Skeleton Crew Finale Reveals Jod’s Origin Story Was Exactly What Everyone Thought It Was
The twist in this Star Wars show was, that there was no twist.
The mysteries of Skeleton Crew have all been made (almost) completely clear. Although there were no flashbacks to the moments when young Jod (Jude Law) learned the ways of the Force, we did finally get a very clear answer for why he has so many Jedi powers, but is not a Jedi at all. And, in answering this question, Skeleton Crew smartly didn’t drop any major twists.
Instead, Jod’s story was more or less what many of us already assumed. What the finale did was to make that tragedy both more specific, but also left a little room for another story to be told.
Spoilers ahead for the Skeleton Crew finale, “The Real Good Guys.”
Was Jod ever really a Jedi?
Jod (Jude Law) has finally told his story. At least part of it anyway.
Because of Jod’s age, and the time period of Skeleton Crew — roughly 10 years after Return of the Jedi — it stands to reason that he would have been fairly young when Order 66 happened. In fact, the episode makes it clear that even the AI “Supervisor” (Stephen Fry) running At Attin, is aware of Order 66, saying, “The last message from the Republic stated that all Jedi were traitors.” This means that Palpatine himself sent messages to At Attin’s AI, though, presumably when the Republic became the Empire, At Attin’s mint was lost in the shuffle. (This also implies there are at least two generations of people on At Attin making money for a political body that never came to collect. But I digress.)
The point is, Jod knows all of this and is more intimately aware of the eradication of the Jedi than anyone else in the show. As many fans predicted, he was a Jedi survivor and escaped from the Empire’s eyes post-Order 66. But Skeleton Crew twists this a bit with what Jod tells us: A woman, presumably a Jedi herself, started to train him when he was a young orphan, but she was then murdered. As he says in the episode: “She only taught me a little before they hunted her down.”
So, no, Jod wasn’t quite a Jedi, but a former Jedi did teach him the ways of the Force. But who was his Jedi master and who took her out?
Who was Jod’s Jedi Master?
The specifics of Jod’s past may never be revealed.
Unlike the character of Reva (Moses Ingram) in Obi-Wan Kenobi, it doesn’t sound like Jod was in the Jedi Temple as a youngling during Order 66. Instead, he describes his mentor like this: “She may have been desperate and ragged like me, but she told me I had potential.”
This makes it sound like Jod’s teacher was a Jedi who was hiding out after Order 66 wiped out most of the Jedi in the galaxy. In terms of who could be in the existing pantheon of canonical Jedi from that period, it’s really hard to say. Even when we start thinking about Legends canon, there are some options, including The Dark Woman, a fallen Jedi from the prequel era who evaded Darth Vader. There’s also Vima Da-Boda from Dark Empire, who was very desperate and ragged and was living as an old woman under the yoke of a cloned and reborn Palpatine.
But the truth is, we simply don’t have enough information from Jod to figure this out. And that’s kind of the point. We’re not meant to know exactly who this Jedi was, because the best answer is that she probably wasn’t anyone we’ve ever heard of before.
Who murdered Jod’s Jedi Master?
In the end, Jod was a victim of the Empire. From a certain point of view.
Because Jod doesn’t specify that he saw Darth Vader, it seems that we have to assume that his mentor was slain by the Inquisitors. In fact, it’s even reasonable to assume that some of the same Inquisitors we saw in Rebels and Obi-Wan Kenobi could have been responsible for taking out Jod’s master. Hell, before the events of Obi-Wan Kenobi, you could even argue Jod’s master was taken out by Reva herself.
Still, ultimately this mystery isn’t really a mystery at all. We know the Empire hunted down the Jedi after Revenge of the Sith, which means we kind of knew Jod’s origin story all along. What the finale of Skeleton Crew did was to affirm the history of the Star Wars galaxy in a way that was both nuanced and realistic.
We may never know the name of Jod’s Jedi Master or exactly when she started training him. We also may never know which Inquisitor she crossed lightsabers with before the end. But then again, Jod’s little smirk right at the end makes you wonder: Could there be more to his story? And if we do get more insight into Jod’s life, will that story take us into the past or the future?
