Lost in Space 2018

 Lost in Space (TV Show) 2018

Not sure if this is funny or sad.

 Six minutes into the series, the family crash on Earth, in a snowy area. Mom's leg is broken, so she sits down and takes off her helmet. It is, after all, Earth.
. "NOOO!" shouts dad, thinking this is an alien planet and concerned that the atmosphere is not breathable.
. She points to a tear on dad's pants. "If the atmosphere was deadly, you'd be dead by now." she states, the evidence of his lack of death being the reason why she suddenly removed her helmet and caused panic.
. If he saw her suit torn, he would rush to her aid and frantically repair the fissure. She sees his suit torn and waits to see if he dies, because if he does, she should keep her helmet on.

. Just to repeat, this is minute six... 1,194 minutes of passive aggression to go. We can look forward to mom openly hating dad each of the 200 times he fails to die. There are 20 more family panic meltdowns still to get through, with the abject stupidity it needs to repeatedly turn nothing into disaster and back to nothing again.

. Also in the first 6 minutes: the family crash on Earth but fail to realize it is Earth despite there being quite a lot of irrefutable evidence that they could not possibly be anywhere else. For a collection of doctors and professors and everyone's a genius, it seems unlikely they wouldn't notice that.

 

 

. Here's another memorable moment: when he expresses concern that the black hole is getting closer. "Oh yes," she says, "It's almost here. I went into orbit earlier and I saw it."
Hold on... even if you could see a black hole... if you can blast into orbit then surely you're no longer stranded on the planet. You have to do a sanity check every time someone says something.

Meanwhile, we nervously wait for the girls to strike up an affair, for when that happens, it becomes underage lesbian interracial incest in space, which is a very specific genre. 

 

 

I have to work from memory here, but as I recall, the formula for the first season was entirely rote. We'd start with a good round of emancipation, with women declaring dominion over the weak and foolish men, and minorities declaring dominion over each other. For a family, they sure are hyper-diverse.

Then, suddenly, a completely unforseen event would happen even - and I'm serious here - if it could have been reasonably foreseen. Mom springs to the aid of the children but does she make it in time? Of course she does, before cocking up the works again with the screaming and the crying and the devastating attack of emotion. This may be due in part to everyone sleeping with everyone else, making the girls pregnant and hormonal and very, very confused.

   Let's be blunt about this. At no point is anyone lost, or in space. The whole lot are rooted firmly on Earth, but bizarrely, are in a panic to leave it. It's the perfect place but they hate it, despite food and refreshments appearing as if by magic. The most likely reason is poor signal, and you can't watch Youtube with poor signal.

The appearance of some horses felt a little out of sorts. Did the horses also wind up stranded on an alien planet, like the humans? You bet they did! Because horses, like people, are shit at interstellar navigation.

Like mommy and daddy when they're not fighting, the kids are horny as hell. When the robot is discovered, the poor thing is sexually abused to the point where it malfunctions. Thereafter, the kids turn on each other (and one unfortunate chicken, whose story we can not tell here) and in the general melee, somehow create one example of every ethnicity known to man. The chickens multiplied randomly or kept changing colour, much like the cast.

 

 
But best of all, is the predictable cliffhanger. "Let's go for a drive" "Okay" "Hmmm, those clouds over there look a bit menacing" [short while later] Kids (screaming): "DAD! DAD! DAD! DAD! MOM! MOM! MOM!" Parents (screaming): "KIDS! KIDS!" Kids (crying): "MOM! DAD! MOM! DAD!" .. and this, folks, is as good as it gets.

Lost in Space 1998

 

 

 Lost in Space (Movie) 1998

I'm not sure what motivated me to revisit the 1998 sci-fi adventure “Lost in Space”. I do recall having enjoyed the movie, and the cast (William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, Gary Oldman, Matt LeBlanc and Lacey Chabert) was a stellar selection of highly skilled actors. Together with Jim Henson's creature shop, ILM and no fewer than ten leading CG production companies in the UK and US, it was bound to be entertaining, I figured.

Ten minutes into the 122-minute treatment, the entire premise had unraveled in a pointless and unthinking cacophony of random dialogue that could only be possible if assembled from scores of preschoolers by selecting, painstakingly, the worst of the lot.

   
Mankind was to be 'saved' (from themselves, apparently) by establishing a ‘hypergate’, a portal through which a ship could jump. At the destination, a return gate would be constructed and the colonization of a distant planet could commence.

Enter the baddies. The ‘Sedition Fighters’ elect to attack the construction of the gate, a curious decision such a skilled and clearly intelligent faction would adopt, given that they are members of the species the gate was designed to save. Equally curious is that they would attack an experiment supported by theory that was weak at best, so the most obvious way to see it fail would be to wait. They decide to build their own version of exactly the same thing.

It would have made much more sense to simply start the movie with the family already lost in space. However, the desire to explain how they got there clearly was more powerful than the ability to do so. Getting themselves unlost by propulsion to random co-ordinates in time and space seems more like a way of getting lost, but no matter.

New Line Cinema had a lot riding on this movie. They were to relaunch the entire enterprise, franchising TV shows, movies, toys, games, the works. And then this disaster of a steaming pile of crap happened, and the cast quickly swept it under the table and New Line Cinema kissed their aspirations goodbye, as did Netflix, 20 years later.

 

 

 The kid "genius" admits his intellectual defeat at the hands of the bad guy like this:

“Surprise!” he says, perceiving a problem in noting his father's scream, terrified face and blaster pointing at the robot's head.

“Dad, chill, it’s okay, I hacked into his CPU and then…”
(pointing to the droid’s head)
“… bypassed his operating systems and…”
(points to the droid’s side panel)
“… accessed his subroutines.”
(shows a RC unit)
“He’s basically running by remote control.”

The kid might was well be saying "Ga-doh ga-doh" while beating himself on the head with a baseball bat. Maybe that's why he's a genius, he's worked out you don't need the bat. I think they should have left the bat in for entertainment value. Speaking of bats, Lacey's voice is so high only bats can hear it, mercifully saving us from the headache of nonsensical pointless dialogue.
   
'Okay' says the professor, 'As you know Alpha Prime is the only habitable planet so far detected by deep space recon. We're going out to Alpha Prime, take us ten years in suspended animation. There we will supervise the building of a gate, the companion gate will meanwhile be built here on earth. This will means vessels can pass instantaneously between points and establish a colony on Alpha Prime.'

So... the question from the press isn't 'why do we need a gate if we have suspended animation?' or possibly 'isn't there already a colony on Alpha Prime?" or "Doesn't that place Alpha Prime within our solar system?" or "why the fuck would anyone want to do that?" or perhaps even "if you've tested this thing, you know you can also teleport yourself there, right? "

Nope, the burning issue is "How does this relate to getting lost in space?" Phrased as: "Can't you use the Jupiter's engines to hyperspace out there?" The short answer to that question is yes, for we see (spoiler alert) at the end of the movie, it's how they get back. "No" says the professor to the attentive cadre of global news representatives. He goes on about how hyperspace is random and therefore a completely stupid idea, and therefore installed on the ship, you know, obviously.

Oh how they will freak the fuck out, he would muse, having spent hours meticulously planning the moment he yells 'Surprise, motherfuckers!" and then plunges down the red button, FOOM, random point in the universe. Haha! THEN they'd be FUCKED and oh what a caper!

Suddenly! the moment arrives! 'See you in hell, bitches!' he screams, bashing down the red button and FOOM, they go from random point in the Universe to their living room on Earth and the hunky pilot is missing and all the girls are pregnant.

In the end, the Robinsons were so happy to be alive that they didn't notice they failed on their mission completely, but was told it happens anyway by future baddie and future Will, so they just up and forgot about it. They also didn't notice the hyperdrive worked by failing to do what it was supposed to do. That seems like the underlying theme of the entire movie, the hypergate never happened either, nor did the sedition destroy it or make their own gate. Even the invention of time travel was somehow uninvented.

In the end, pretty much everyone was back at square one, except the baddie turned goodie maybe, who was now a spider. Told you all they needed to do was wait. 

Lost in Space 1965

 Lost in Space (TV Series) 1965

Let’s have a brief look at the evolution of the Lost in Space franchise…

1719:        Robinson Crusoe
1812:        The Swiss Robinson / The Swiss Family Robinson
1962:        The Space Family Robinson Comic
1965:        Lost in Space CBS/Fox Series
1998:        Lost in Space New Line Cinema Feature
2003:        The Robinsons: Lost in Space WB/Fox Series
2018:        Lost in Space Netflix Miniseries

Somewhere in there is a comic book.

Yup, three hundred years of gestation, adaptation and general wrangling of the Robinsonade genre. Now you know why their surname is Robinson.

 

So the CBS TV series, which ran 1965-1968, was based on the 1812 Johann David Wyss novel “The Swiss Family Robinson” which was, in 1812, made to be reminiscent of the age of adventure. That was back then, when practically nothing had been discovered yet, so spinning tales of unknown places was fairly commonplace.

Still, the idea of turning it sci-fi sounded futuristic so the cast donned their best tinfoil suits and prepared to live the life of a family out on a nice dangerous adventure, in space, as all families will be in the year 1996.

Angela Cartwright (13), Marta Kristen (20) and Bob May (the robot) (26) did manage to liven up the production by creating ever-more inventive ways of copulating on camera without anyone noticing. One of Bob’s tricks was to don the robot suit backwards, which wasn’t easy to spot. It does explain a good deal of the behavior in several episodes, though.

Sadly the behind-the-scenes activity remains hidden from all but the most observant, and sad only in that this was surely a great deal more entertaining than the cheap-as-chips nonsensical adaptation.

Lost in Space

Sci-Fi Yestercheese

End of Part One