Jod the Jedi?
In Skeleton Crew, Wim and his friends band together with the enigmatic Jod Na Nawood, whom Wim assumes is a Jedi because he can use the Force. But as Wim slowly realizes and finally tells Jod in the season finale, “You’re no Jedi!”
From one point of view, Jod is an anti-Jedi, resembling them superficially but opposed to them in values. In “Very Interesting, As an Astrogation Problem” (Skeleton Crew 1.3), he tells KB, “Not everything in the galaxy can be calculated.” This sounds like what Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker aboard the Millennium Falcon, in A New Hope, to warn him against materialistic thinking: “Your eyes can deceive you; don't trust them.” But the next thing Jod tells KB is that, “Sometimes, you have to trust your gut.” Following his stomach aligns Jod not with the Jedi, but with the Sith, who live to satisfy their materialistic appetites. Jod turns out to be voraciously greedy for money – “hungry,” he tells his pirate crew in “We’re Gonna Be in So Much Trouble” (Skeleton Crew 1.7). Far from valuing what can’t be calculated, he says in both the first and last episodes of Season 1 that “the only thing that matters” and “the one thing that means something in this galaxy [is] cold, hard credits.”
But from another point of view, Jod acts consistently with Jedi values, insofar as they were understood before the fall of the Jedi Order. In “You Have a Lot to Learn about Pirates” (Skeleton Crew 1.5), Jod repeats the old Jedi warning against attachments. He tells Wim, who misses his parents, “Forget ‘em. Your fears, your anxieties, your parents, they’re what you call attachments – and they’re the last thing you need. Forget ’em. That’s what I did.” Here Jod sounds like Yoda in The Phantom Menace, when he tells Anakin Skywalker, who misses his mother, that “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” Like Jod, Yoda thinks that fear is the inevitable result of attachments, which is why he counsels Anakin, in Revenge of the Sith, “to let go of everything you fear to lose.”
From this perspective, Jod is not an anti-Jedi but has followed one conception of the Jedi way to its tragic conclusion. Jod rejects all attachments, but this doesn’t free him from material cares. Instead, his lack of care for others makes him willing to sacrifice anyone to satisfy his appetite: “I’ll kill who I need to kill,” he says in “The Real Good Guys” (Skeleton Crew 1.8). Indeed, the only reason Jod doesn’t carry out his threat to kill the young adventurers’ loved ones is that, deep down, he can’t deny the bonds he has formed with them. If Jod had been raised in the Jedi Temple, the power of healthy attachments to curb selfish appetite is not something the Jedi would have taught him.
EXPLORE FURTHER…
Characters: Jod Na Nawood
Shows: Skeleton Crew
GO DEEPER INTO THE ARCHIVES…
Concepts: appetite / attachment / fear / greed / Jedi / materialism
Interpretive Tools: Tripartite Soul Theory
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