The new series hovers between OK and painfully idiotic, often at the same time, though it does have its moments. It is at least watchable once though it does not have a lot of rewatch value that I can see. Also, the Netflix series is practically the antithesis of the original show in some ways (more about that later).
It looks like someone took the failed pilot from an earlier reboot attempt, removed some of the worst garbage (especially the space pirates and kidnapping nonsense or whatever that plot trainwreck was supposed to be) and tried shining up the rest with definitely mixed results. The Netflix series also improved the characters vastly compared to the failed pilot, though that is not saying much.
Frankly, the movie did a better job (so far anyway) even though it played up the silliest most annoying parts of the original series, and like all of the sequels they chickened out when it came to making the hero ship a "flying saucer". The reason the movie people gave for Star Warsing the Jupiter 2 at the time was, in essence, that they thought the audience would be too stupid to understand the helicopter-like movements of the ship (of course they did not phrase it quite that way).
The movie mixed up Penny and Judy and to a lesser extent Maureen, while the Netflix series mixes them up even more (though not as badly as the failed pilot IIRC).
The original series bible bio was setup was for an ensemble style cast but before any of it was actually filmed it slipped into the typical hero and supporting cast format centering around John Robinson (then flipped again to focus on Smith, Will, and the robot by the next season or so). It would have been interesting had they actually followed the character bios more than they did and kept it an adventure drama instead of the half-baked spoofiness of the later seasons.
Judy Robinson was the rebel of the family and the only Robinson without a genius IQ (she was an actress or singer or something IIRC before the mission and gave it up to go with her family, which might explain some of her silent "ice queen" grumpyness). She was physically oriented and a natural survivor type, something the network probably did not want to deal with since it was ignored and scripts changed to give others the jobs she would have had (Uhura got some of the same treatment in Star Trek, the times some random male extra sits in the captain's chair were the times she was supposed to be there, and Number One got axed entirely after The Cage).
In fact, technically Don West was not the only certified astronaut on board, Judy was supposed to be the other half of the flight crew and was the EVA and survival specialist (though John Robinson did almost all of that instead in the actual shots despite being, in essence, the engineer (and mission commander of course) as far as ship operations went). Unlike both the Netflix reboot and the movie she had no medical training besides the typical survival first aid an astronaut gets. In fact, she was the only adult on the ship without a doctorate in anything.
Maureen Robinson had the most degrees of the bunch, something only the Netflix series actually mentions. The original got pretty much the "June Cleaver" treatment onscreen unfortunately, though the movie version fared better. Her doctorates were in biochemistry and botany and she had a number of lesser degrees in related fields. Mission wise one of her functions was supposed to be the medical person and she cross-trained for something more or less like a navy medical corpsman level of medicine.
Penny and Will graduated from the same "magnet" academy at about the same time despite their age difference (and both early). While she does not have any degrees her main focus was zoology. She also had a rather peculiar ability to vividly visualize things, to the point where people who knew her often did not know if she was talking about something real or imaginary that only she could see.
She was supposed to be open, friendly, and have a kind of dreamy, ethereal air about her sort of like a cyberpunk running BTL simulations in her head at the same time she is interacting with the real world (which is why even she did not realize she was being manipulated by an alien playing mind games on her in one episode). If Netflix or some other reboot in the future actually picked that part of her bio up they could probably do it like the main character in "Unforgettable", or Misty Knight with her walk-on crime scene mental reconstructions if they ever wanted to show the "inside" of her head (I doubt Netflix will do it since in that series she seems more down-to-earth instead of quirky).
As usual for TV of the time, the male characters got more to do, including actually doing some of the stuff they had in their bios.
John Robinson was the ever popular "jock with a brain" archetype, with a doctorate in astrophysics and a masters in geology mostly paid for with football and fencing scholarships, finally working as a physics instructor for a few years (hence the "professor" nickname) before being tapped for the automated interstellar probe project. They launched the probe in 1988 and got its radio reports back across the 4.37 light year distance in five years or less (the colony was greenlit in 1993) so it either went FTL or jumped a few years back in time. The military stuff all started with the movie, the original series John was strictly civilian though his father's profession was not defined (except that they were a "low income" family) so the father could have been a soldier of some sort.
Will Robinson was about the same in all of the shows (except maybe that failed pilot, it is so forgettably bad I do not remember) and like Penny did not have any degrees yet. His thing was electronics and robotics, and unlike the movie version, the original series Will was not into physics.
Don West (who ironically had the fighter pilot callsign "Crash") was the main pilot and astrogator (and had a PhD in astronomy) and was originally very straight-laced and by the book. He was the fire to balance Judy's ice (though the show never followed up on that since it turned into the Will, Smith, and Robot comedy hour) and was supposed to unbend over time (though if the show went for another season the writers were considering him getting unstable instead and killed off to make room for more of the trio's antics since he was considered the most expendable by that point).
Doctor Smith had no redeeming features in his bio at all, and was not actually supposed to last that long in the show. The screwy behavior was all ad-libbed by the actor at first, though the writers started putting in more of it as time went on. He was a "double doctor" with doctorates in psychology (his first one) and an odd branch of physical medicine having to do with environmental factors. He branched his psychology training out into artificial intelligence as part of his agent/saboteur training though he is not good enough at it to keep Will from circumventing his tampering with the robot. The Netflix version has nothing in common with the original series Smith except for having a villain bent and the fact that she claimed to be a psychologist for a while.
The original and the Netflix reboot have a very different style and causative tone, the original was an example of the "one breakthrough that changes everything" style of science fiction, in this case a breakthrough in quantum physics that made it possible to actually build a magneto-gravatic drive and a new type of fission/fusion reactor to power it along with revolutionizing practically everything else.
In the Netflix series it is the other way around (again, at least the first season is, the next may change that), the characters are being blown around by metaphorical winds beyond their control (which kind of echos in a way the storm in the Swiss Family Robinson story that forms a loose basis for Lost in Space).
Both are valid styles, though personally I like the idea of the former a little more since that is the kind of sci-fi I grew up with (the E.E. Doc Smith's Skylark novel series was one of my early favorites for example).
It will be interesting to see what they do with it, first season ended with some good possibilities. I do hope they get the pacing right this time though, first season felt like they were dragging things out one minute, fast forwarding though the next, and no "goldilocks" middle ground between.
I liked the first season. I'm not going to analyse what I liked about it, I just did
Ok I'll try anyway:
It's nice to have a Sci-fi series where you can really see the constraints experienced by colonists and the challenges that presents. Rather than being equipped with transporters, phasers, holographic doctors, miracle workers and so on there's a limited amount of resources and limited options. Problems and challenges are more realistic and interesting as a result and it is much easier to identify with the characters and their problems.
Besides that, I like that there is a certain element of mystery added. Alien life is special again (something The Expanse also manages very well by the way).
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
the first season was correct, but the second season is really boring; the family of superheroes who save everyone, who solves all the problems. Humans use a stolen technology, the robots want to recover it (logical), they use the robot-pilot like a slave; and the bad guys are the robots: this is so dumb. All these TV shows, where humanity is put on a pedestal, it really starts to TRIBBLE me off.
Toby Stephens was great in Black Sails; what is he doing in this show?
The original show was still better (despite the silly '60s TV restrictions on women and the generally lower production values) than the remake until it devolved into the three buffoons' show, but the remake has its good points too. So far I like the second season a little more than the first (at least so far, I have only seen about four or five episodes).
Unfortunately their pacing is still bad, like they cannot decide if they are doing melodrama or drama or an action survival story and it flops around from one to the other like a fish out of water instead of blending and things get drawn out or compressed at random in the process. There are, however, more little mysteries than there were in first season that, if they follow up on them instead of leaving them as empty mystery boxes, could be interesting.
A minor point that is rather irritating is that they use that Millennium Falcon like design for the Jupiters. A saucer shape for a chemical rocket powered ship simply makes no sense (in fact chemical rockets make no sense whatsoever for single-stage to orbit vehicles like the Jupiter landers). The original magnetogravitic driven ship was a saucer because the main drive was a torus that ran around the inside of the rim of the saucer, and its main drive was nuclear powered, not chemical (the weird chemical fuel the alien plants liked was for the equivalent of RCS thrusters).
This season does seem a little more focused and complex at the same time which is an improvement if they can keep it on track instead of dissolving into more of Smith's paranoid scheming like first season did for a while.
the first season was correct, but the second season is really boring; the family of superheroes who save everyone, who solves all the problems. Humans use a stolen technology, the robots want to recover it (logical), they use the robot-pilot like a slave; and the bad guys are the robots: this is so dumb. All these TV shows, where humanity is put on a pedestal, it really starts to TRIBBLE me off.
Toby Stephens was great in Black Sails; what is he doing in this show?
I don't think it was meant to be a "superhero" thing at all though it does share some tropes.
The first season started them off as "just another family" but they were exposed to an unusual event that the others were not and increasingly the differing experience started to cause the alienation of the Robinsons in the eyes of the rest. That alienation built up, peaked, then crisis pulled the lander people together.
It is just the continuation and escalation of the alienation effect combined with some awkwardness of the writing that gives it that possible "superhero" vibe, but instead of setting them above the others, the apperently writers tried (not entirely successfully) to just set them apart.
(I tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible in the following but there are some very high level ones that have to be addressed for this to make any sense so I put it in a spoiler block)
Second season was actually an amplified repeat of the first one, with the Robinsons again isolated and experiencing completely different circumstances from the others, this time for a longer period of time, having a bonding crisis of their own, then returning to the fold again. Another amplification is the introduction of a third group who never experienced any kind of bonding crisis with the Robinsons or the others on the surface and who are even more rigid and untrusting than the first season main group.
The Robinsons are caught between factions, their disillusionment and increasing alienation provides the paranoia fuel for some of the worst of the third group to take increasingly extreme action against them and it has potentially dire consequences for everyone.
Unfortunately the extreme shortness of the season (less than half a traditional season to work with) the writers apparently got to the last installment (what would be an episode if the series was episodic instead of serial) and ran out of time to set up the cliffhanger and just sort of winged it, contradicting themselves severely in the process.
(Here it only makes sense in detail so it is a full-blown spoiler, read only after seeing the cliffhanger at the end of the second season)
The crux of the contradiction in the last episode of the season that the FTL drive acts a bit like a stargate or Babylon5 jump point in that as long as it is open anyone can go through, and there is an enemy ship too close (about fifteen minutes out) to simply jump the Resolute away to Alpha Centauri because it would be able to follow them through before the rift closed, so they set a trap and plan to destroy the enemy boarding party and escape before the larger enemy fleet gets there.
Unfortunately, later in the installment, when the plan against the boarding party goes wrong, they decide they have to abandon ship but only have one FTL engine so only ONE Jupiter can go to Alpha Centauri and the rest have to hide in the system somewhere so they packed all the minors in it and sent it off. What happened to the earlier established fact that the rift would stay open for at least fifteen minutes and anyone could use it in that time? Why couldn't the rest of the Jupiters simply follow the first one through without having to separate?
Another glaring problem is the way they supposedly found Alpha Centauri, by picking up and tracing Terran tech style radio signals. With all the doctorates in science the people have, why didn't even one of them realize that radio waves travel at the speed of light, so if they are as away from Earth and Alpha C as they thought, there would not be any radio signals and so it had to be coming from something else (in this case from something only 20 lightyears from their current position, which earlier they said was "on the other side of the galaxy from Earth" or words to that effect).
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My character Tsin'xing
It looks like someone took the failed pilot from an earlier reboot attempt, removed some of the worst garbage (especially the space pirates and kidnapping nonsense or whatever that plot trainwreck was supposed to be) and tried shining up the rest with definitely mixed results. The Netflix series also improved the characters vastly compared to the failed pilot, though that is not saying much.
Frankly, the movie did a better job (so far anyway) even though it played up the silliest most annoying parts of the original series, and like all of the sequels they chickened out when it came to making the hero ship a "flying saucer". The reason the movie people gave for Star Warsing the Jupiter 2 at the time was, in essence, that they thought the audience would be too stupid to understand the helicopter-like movements of the ship (of course they did not phrase it quite that way).
The movie mixed up Penny and Judy and to a lesser extent Maureen, while the Netflix series mixes them up even more (though not as badly as the failed pilot IIRC).
The original series bible bio was setup was for an ensemble style cast but before any of it was actually filmed it slipped into the typical hero and supporting cast format centering around John Robinson (then flipped again to focus on Smith, Will, and the robot by the next season or so). It would have been interesting had they actually followed the character bios more than they did and kept it an adventure drama instead of the half-baked spoofiness of the later seasons.
Judy Robinson was the rebel of the family and the only Robinson without a genius IQ (she was an actress or singer or something IIRC before the mission and gave it up to go with her family, which might explain some of her silent "ice queen" grumpyness). She was physically oriented and a natural survivor type, something the network probably did not want to deal with since it was ignored and scripts changed to give others the jobs she would have had (Uhura got some of the same treatment in Star Trek, the times some random male extra sits in the captain's chair were the times she was supposed to be there, and Number One got axed entirely after The Cage).
In fact, technically Don West was not the only certified astronaut on board, Judy was supposed to be the other half of the flight crew and was the EVA and survival specialist (though John Robinson did almost all of that instead in the actual shots despite being, in essence, the engineer (and mission commander of course) as far as ship operations went). Unlike both the Netflix reboot and the movie she had no medical training besides the typical survival first aid an astronaut gets. In fact, she was the only adult on the ship without a doctorate in anything.
Maureen Robinson had the most degrees of the bunch, something only the Netflix series actually mentions. The original got pretty much the "June Cleaver" treatment onscreen unfortunately, though the movie version fared better. Her doctorates were in biochemistry and botany and she had a number of lesser degrees in related fields. Mission wise one of her functions was supposed to be the medical person and she cross-trained for something more or less like a navy medical corpsman level of medicine.
Penny and Will graduated from the same "magnet" academy at about the same time despite their age difference (and both early). While she does not have any degrees her main focus was zoology. She also had a rather peculiar ability to vividly visualize things, to the point where people who knew her often did not know if she was talking about something real or imaginary that only she could see.
She was supposed to be open, friendly, and have a kind of dreamy, ethereal air about her sort of like a cyberpunk running BTL simulations in her head at the same time she is interacting with the real world (which is why even she did not realize she was being manipulated by an alien playing mind games on her in one episode). If Netflix or some other reboot in the future actually picked that part of her bio up they could probably do it like the main character in "Unforgettable", or Misty Knight with her walk-on crime scene mental reconstructions if they ever wanted to show the "inside" of her head (I doubt Netflix will do it since in that series she seems more down-to-earth instead of quirky).
As usual for TV of the time, the male characters got more to do, including actually doing some of the stuff they had in their bios.
John Robinson was the ever popular "jock with a brain" archetype, with a doctorate in astrophysics and a masters in geology mostly paid for with football and fencing scholarships, finally working as a physics instructor for a few years (hence the "professor" nickname) before being tapped for the automated interstellar probe project. They launched the probe in 1988 and got its radio reports back across the 4.37 light year distance in five years or less (the colony was greenlit in 1993) so it either went FTL or jumped a few years back in time. The military stuff all started with the movie, the original series John was strictly civilian though his father's profession was not defined (except that they were a "low income" family) so the father could have been a soldier of some sort.
Will Robinson was about the same in all of the shows (except maybe that failed pilot, it is so forgettably bad I do not remember) and like Penny did not have any degrees yet. His thing was electronics and robotics, and unlike the movie version, the original series Will was not into physics.
Don West (who ironically had the fighter pilot callsign "Crash") was the main pilot and astrogator (and had a PhD in astronomy) and was originally very straight-laced and by the book. He was the fire to balance Judy's ice (though the show never followed up on that since it turned into the Will, Smith, and Robot comedy hour) and was supposed to unbend over time (though if the show went for another season the writers were considering him getting unstable instead and killed off to make room for more of the trio's antics since he was considered the most expendable by that point).
Doctor Smith had no redeeming features in his bio at all, and was not actually supposed to last that long in the show. The screwy behavior was all ad-libbed by the actor at first, though the writers started putting in more of it as time went on. He was a "double doctor" with doctorates in psychology (his first one) and an odd branch of physical medicine having to do with environmental factors. He branched his psychology training out into artificial intelligence as part of his agent/saboteur training though he is not good enough at it to keep Will from circumventing his tampering with the robot. The Netflix version has nothing in common with the original series Smith except for having a villain bent and the fact that she claimed to be a psychologist for a while.
The original and the Netflix reboot have a very different style and causative tone, the original was an example of the "one breakthrough that changes everything" style of science fiction, in this case a breakthrough in quantum physics that made it possible to actually build a magneto-gravatic drive and a new type of fission/fusion reactor to power it along with revolutionizing practically everything else.
In the Netflix series it is the other way around (again, at least the first season is, the next may change that), the characters are being blown around by metaphorical winds beyond their control (which kind of echos in a way the storm in the Swiss Family Robinson story that forms a loose basis for Lost in Space).
Both are valid styles, though personally I like the idea of the former a little more since that is the kind of sci-fi I grew up with (the E.E. Doc Smith's Skylark novel series was one of my early favorites for example).
Ok I'll try anyway:
It's nice to have a Sci-fi series where you can really see the constraints experienced by colonists and the challenges that presents. Rather than being equipped with transporters, phasers, holographic doctors, miracle workers and so on there's a limited amount of resources and limited options. Problems and challenges are more realistic and interesting as a result and it is much easier to identify with the characters and their problems.
Besides that, I like that there is a certain element of mystery added. Alien life is special again (something The Expanse also manages very well by the way).
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
Toby Stephens was great in Black Sails; what is he doing in this show?
Probably due to the fact that the original Lost in Space is an iconic science fiction show and Stephens didn't realize the remake had lousy writers.
Unfortunately their pacing is still bad, like they cannot decide if they are doing melodrama or drama or an action survival story and it flops around from one to the other like a fish out of water instead of blending and things get drawn out or compressed at random in the process. There are, however, more little mysteries than there were in first season that, if they follow up on them instead of leaving them as empty mystery boxes, could be interesting.
A minor point that is rather irritating is that they use that Millennium Falcon like design for the Jupiters. A saucer shape for a chemical rocket powered ship simply makes no sense (in fact chemical rockets make no sense whatsoever for single-stage to orbit vehicles like the Jupiter landers). The original magnetogravitic driven ship was a saucer because the main drive was a torus that ran around the inside of the rim of the saucer, and its main drive was nuclear powered, not chemical (the weird chemical fuel the alien plants liked was for the equivalent of RCS thrusters).
This season does seem a little more focused and complex at the same time which is an improvement if they can keep it on track instead of dissolving into more of Smith's paranoid scheming like first season did for a while.
I don't think it was meant to be a "superhero" thing at all though it does share some tropes.
The first season started them off as "just another family" but they were exposed to an unusual event that the others were not and increasingly the differing experience started to cause the alienation of the Robinsons in the eyes of the rest. That alienation built up, peaked, then crisis pulled the lander people together.
It is just the continuation and escalation of the alienation effect combined with some awkwardness of the writing that gives it that possible "superhero" vibe, but instead of setting them above the others, the apperently writers tried (not entirely successfully) to just set them apart.
(I tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible in the following but there are some very high level ones that have to be addressed for this to make any sense so I put it in a spoiler block)
The Robinsons are caught between factions, their disillusionment and increasing alienation provides the paranoia fuel for some of the worst of the third group to take increasingly extreme action against them and it has potentially dire consequences for everyone.
Unfortunately the extreme shortness of the season (less than half a traditional season to work with) the writers apparently got to the last installment (what would be an episode if the series was episodic instead of serial) and ran out of time to set up the cliffhanger and just sort of winged it, contradicting themselves severely in the process.
Unfortunately, later in the installment, when the plan against the boarding party goes wrong, they decide they have to abandon ship but only have one FTL engine so only ONE Jupiter can go to Alpha Centauri and the rest have to hide in the system somewhere so they packed all the minors in it and sent it off. What happened to the earlier established fact that the rift would stay open for at least fifteen minutes and anyone could use it in that time? Why couldn't the rest of the Jupiters simply follow the first one through without having to separate?
Another glaring problem is the way they supposedly found Alpha Centauri, by picking up and tracing Terran tech style radio signals. With all the doctorates in science the people have, why didn't even one of them realize that radio waves travel at the speed of light, so if they are as away from Earth and Alpha C as they thought, there would not be any radio signals and so it had to be coming from something else (in this case from something only 20 lightyears from their current position, which earlier they said was "on the other side of the galaxy from Earth" or words to that effect).