Even the gorgeous visuals can't save this turd.
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| Lost in Space (TV series). Netflix, April 2018. |
I remember watching Apollo
13 as a child. I wasn’t impressed with the aesthetics, but recall thinking
that while the cascade of near-fatal problems seemed a bit forced (at the time
I had no idea it was based more or less closely on actual events!), the cast managed
to pull it off and save the movie from the dustbin of (audiovisual) history.
Sadly, Lost in Space suffers from the
exact opposite issue. Watching it in Netflix’s vaunted 4K resolution—with HDR
enabled, no less—the visuals are absolutely stunning. But what stunned me even
more is how incredibly insipid the narrative was. In honor of this atrocious
series, welcome to the first episode of “Can you come up with a better story
than a seventh-grader?” (It goes without saying that the writers for this show
would spectacularly fail that test!)
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| Except the problem in Lost in Space is "bad writing" and there's no escaping it! |
First of all, the series suffers greatly due to its
pointless “problem of the week” feel in each episode. I will spoil nothing when
I say that each episode confronts the Robinsons with a crisis even more
gratuitous or improbable than the last one. I think the main failing of the
writing is simply that they were (too) obviously starting from the desired
end-point (usually some sort of emotional realization, etc.) and then just
throwing darts at the wall until they hit upon some convenient problem that
forces precisely that end result. I have dubbed this the “crisis ex machina”
effect: the perfect problem at just the right time which forces the character(s)
to feel their feelings, and attempts (unsuccessfully for this viewer, needless
to say !) to push the audience into
melodramatic identification with the doggone unfairness of it all—poor Robinsons!
Just one example, sort of spoiler-free or at least spoiler-lite, will suffice to
make this point. Once the robot (who despite the show’s gorgeous visuals looks
quite ridiculous, as it is all too obviously a guy in a suit for 90% of the
shots—shame on you, producers, for cutting corners on such a key visual
design!) bonds with Will, the villain must engineer a scenario in which the boy
not only initially tries to hide the robot but, after it alternates—in response
to his express commands!—between saving and injuring the other humans, forces
it to take a long walk off a short pier (all of this, of course, is done in
full view of the only nominally hidden villain). Yeah, the robot, an incredibly advanced alien life form, is forced off a cliff by a 12-year old's whim, cause that makes sense. This is so the villain can
attempt a reset and thereby get a chance to be the robot’s protectee. Since the
writers obviously wanted to milk the melodrama of the shocking
tables-have-turned moment when the villain comes out on top, they simply
whipped up a bunch of crises, each more absurd than the last, which produce exactly
that result. And I thought John Connor was annoying!
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| By series' end, you'll want to slap Will Robinson a lot more than John Connor/Eddie Furlong, I can assure you! |
The writers also made a halfhearted attempt to circumvent some
of the obvious objections their hopelessly contrived story-line might provoke in
the minds of viewers. Why don’t their various spacecraft just take off and go
back to the mother ship? Apparently the writers had been watching Princess Bride and decided to
manufacture a convenient methane-eating critter, seemingly stranding everyone
on the planet for good.
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| I.e., "convenient plot device to push us into the next lame crisis" |
An alternate source of fuel is found? Don’t worry, the
writers find a way to ruin that too, basically by manufacturing a stupid sense
of looming crisis via the source’s precarious location plus seismic activity,
and then forcing a character to make a one-versus-many decision in the midst of—because
why not?—a brand-new threat, steam geysers! Yet another alternative fuel source
is located in a later episode? Well, that won’t fill up 45 minutes, so better get
some lame-looking bat thingies in there!
The cast is a bit uneven, too. While John and Maureen are
well cast and as believable as anything/one else in this amateurish nonsense of
a story, others left much to be desired. The villain, partly as a result of
casting, was far from intimidating, but more than made up for that shortcoming
by being absolutely no fun at all to watch. At times, this villain seemed to
start poisonous rumors/hit people in the head just “to watch the world burn”,
to quote Alfred, but lacked even the slightest glimmer of the Joker’s manic psychopathy.
But the worst casting choice/performance was definitely
Will. In fact, at first, I thought the worst problem with the show was simply
the mediocre actor they’d found to play him, because the kid’s performance
managed to turn ostensibly the most innocent, likeable character into an
infuriating nincompoop with an irritating habit of turning up his chin to look
scared, turning up his chin to look brave, turning up his chin and scrunching
up his eyes a little to look sad, and so on ad infinitum.
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| Look, the kid can also turn his chin up to look surprised/scared! |
When the villain gets captured, not only does Will the
rapscallion see fit to listen to the villain’s absolutely ridiculous let-me-out
ploy, he obligingly frees said villain despite the ploy not even making sense.
It can be paraphrased thus: “I know someone who could do that dangerous thing instead
of your father, and you really don’t want him to leave you again, do you? Let
me out right now (even though your father has literally already left!) and I
totally won’t tie you up or anything!” Never have I so thoroughly rooted
against the ‘good guy’ in a story before, and I initially blamed it all on the
actor. But halfway through, I was forced to reevaluate. It’s the writers who
should shoulder the responsibility for this hot mess. Sure, the actor may be
unimpressive, but oh, the contrived nonsense they keep writing for him to
stumble into—it’s enough to make one scream!
Near the end of the series, Will is in grievous danger with
seemingly no hope left, and I suppose the audience was meant to stare
helplessly at the screen, desperately wishing for the impossible to happen and
for him to be rescued. I hope you, dear reader, won’t think less of me if I
admit that I was entirely on the other side, praying fervently that the writers
would finally have the courage to kill him off! I trust you won’t consider the
series spoiled if I reveal that, to my everlasting sorrow, the annoying
Robinson family will be stinking up our TVs with a second season if the
cliffhanger ending is any indication. Would that they all hurled themselves off
a cliff instead!
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| I was certainly ready to jump by the end... |
TL, DR: this series suuuuuuucks. Give it a miss, and go back
to the source: Swiss Family Robinson!
(The title of the show should never have been Lost in Space, anyway—it should have been Space Family Robinson!)
The Math:
Objective assessment: 5/10
Bonuses: +2 for truly breathtaking visual aesthetics in crisp
4K+HDR
Penalties: too many to count, but I’ll try: -1 for Will
being such an idiot, -1 for the crisis ex machina nonsense, -1 for absolutely
terrible end-focused narrative writing, -1 for reducing Smith (the villain) to
a mere poison-tongued rumor starter, etc., etc.
Nerd coefficient: 3/10 “Danger, potential viewer!”
[This score, while abysmal, isn’t quite as low as it might
sound, since our scoring method is less bombastic than that of most reviewers;
see here for
details.]
This message was sent out into the furthest reaches of space
by Zhaoyun, reviewer at Nerds of a Feather since 2013 and normally an easy
grader for these sorts of projects but a stalwart enemy of sloppy writing any twelve-year-old
could easily surpass! Seriously, are any of the writers actually 12?
