Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Lost in Space

The Robinson Family are sitting around a table on the Jupiter 2 and playing cards in Zero-G.  They are all in space suits.  And then alarms sound and the ship crashes on an unknown planet.  Evacuating the ship, they find themselves on top of a glacier.  Moments later, the Jupiter 2 sinks into a freshly melted pool of water.  That can't be good.  It gets much worse, both the situation and the writing.

The current events are interspersed with flashbacks that don't really explain the present situation but hint at some things.  Obviously, this will make more sense as the series progresses.  For an initial episode, it's mostly annoying.  That's a small complaint.  Stuck on the frigid glacier, they would need something to provide heat so Judy swam back into the ship to get a battery.  On her way back, the water froze solid so that she was a couple feet from the surface.  Well, that's impossible.  I guess the science advisor sucks.  Next, John and Will Robinson go hiking to get some magnesium to melt the ice and rescue Judy.  Yeah, that's a bad idea but, as we've already determined, the science advisor sucks.  Also, the distance across the frozen wastes to the magnesium is obviously too far to be practical but it does make for an impressive vista.  John, who is a military man, brings a child who will only slow his pace.  Sigh.  While digging out the magnesium in a cave where they have seen burning magnesium, John pauses repeatedly to talk to his son.  Of course, this delay is just long enough for the glacier to crack and Will to be whisked away down an icy tunnel.  Great job, dad.  Meanwhile at the crash site, mom is unconscious because her leg was broken during the crash and its worse than it looked.  So bad that Judy - still frozen in ice - had to talk Penny through an operation on her mother's leg.  Failing to follow his father's orders to stay put, Will manages to get trapped in a tree to avoid an alien robot just as a forest fire starts.  Sigh.

John (Toby Stephens) is mostly a bumbling idiot.  He really doesn't know what to do and repeatedly defers to his know-it-all wife.  In the flashbacks, it is shown that Maureen had intended to only take the kids on this interstellar move while John stayed on earth.  The flashback explaining why he wasn't left behind will likely appear in a later episode.  Judy currently hates her father, though I'm not sure he is her father.  She's black while the rest of the cast is white.  Doubtless this will be explained in later episodes.  Most of the flashbacks show that John was usually absent on account of military deployments.

Maureen (Molly Parker) is hard to like.  In flashbacks, she does some sort of shady deal to make sure Will's failed test scores are altered; if the writers are as bad as it looks so far, this deal probably led to the catastrophe that destroyed the Resolute and left the Robinsons stranded.  That she sought to take the kids off-world without their father looks really bad.

Will (Maxwell Jenkins) is a kid.  He seems all right if a bit nervous.  Unlike the rest of the family, Will failed the tests that would allow him to emigrate from earth, thus his mother's shady deal.  He came up with the magnesium plan which shows he has a knowledge of chemistry.  Does not appear to be the prodigy of previous versions.

Judy (Taylor Russell) is the oldest of the Robinson children.  As the show progressed, I liked her less.  She has advanced medical knowledge.  She was cheated with the magically freezing water but, once frozen, she started dispensing her wisdom.  Hey, who's frozen in ice here?  She lives in a universe where water freezes differently and foolishly got stuck.

Penny (Mina Sundwall) is the blandest of the Robinsons.  However, she is also the only Robinson who doesn't screw up.  She doesn't make stupid mistakes or stupid decisions.  Thanks to writer neglect, she is the smartest, most supportive, and most reliable character.  Her passivity allowed her not to do really stupid things like the rest of her family.

Doctor Z Smith (Parker Posey) only appears in the last few minutes of the premiere.  As the Robinsons are evacuated to the Jupiter 2 - which is just a pod on the immense colony ship Resolute, she flees from a robot - exactly matching the robot befriended by Will on the alien planet - that is slaughtering colonists.  She stops to 'help' a wounded man (Billy Mummy of all people) but just steals his jacket.  The jacket says Dr. Z Smith.  She uses the built-in ID card to access a different Jupiter pod to escape the unfolding disaster.

I am partly tempted to watch more episodes to see how much worse it gets or, less likely, see if it improves.  IMDB rates this stinker of an episode at 7.6 while the series as a whole is 7.3.  More reviews may follow.

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