If you've seen Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, you probably have a lot of questions about At Attin. This is the world that makes El Dorado and Area 51 look like public parks. The place seems well-kept and well-maintained. As long as you don't take a shortcut, you don't have to get your hands dirty. At least, that's what the adults tell you at school, and there are community rules that keep things running smoothly. When Wim seems to run off into the woods and ends up on a grand adventure across the stars, his father, Wendle, responds very quickly to searching the woods.
But why? How did Wendle know where to go? And who is the Supervisor?
"My dad's a Systems Coordinator," says Wim. Wendle mentions being in the Supervisor's review all week. When Wim misses his assessment, Wendle emphasizes that he was pulled out of a review to deal with the infraction. Whoever the Supervisor is, Wendle seems to work on a fairly high level. While Undersecretary Fara says they need all the Analysts they can get, a Coordinator implies a position of authority, and these are not a datarie-a-dozen.
What intrigues me is that Wendle's home life seems to not be much of a factor. It might be that this is storytelling from the point of view of children who have more black-and-white thinking, but we see at least two instances where Dad seems to never leave the office. His entire week in the early part of episode 1 is dedicated to working late for the Supervisor. But more importantly, we never see what events led him to the "Jedi temple" in the forest.
Wendle responds to Wim's trespass with the same focus and rapidity as the security droids who are on the lookout for truants. In neither case do I think that things are that simple. There is an urgency in both cases to keep children from looking beyond the society that has been cultivated in At Attin. Wendle may have been dispatched to find his son directly from work, having been alerted to the fact that his son had trespassed again. It may be that the security droids are only the visible evidence of surveillance that is done by the Supervisor or on their orders. Or it might be that Wendle, having returned home to find his son is not there, goes to stop him from looking further into prohibited Jedi information.
At Attin is closed off from the galaxy by the Barrier and by the regimented nature of its society. How far that extends is something we will have to find out in the episodes to come.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is streaming on Disney+.