Netflix greenlights new "Lost in Space"

Or the TARDIS.

 

That has instantaneous travel. In space and time.

 

Well, technically 'instantaneous' is Faster Than Light, right?

 

Tegan Jovanka disagrees with you strongly, Ian and Barbara too.

 

It's $470 on Amazon. I'd guess that's still cheaper than having to design and build a controller from scratch.

 

Don't think of it as propulsion. Think of it as exiting "Space/Time" as we know it and then re-entering it at any other point. I guess jump gates or wormholes are an attempt to explain something similar but not exactly how I would imagine it.

 

Lost in Space (so far) Thoughts
Impact
An interesting start. 8/10.

Diamonds in the Sky
This new Doctor Smith is different to say the least. 8.5/10.

Infestation
Also an interesting installment, showing how the Robinsons (and Smith/Halliday) work together to get out of their predicament. 8.2/10.

 

Oh, we have very good theoretical understandings of how warp drives or wormholes would work. They've been an active field of study in theoretical physics since the '80s for wormholes (thanks to Kip Thorne) and the '90s for warp drive (thanks to Miguel Alcubierre). Imagining how it would work in pure theory is the easy part, since it's all just extreme applications of General Relativity. The hard part lies in fulfilling the practical requirements indicated by the theory, which would require prohibitively vast amounts of energy or the ability to generate a negative energy or antigravity effect using currently unknown means (though there's been some promising research in theoretical means around those problems).

Despite the terminology used, I wouldn't call Star Wars hyperdrive a jump drive. Yes, they do use the phrase "jump into/out of hyperdrive," but Star Trek has used "jump to warp" on occasion. That's "jump" in the sense of a transition between sublight and FTL states or continuums, but the phrase "jump drive" is generally used to refer to an instantaneous jump or teleportation between locations in normal space. The reboot Battlestar Galactica used this kind of drive, and the star gates in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were along those lines too. Star Wars hyperdrive is more like Trek warp drive, albeit much faster -- you spend a nonzero amount of time traveling through hyperspace on a certain course in order to reach a given destination, and it's possible to emerge short of that destination if the drive fails (I think that happened in a recent Star Wars Rebels episode).

 

And bits...

 

At the end of ep1, it looked like the whole thing was sucked into a wormhole. Or similar. Because of the alien drive, and it wasn't under the control of the Resolute's team. Wherever is not where they are meant to be or where they think they are.

This is what's missing from TV: a SF program you can watch sit and watch with preteens, and not stress about excessive sex, violence and language. Yes, some people care about these things.

 

Still, it's a good point that making it a whole other galaxy is a bit excessive. The Milky Way is immense, with plenty of places to get lost in without going as far as another galaxy (although there are a couple of satellite galaxies as close as tens of thousands of light years away, and others at hundreds of thousands).

The problem is, though, that the Milky Way is immense. It's just one really big thing that doesn't have a lot of useful subdivisions for writers of fiction to latch onto. You could make it another galactic arm, perhaps, but that's about it, unless you make up an imaginary dividing scheme like Star Trek's quadrants (although 1/4 of something impractically immense is still impractically immense).

 

I have to say that

Spoiler: Scary!

the fuel-sucking eels scared me a little ...

 

@Skipper can't say I blame you.

@Christopher when they say 'Lost In Space', they mean. 'Lost In Space'..They are going to see some shit.

 

I agree that they should have stayed in the Milky Way. Honestly, I think it would have been better writing if the show had just stated that they were in an unknown part of space and leave it at that. Keep it intentionally vague. You preserve the sense of being lost in space without raising questions about being another galaxy. Maurene could have looked up at the night sky and said something like "I don't recognize any of the star constellations. We must be in a completely different part of space".

 

Easter Egg alert: Episode 7, Penny starts knocking on Will's door. (This involves the Robot) He doesn't answer, so she starts knocking incessantly. And in the rhythm of "The Cylons Were Created by Man" underscore from the BSG openings.

 

That wouldn't really work, though, not if you had a decent astrogation computer. There are no horizons in space -- you can literally see galaxies billions of light-years away. So no matter where you are in the Milky Way, there would be landmarks you could use to calculate your position -- external galaxies, pulsars with known frequencies and radiation signatures, the central black hole of the galaxy, etc. You can't really get lost in space, unless you're maybe way on the opposite side of the galactic disk, where we don't know much about the layout because of all the galactic disk in the way. Although you could still calculate roughly where in the galaxy you were from the external galaxy positions and such. This is something Star Trek Voyager got right -- it took the ship's computer mere seconds to calculate exactly where in the galaxy they were, even though it was totally uncharted space.

Even if they were flung to another galaxy, they could still identify known galaxies and clusters as astrogation references, so they could still figure out where they were, unless they were really enormously far away, like billions of light years. Or unless the ship's star maps were wiped and there was no astronomer on board, I guess.

 

Initial impression of the season - it wasn't as good as I had expected. It wasn't bad - just not something that I can see going very long if they don't bring in some stronger acting / writing. Parker Posey crushed it as Dr. Smith though.

I enjoyed the visual concepts and the fact that EP 1 jumps right into things. Even where it all ends had enough substance to make S2 intriguing, but it just didn't pull me in completely. I'd probably say B minus grade on my end.

 

I watched the first two, and it's pretty good. That's how you revive a show. Of course LIS didn't start off cursed with a sizable hardcore fan base conditioned to accept and defend any clumsy, half-hearted crap that has their favorite brand name slapped on it.

 

This is the obvious answer - all the superior hand-wringing about the writers not understanding the material they're working with is wrong.

 

Now I'm gonna have to go watch that again and episode 7 was the one that annoyed me a little.