I just binged the whole of season 2 in one day. Whew. It helped that the episodes seemed to be a bit shorter on average than in season 1.
Anyway, it was good, but I feel they drifted a bit too much from the basic premise of the series when they got back to the
Resolute and caught up in all the conspiracy stuff about the alien drive. Also, there were some implausible contrivances to put people in danger. As a rule, nobody should ever exit a spacecraft (even one functioning as a sailboat) without being tethered to it or having a thruster unit. (Also, I winced when they did that continuous shot in the first episode of John and Will suiting up and going out the airlock, because
they didn't check each other's seals. That's, like, the single most basic rule of spacesuit protocol.)
Honestly, with the revelations about the robots and the drive, I have a hard time sympathizing with the human characters now. I mean, it seems now that the robots didn't attack out of malevolence -- they were trying to free one of their own who'd been enslaved and tortured. The humans are the bad guys here. Of course the Robinsons didn't know anything about that at first, but once that was established, it felt disingenuous for the show to keep painting the robots as an evil horde. Sure, they had Will trying to save Scarecrow and make peace, which was good, but it didn't go far enough in acknowledging that the robots were the originally wronged party in this whole affair. (Well, assuming the original "Christmas Star" crash was an accident, as it seemed to be.)
I think the writers of this show must be fans of the '90s Innovation LiS comic book, because there are some common ideas here. The comic also had the hyperdrive be salvaged/stolen from a crashed alien ship, with the aliens wanting to get it back. Plus, it did an issue based on the conceit that the silly, campy TV show was actually Penny's diary reinterpreting the more grounded adventures they actually had. So having this Penny write a book called
Lost in Space seems like it might be a callback to that.
When Ben Adler said "I understand Will because I used to be him," I wished that
he had been the role Bill Mumy played, instead of the real Dr. Smith. By the way, how did June get away with "becoming" the real Smith when he's still down in the cryogenics bay? I mean, she left him alive, and we saw that she feels very guilty about the man she allowed to die, so she wouldn't have deliberately killed him to cover her tracks. Although I guess he's dead now after the fate of the
Resolute. That's a pretty big plot hole.
(We also had a cameo by Angela Cartwright as June's mother.)
Was the colony a sham? I wonder. It seemed freaking elitist that they would only have the "chosen few" go to the colony.
It's not about elitism, it's about skill. Space travel is a difficult and dangerous activity where any mistake or performance failure can cost lives. The same goes for colonizing an alien planet. They need the most qualified people they can get to do the early work of setting up the colony, before things eventually get established enough that it's safe for everyone else.
Dr. Smith is so over-the-top evil for no reason that it makes the Robinson's look like idiots to still keep her around. Seriously, she holds no power over them...why the hell haven't they shot her out an airlock yet?
Because
they aren't evil. Didn't we already have this conversation in this thread? It's easy to glibly say "Why not just kill her?", but only a psychopath could
actually kill that casually. Hell, even Smith could barely live with the guilt of the life she took through inaction, and the Robinsons are supposed to be far better than she is.
