There is always a risk involved in revisiting the past. Too often you find that the things you thought were great when you were young just don’t stand the test of time. This can be especially true of the things you liked as a child. Case in point, Lost in Space. The campy 1960’s TV show about a family, their arm waving robot, and a wayward saboteur named Dr. Smith seemed much more entertaining in the 1960s than it did decades later, or more accurately differently entertaining. What once seemed like a great science fiction adventure became a hilariously campy study in Jonathan Harris’ chewing up of the papier-mâché sets with his over-the-top performance as the aforementioned doctor. The series didn’t hold up nearly as well as Star Trek. But in Hollywood these days everything that goes around eventually come around again, and like the Lost in Space movie from the 1990’s starring Joey from Friends, this idea has come around again, this time as a Netflix series.
Lost in Space, like the series that inspired it, is about the Robinsons, John (Toby Stephens), Maureen (Molly Parker), Judy (Taylor Russell), Penny (Mina Sundwall) and Will (Maxwell Jenkins), a family of space colonists who lose their way while en route to a colony at Alpha Centauri. Of course, the original series was not all that original, being based on Johann David Wyss’ novel The Swiss Family Robinson. The colonial expedition, composed in this version of several families (each assigned a Jupiter style spacecraft), falls victim to an unplanned disaster, sending several of the smaller ships (including the Robinson’s Jupiter 2) down to the surface of a picturesque but hostile planet. The next ten episodes find the Robinsons, their fellow colonists, an alien robot, and the felonious Dr. Smith, trying to survive all the hazards the planet can throw at them while trying to find a way to get back to the colony ship Resolute and Alpha Centauri.
Lost in Space is almost great television. It is certainly good, but the potential to be great gets lost in its tendency to indulge in the excessive jeopardization of its characters. Often it seems as if they are thrown into dangerous situations just for the hell of it, and having characters get dragged toward the edge of a cliff by a half-inflated windblown weather balloon, or driving into a tarpit and sinking, begins to feel a bit contrived. That said, the series is a solid science fiction adventure. Like most televised (and filmed) science fiction, actual science takes a back seat to the needs of the plot, but this version does better on that count than the previous incarnations. The plot goes in circles that largely involve finding enough fuel to get the Jupiter spacecrafts off the surface to rendezvous with the Resolute. The sudden pending uninhabitability of the planet that adds a ticking clock to that endeavor. The “I have a solution, there is another problem” pattern, like the jeopardy issue, weakens the story by playing out a little too often. This was probably a five-to-seven-episode story arc that had to be stretched out too far to fill the ten episode order.
The best thing about the new Lost in Space is the characters, and the underlying performances that support them. Maureen Robinson is no longer just the mom, although she is the center of the family, but is a lead scientist and planner of the expedition. She’s definitely the brains behind the operation, and her excessive competence might have gotten annoying if not for an outstanding performance by Molly Parker. Toby Stevens also does a good job playing against her as the estranged husband John. That estrangement seemed a little too contrived at first, but it played out well by the end of the season. All of the Robinson children are well cast, but Mina Sundwall stands out as Penny, bringing a credible amount of teen rebellion and angst to the role. Parker Posey, who plays the gender flipped Dr. Smith, is, well, Parker Freakin Posey. The role is more understated than Harris’ original, and the backstory has been significantly altered, but those moments when Dr. Smith is being duplicitous and manipulative are brilliant. Don West’s (Ignacio Serricchio) backstory has also been revised. The actor is competent, but I’m not sure that the discount Han Solo transformation was all that effective. The Robot is also given a different origin in this series, as an alien AI with a dark past that befriends a lost Will. Many questions about the robot remain unanswered at the end of the season, but the design is well done, and the robot’s delivery of the “Danger, Will Robinson” line is chilling. As for the series, Lost in Space is not everything that it could have been, but overall it is an entertaining addition to the Netflix lineup.
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