Lost in Space Review

For a show called Lost in Space, there's not actually a lot of, well, space involved in it. The whole first season takes place on a single planet. And said planet? It's awful.

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The planet is, like so many other planets in science fiction, Planet The Woods Near Vancouver Canada, one of the two major planet types out there- the other being Planet The Desert A Days Drive From LA. That doesn't really bug me so much, I'm used to it. Lost in Space did a great job of actually adding enough weird colored plants and such to make it look more alien than most movies filmed in that area. Where it started to irk me? When it turned into a nonstop danger of the minute planet. In the first episode alone was featured- the ship crashing into a glacier, the ship melting the glacier, the ship sinking into the new pond formed this way, the onset of night threatening to freeze the family, the water freezing around the ship as one of the family members tried to carry a battery out, said family member being trapped as the ice froze around her (what?), the family only having x hours to dig her out of the ice before she runs out of air, a crevasse/ice chute, a killer robot, a forest fire... the list goes on and on. That's not even the full list from the first episode. Others from later in the series include eels that eat space fuel, a giant flesh-shredding rock storm, and the obligatory predators that hunt purely by sound.

While the sheer number of these problems is exhausting, it's not all downside. We've definitely seen a lot fewer man vs nature conflicts in television lately, and that's the bread and butter of this show, so I just might now be used to them at this point. I think if some of them were telegraphed a little better, I wouldn't have been so jarred by them. And, to the show's credit, the solutions the cast comes up with tend to often be scientifically plausible and narratively interesting, even if the problem itself isn't.

While I've only ever seen a very few episodes of the original Lost in Space show, the new show far blows the terrible late 90's movie out of the water. (Though I have fond memories of the movie, regardless.) The new show actually does a pretty great job of giving everyone interesting conflicts and plenty of agency, so no one, at least in the core family, feels like dead weight. The new Dr. Smith is... an interesting villain, to say the least. Will and his robot (who has a suspiciously nice butt for a machine) are the center of the show in many ways, but less so than the previous iterations of Lost in Space.

The show itself looks great, as well- or at least would have a few years ago. Television science fiction special effects have improved in leaps and bounds lately, with the Expanse and Star Trek: Discovery both looking better than a lot of movies out there. Ignoring big budget shows like that, however, Lost in Space looks fine. I've got no complaints there.

If you have any nostalgia for the Lost in Space franchise, or even the Swiss Family Robinson, which Lost in Space is loosely based off of, it's probably worth checking out. My complaints about the planet they spend most of the season on are aggravating, but not a game-breaker for me. I'll definitely be giving the second season a watch, at least, especially since the first season ends with them, you know, actually traveling through space.