The Planet of At Attin is Star Wars: Skeleton Crew's Biggest Mystery

The following story contains minor spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.

SOMETIMES, STORIES IN the Star Wars universe get stuck between a rock and a hard place. If something tries to do something new, that hasn't been done before, it can be criticized as not "feeling like Star Wars," or, worse, "ruining Star Wars." If something tries to really tap into the history and hit all those traditional Star Wars beats, it runs the risk of critiques calling it derivative or redundant. Which is all to say something that's very obvious: it's tough to make a Star Wars project.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is kind of going in between. It's trying something that's never really been done within the Star Wars universe before, but is very much trying to tap into the soul of coming-of-age adventures past, like The Goonies and even Stranger Things.

But part of what makes Skeleton Crew compelling so far is its unique setting. While the show opened up with a scene depicting a (failed) pirate hunt on an unknown planet, our main story centers with four kids on a planet called At Attin, which seems to function like a city/suburb unlike any other we've seen in Star Wars. This is compelling much in the same way that we've seen the city planet of Coruscant in the past; we've spent so much time in this universe on desolate desert planets like Tattooine that it makes a fun reminder to remember how much we've barely scratched the surface on the rest of George Lucas's world. There are functioning societies not dissimilar from our own out there, and lots of interesting characters and stories happening within them.

At Attin, however, comes with a couple extra layers of intrigue. Not only is this planet the home of our heroes, but it seems to have some rather dystopian qualities to it. Yes, there are cool houses that feel like the suburbs with a bit of Galaxy Far, Far, Away twang to them, but there's also a whole thing about the kids taking one single test that determines the path of their entire lives. And then there's some other stuff that comes up later, too...

Let's dive into the mystery of At Attin, shall we?

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There's a lot of strange things going on with At Attin even before diving in deep. There's the aforementioned test that determines people's entire lives, like something out of The Giver or even The Hunger Games. There's the Old Republic-style credits that Wim's father (played by TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adabimpe) gives him for lunch money (which, you may remember, Qui-Gon Jinn had in The Phantom Menace and could not get value for even then).

But there's more that you may not even initially have considered. The series opens with Wim playing with toys, acting out a battle between a Jedi and a Sith. This seems normal, because, like, in our world, this is a perfectly normal thing. But you have to keep in mind that in the Star Wars world, at this point—the time in between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens—the Jedi are essentially extinct. After Order 66 was executed in Revenge of the Sith, the Jedi became an endangered species; you may remember that it was basically Luke, Obi-Wan, and Yoda all by themselves as Jedi in the original trilogy, with Vader and Palpatine as (seemingly) the only Sith. By the time we reach The Force Awakens, only a few years after the events of Skeleton Crew, Rey thinks the Jedi and Luke Skywalker were just a myth.

So, then, why is their history and presence so realized on At Attin?

There's also the questions of once the kids find the mysterious spaceship and jet into the galaxy; they've never seen the stars before. At Attin, it would seem, is in some kind of bubble.

And, finally, there's the fact that once they reached the pirate base of Port Borgo and explain that they need to get home to At Attin, the reactions of the pirates are all incredulous. It seems that At Attin, even in name, is the stuff of legends and myths. Is that actually the treasure planet that was being searched for at the start of the first episode?

It seems possible. If At Attin is both some kind of hidden, secret, mystery treasure planet and also the home the kids need to get back to, it gives everyone a common goal of going to the same place.

Now that Jude Law's character, a mysterious Force-user named Jod Na Nawood, has been properly introduced by the end of the show's second episode, it seems likely that we're about to get a whole lot of answers. And, quite frankly, the timing is perfect—because we've got a whole lot of questions.