waiting for a random windfall to just materialise.
 
The Empire might have felt no need to invade the planet or control it. They weren't a threat. They likely didn't care about the treasure because I assume they would want to create their own currency. Why waste resources,
 
Jod redeemed himself in the end. As said, he threatened the kids and their parents often, but didn't actually do anything, even when they were about to ruin everything for him. He dropped his blaster because he knew the only other option was to kill them and he wasn't going to do that.
 
Fun show, but a major letdown after The Acolyte. Not nearly as interesting and adds nothing to the SW universe as a whole.
 
Fun show, but a major letdown after The Acolyte.
I agree with this. But I still liked it more than I thought I would.
Not nearly as interesting and adds nothing to the SW universe as a whole.
It does add some stuff, it's just that it's kind of its own thing and doesn't seem to be part of some kind of overarching Marvel-style arc. At least not at this point.
Reverend said:
It really needed either a much stronger uplifting moment ala Goonies, or some sort of coda scene.
I also expected a coda for some reason.
 
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It does add some stuff, it's just that it's kind of its own thing and doesn't seem to be part of some kind of overarching Marvel-style arc. At least not at this point.

Exactly. The existence of all of these mints does have a potential connection to the First Order, as many have suggested. I appreciate that it seems as though there have been minor hints building towards the First Order throughout all of Disney Star Wars. I wish it wasn't necessarily so obvious, but its nice they're trying to answer some questions.
 
Fun show, but a major letdown after The Acolyte. Not nearly as interesting and adds nothing to the SW universe as a whole.
Not that it needs to add anything to the lore, but it does add that the Republic apparently had these special hidden, protected mint planets as the basis of its economy (and that Republic dactarii (?) are gold).
 
Nope.

Jod stopped short of physically hurting the kids, even though they got in the way of what he was after. The proposition that he is "perfectly willing to hurt people to get what he wants" was demonstrated by @EmoBorg to be quite false, in the post I quoted. He might be willing to hurt some people, and when we first met Jod we did observe him leading a raid in which people were killed. But it was proven beyond all doubt that Jod was not perfectly willing to hurt or kill anyone who got in the way of what he wanted.
We're going to have to agree to disagree. Just because he didn't PERSONALLY harm a group of kids he spent time with doesn't absolve him from SICCING HIS PIRATES ON INNOCENT CIVILIANS. Or from, you know, attempting to enslave an entire planetary population to his greed.

Your rationalization feels a lot like "Sure, he murdered all those people. But he was always nice to me." Which just doesn't fly in my book, sorry.
 
(and that Republic dactarii (?) are gold).
Or at the very least gold coloured. We also saw gold (and silver) Republic credits in Clone Wars.

Imperial credits also come in a variety of colours, including gold. Similar to some IRL currencies.

The New Republic as well, though their credits are round instead of rectangular.

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