“Star Wars: Skeleton Crew” creators go inside the finale and future of the show

Surprise! Jod Na Nawood is not a good guy after all. While many have expected Jude Law’s character to turn into the pirate with a heart of gold by the end of the Star Wars: Skeleton Crew season finale, that never really happened. True, Jod did not chop anyone up “piece by piece” as he once threatened, but he did attempt to enslave an entire planet to work for him churning out credits. Not great!

In the end, however, Jod was thwarted by a group of plucky At Attin kids, forced to watch his scheme fail and pirates burn under a barrage of New Republic X-Wing fire. It was the latest setback for the captain, who finally shared his backstory — informing his captives how he was found by a Jedi when he was a child living in a hole in the ground, only for that Jedi to be hunted down by Palpatine’s orders right in front of his eyes, setting him on a path to a life of crime.

The end of the finale left Jod’s fate uncertain. Just as uncertain is the fate of Skeleton Crew itself. Will the show get a second season on Disney+? Is there a Star Wars crossover coming? And what happens when those child actors hit — GASP! —  puberty? Entertainment Weekly sat down with creators Jon Watts (who also directed the finale) and Christopher Ford to delve into the season’s final chapter as well as the murky future of the franchise.

Related: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew finale ending reveals Jod's backstory

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You really surprised me with how dark Jod got in these last few episodes, and I kept waiting for the redemption arc to come with him in the finale — kind of like Han Solo swooping in at the last second to help Luke destroy the Death Star — and it never did as he goes for global subjugation instead. Tell me about turning the guy some of us kind of assumed would end up a hero by the end into a villain.

JON WATTS: It was really exciting following people get to the same conclusion that you got to on Reddit. Everyone is waiting for that redemption arc, and Ford would always say, “He's not their parents.” So we had that waiting and you get a little bit nervous. You're like, “Should we have given him a redemption arc?” But I don't know.

CHRISTOPHER FORD: We knew that that character archetype was part of Star Wars, so we wanted to play with it, and especially the whole “Is he a Jedi or not?” thing. Is he good or bad? And so our twist was this anti-twist, that he was exactly as he presented to be. Seemingly.

WATTS: We've been having to not reveal any of that for such a long time. You're the first person that we're able to talk freely with.

FORD: But honestly, it would've not worked if it wasn't for Jude, because of his performance and his ability to play the character. He was so invested and interested in making Jod three dimensional, so it wasn't just, “I'm a villain! Surprise!” Even in his villainy, you can feel that it comes from a human place where he has lived in this hard world and he's made the wrong decisions. He was so interested in making it great as opposed to just “I'll show up and be the villain.” He worked on the backstory so much.

WATTS: When he gets to talk about how he ended up the way he did. I think that's fascinating. No villain wakes up and thinks “I'm the villain.” He exists in a morally gray area. He's not so one dimensional that he would just kill the kids and run away with the gold. He's tortured by his behavior and I think that that's fascinating to watch. And just because the main characters in our show are kids doesn't mean have to oversimplify those ideas, and I think that's given the show hopefully layers of depth in a way. It's not a kid show, frankly.

FORD: We were trying to define how it wasn't just a kid show before the season, but we couldn't reveal anything. It's actually darker for this reason. For me, it was always that we were just making the show that we wanted to watch. We’re not kids, but I loved watching it with my kids. That was so fun.

Related: Jude Law reacts to big Star Wars: Skeleton Crew character reveal

It felt to me like Jod sort of missed on purpose when he shot that blaster shot towards Fern when she was going for the barrier switch, and my read was that he was bluffing when he threatened to slice up Wim’s dad with a lightsaber. Was he bluffing? Would he have actually hurt any of these kids or their parents?

WATTS: What's so great about Jude's performance is you feel that complexity and conflict in all of those decisions. He doesn't want to have to do this. He says “Don't make me do this.” And I think he wishes that wasn't ever put in that situation as well and being forced to do that, because you feel like he's grown close to the kids, and admires the kids, and in a way sees what he was never able to have in the kids. And that creates a really interesting conflict inside of him. And Jude was able to play all the layers of that, even down to what you're picking up on, those small gestures, his tiny bit of hesitation when he fires.

FORD: It’s blaster acting.

Jod finally shares his backstory here as a kid that was saved by a Jedi, trained a bit, and then Order 66 came around. Are there other details of that backstory that you came up with — like say the Jedi who saved him — that did not make it on screen into the episode. How deep did you go?

FORD: In our heads, it's like the potential to go deeper. That part of the story is something that could be explored in the future. So when you have something that's a kind of work in progress like that, you leave it open enough to get worked on and made better.

WATTS: If you want to, I could fully describe the bottle episode where we see Jod as a kid and what happened to him and why.

FORD: The challenge though was as fascinating as Jod is, we always wanted to keep it from the kid's perspective. The kids are like, “I don't understand this guy.” They've never been out in the galaxy and met someone as damaged as him. So I don't think we could have done a flashback in this season.

WATTS: Yeah, not in this season. But what's great about Star Wars is that you start talking about someone's backstory and there's already a history and allure that surrounds it. So you start getting excited about, “Oh, well, where do you place this person if it's X amount of years ago into this larger galactic timeline?” It's just such a rich world that you can have so many variations and varieties of characters and backstories, and it's just like limitless potential. It's very fun.

Related: Skeleton Crew creators explain Star Wars Holiday Special tribute

What’s Jod doing there at the end, when he stays in the Supervisor’s chamber as the others are fleeing? Wim calls to him, but he stays to watch the ship go down, as a captain would, I guess.

WATTS: That's a great one because I think you could read a lot of different ideas into that expression.

FORD: I had a really weird experience. I've watched this episode 10,000 times in editing and in every stage of post-production, but watching it last night with my family, that was the part that kind of actually made me feel something I hadn't felt before for some reason. Just him now alone and thinking his thoughts, ruminating. That hit me in a way that it hadn't before.

WATTS: It's one of those performances where it is open and real enough that you find yourself projecting a lot of yourself onto his expression. I was trolling Reddit while you were watching with your family. Different people were reading different things. Some people were like, “Oh, he's happy to finally have to drop this ruse.” Or it's like, “No, he's regretful because he's looking out at this perfect family landscape and he's all alone.” People saw every different variety

FORD: It's funny because what I used to see was he gets this idea at the end. But it's been long enough now that I could just finally watch it for what it is

It read mournful to me.

WATTS: He's seeing the entire plan that he has — probably the closest he's ever been to victory — just going down in flames

Plus, it doesn't feel like it's the first time that's happened to him, and it bookends with your first scene of the show where he just misses out on a big score there as well.

FORD: Right, exactly.

Related: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew star Jude Law insists Han shot first

Any interesting detours or side plots or other things that you thought about at one point for this season that you ultimately had to cut or didn’t go down that road for whatever reason?

WATTS: There was always a richer, more complex layer to the internal politics of the pirates, which was fascinating, but it became a thing where it's like, we literally don't have time to get into all of those stories.

FORD: It's fun because it kind of exists there as this residual layer that just makes it feel weirdly lived in. There's this moment where Jod is just staring at that motherly pirate and they have this moment, and I remember seeing online that people were thinking, “Is he using a mind trick on her?” And it's like, “No, they just know each other really well.”

WATTS: Yeah, we had done the work to flesh out their intricate pirate politics dynamics and their backstories. With all Star Wars, you just have one little detail and you're just scratching the surface. I want to get to know so many of the characters who we only see for one or two scenes. Every single one of them can have a spinoff show if they want.

What can you all say about that closing credits sequence which reads almost like a Jedi adventures pop-up book?

WATTS: Yeah, I love that. We had initially thought about trying to do a bespoke version for every episode that sort of references Wim’s Storypad. But then we took all of those ideas and just put them together and thought it made more sense to be a nice little cherry on top at the end of the season. Because we're folding our story into this larger world of Star Wars stories that are the things that Wim is obsessed with on his Storypad, and we are just like Wim. We love Star Wars stories and want to see more of them. So it felt like a nice way to fold our story into this larger idea of tales of Star Wars.

Related: Star Wars meets The Goonies in new Skeleton Crew trailer: 'I found something buried in the woods'

So what is the future of this story, and will it be told, and where will it be told, and how will it be told?

WATTS: We haven't gotten deep into those conversations. I live in New York, Ford's in Oakland, but everyone that we work with the show on is essentially in Los Angeles and dealing with real life right now. So in terms of what we're doing next, we're excited to talk to everyone, but obviously everyone has their hands full right now dealing with the tragedies of the fires. But we're excited. We're happy that people are finding the show as well. We've slowly been building viewers over each episode, so that's a really exciting thing to watch that grow, and the word of mouth has been really positive. So we're excited to get back together with everyone and talk about the future soon.

Do you have season 2 outlines? Do you have scripts ? Or is it just all in your heads?

WATTS: We have ideas in our heads for sure. We're waiting to find out what everyone else thinks, but we've always had an idea of where this could go even before we made the first season. So there's lots of potential out there and hope everyone sees that.

Related: Jude Law makes his Star Wars debut in first Skeleton Crew trailer

Of course, one of your biggest challenges moving forward is puberty. How does that work in terms of your timeline if some of your child actors shoot up a foot?

WATTS: We wouldn't pretend like the kids are only six months older if we made more. It is fun to think of them growing up and where they would fit into the galaxy and how their world would be changed by the events of what happened in the first season,

FORD: And interconnected wise, how the events of the other shows would impact At Attin. It doesn't have to be a cameo, because if there's historical events are happening in the galaxy, it's going to affect everyone.

WATTS: Yeah, their secluded planet is now officially a part of the larger galaxy. So what would be the ramifications of that?

FORD: So you just start with this big pile of amazing story prompts and it's like it would be so much fun.

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