And Before I go forwards with writing this, I must clarify I mean this in the best possible way, Generally when someone says they do not have a strong opinion of something, they mean it in the sense that this wasn't good enough to incite an opinion out of me, But that isn't the only way to look at it.
Overall, after watching this episode of the Skeleton Crew, I feel it was a necessary one, It establishes explicitly, somethings that could already be speculated on from the last two episodes.
Namely, Crimson Jack/ Jod is indeed a pirate and not a Jedi, even though he has their powers, that he was the same pirate captain who was overthrown in the first episode, At Attin missed the great war, including the rise and fall of the Empire, At-Attin is isolationist, for whatever reason.
The main reason I do not have much to say about this is because I could already tell a lot of it from the last episode, so I didn't need to be told all this, but I definitely am aware that this is isn't the case for everybody and therefore this needed to happen...
Other than that this episode is mainly a connecting episode, it connects the end of the previous episode to the beginning of the next one, explicitly explaining how the crew got out and went to At Attin.
But here is the thing alright, if they wanted, they could have ended with the crew landing on At Attin, but they didn't which makes me think that maybe the next episode also wont be them returning, which is, interesting...
I mean, in order for the show to be interesting, conflict has to follow the crew to their home, and if they just hyper-space there, then how can they be tracked to that place?
Oh wait Hyper-space tracking right...
But regardless, I wouldn't call this one filler, but it definitely did not have, a lot of... satisfaction, it seems that has been held for later, there wasn't a lot of the mystery and explorer vibe going on.
And that could have been an easy fix, like for example, there is a scene where Kh'ymm sees Crimson Jack coming towards her and calls the police on him, cut that one, then, we go an meet Kh'ymm, we see her act as she does, and then we learn with the characters that she is planning to betray them.
My only guess is that they wanted to secretly signal to the Audience that Kh'ymm had an altruistic reason for calling the police, i.e. save the children, and not something selfish, like revenge?
But that makes it worse almost, it takes a lot of Depth from her character, I mean she is someone who is willingly helping a Pirate, or at least has in the past, enough for him to call her friend, even though not a trusted one.
So no, this episode is not filler, but it feels like it because it is poorly executed and it ends on a cliff hanger, add to that the fact that a lot of the information learnt in this episode could be inferred anyways, and you have the recipe for a not so great episode.
But here is another reason why this episode has an issue, It doesn't give us much to discuss, except maybe, oh what is Crimson Jack's past? Which was already a thing people would be discussing after the first two episodes, and perhaps, this helped a few fan theories in what exactly the History of At-Attin is, by helping Narrow down the possibilities.
But that can almost be a bad thing, because you are effectively just Quelling a few fan theories and adding no new ones, in this case it works because "mysterious lost Planet" is too vague to speculate anything.
I don't know maybe there were Easter eggs or something. and yes, that does give people something to discuss, but a truly good story will give watchers from all walks something to talk about and not just Easter egg hunters.
Andor had almost no Easter eggs, and yet every episode gave us something to discuss, and this could also be an easy fix.
Because, as an episode, this is complete, in other words, adding on much at the end or somewhere in the middle will not be an easy feat and may even be a bad idea, anything further will need to be a separate episode.
When Netflix came into the scene and introduced its hot new technique of dropping everything at once, it gave the showrunners a lot of freedom that they otherwise did not have.
For example, since everything is available at all times, Shows do not need to reset status quo at the end of every episode as they needed to earlier, see when shows were serialized and released on Television, as some of you may not know, because I have come to realize I am old enough for that to be true... Episodes aired on a thing called, cable T.V. which was run by someone called a cable operator, and they were aired on a pre decided time and then that's it, you could never see them again... ever....
So if you missed it, too bad, watch from episode 87 looser!
A great Example of this can be seen when you compare the shows Paradise PD to Brickleberry, Both are shows created by Comedians Roger Black and Waco O'Guin, I haven't seen these two shows, neither have I seen any other Family Guy look alike shows, but I do realize that while Brickleberry pretty much remained unchanging episode per episode, as in one episode someone could be shot dead and the next they would be walking around just Fine.
Paradise PD on the other hand had season long arcs such as the one where one of the main cast turned out to be a Drug kingpin who has been possessing a police officer and turned out to be the main villain, but then he wasn't because he had Dissociative Identity disorder... or something... and it went on.
See the thing is, when you can watch any episode at your leisure, if you choose to jump in at a later one, it really is your fault for doing so, A side effect of this is of course shows that have been going on for a while begin to seem like Backlogs and hence the average season length has gone down as a way to not only reduce the number of episodes one has to sit through if they do the crime of jumping in at a later point.
But also because, now that viewers have things such as the pause and playback options in their hand, a point doesn't exactly need to be reiterated that many times in order to reduce the chance of someone missing it, whereas earlier it was almost a necessity, because believe me, I missed the climax because I had to pee is a real thing, and a major source of Trauma for anyone Millennial and above.
Tied to that is the fact that audiences have also become less tolerant to formulaic or repetitive arcs and would prefer the show be more fast paced and have less filler, whereas earlier fillers were almost a chance of relief as if you missed an episode, there is a chance its not that important.
One of the Shows that Benefitted from this faster paced more focused story telling is Lucifer as the first three seasons aired on Fox before the show was cancelled and picked up again by Netflix, earlier arcs used to be very long winded and stuck more closely to the Formula, and whereas the later seasons also followed the formula, it was more of a loose structure and the Show became more focused on the main character of Lucifer and his development.
Tied to this freedom from formula is the freedom to experiment, Lucifer in particular went wild with this in season 6 where in a large portion of episode 3 was entirely animated.
But there are, some downsides to this, earlier, each episode of a show was an event, you remembered it, and after the end of the episode, came the speculation, the anticipation, theorizing, which is and always will be an intrinsic part of Fandom Culture.
Now an entire season can just be sat through in a weekend, not only robbing Fandoms of a core part of their culture but also robbing the show of any hope, that an Audience member will stop and think when the show gives food for thought.
No instead shows started becoming more and more focused on becoming eye catching and binge-able, i.e. something you can throw in the background and not think about, making them once again loose depth, which is funny because the entire advantage that this model claimed to have over the older one was Depth.
So many Streaming services saw it fit to return to an episodic release but keep all the episodes viewable once they have been released, this seemed to be the best of both worlds in some sense, until... it wasn't...
You see like the episode this article was supposed to be about before it took a hard left turn into talking about episode structure, some episodes are just not going to be able to stand on their own, and that is fine, each work of art is unique in its own right, Some episodes need to be released together, some need to be released with a gap in between to allow for "digestion" so to speak.
It really needs to be done on a case by case basis.
And it seems most studios are fine with releasing episodes clumped together when they are at the end or in the beginning but the ones in the middle need to be separate or the whole thing must be dropped at once, or like in the case of Arcane, the chunks they are released in need to be of the same size, i.e. three, it appears to me as an outside observer that Studios want to keep the appearance of Structure, and in doing so are actually still holding on to some other characteristics that could otherwise be detrimental.
Really like I said its a case by case thing, the answer to all the problems I have raised about this weeks episode could easily have been, release more than one episode.
This could also help studios like Marvel, structure their shows and movies together better, as then they do not have to wait for an entire season to drop week by week before a movie release that may have spoilers, they can simply restructure the episode release order and shorten or lengthen the time as they need.
Also one of the reasons Disney Plus shows have stuck to 6 episodes it seems(to me at least.) is that 10 weeks or 8 weeks is simply too long a time especially when it comes to studios with multiple interconnected projects such as Marvel and Lucasfilm
And it seems studios will get there, although it may be a bumpy ride, but it seems they are slowly getting to a point, where in they are comfortable with releasing episodes keeping nothing but the viewing experience in mind, but we shall see.
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