Lost in Space
Season-Two DVD

America's premier space family took to the stars in what was essentially the Gilligan's Island of science fiction

	Lost in Space Season-Two DVD, Vol. One
	Starring Guy Williams, June Lockhart, Billy Mumy and Jonathan Harris
	Created by Irwin Allen
	Fox Home Entertainment
	Four-disc set
	MSRP: $39.98

By Adam-Troy Castro

he Robinson Family's Clinton-era journey to Alpha Centauri has become derailed. They now bounce from one planet of shapeless purple rocks to another, encountering aliens in shiny costumes and silvery body paint while struggling in vain to endure the antics of their resident disaster magnet, Dr. Zachary Smith (Harris).

In one episode, a futuristic space prospector dickers with young Will Robinson (Mumy). In another, Dr. John Robinson (Williams) gets involved with an intergalactic fight promoter. In a third, Dr. Smith finds himself condemned to a version of Hades, where he is forced to watch himself, as a child in hideous bangs, sucking up to the teacher by reporting another child's misbehavior.

Dr. Smith, who is terrified of everything, loves luxury, which is why he's so happy when an android-vending machine provides him with a shiny silver lady eager to give him footbaths. The reaction of Mrs. Robinson (Lockhart) is limited to a vague "That's interesting" and a reminder to everybody that it's time to wash up for dinner.

Like most everything else in Smith's life, the robot lady proves an unhappy development, the first indication being an unfortunate misunderstanding in which she freezes his feet in a block of ice. "Oh, the pain," he wails. "The pain, the pain."

When told he must do his chores in order to be fed lunch, Dr. Smith takes a nap, then musses his hair and runs around the corner shouting about the fictitious space monsters that just chased him.

The Robot points out Dr. Smith's lies at every opportunity, which prompts blasts of withering, alliterative abuse from Smith. Smith's polysyllabic utterances are sometimes marred by imperfect word choice (such as "gregarious" for "offensive") which seem less a deliberate element of his character than the natural end result of the show's writers attempting to use vocabulary above their apparent reading level.

All the aliens speak English and don't even have forehead ridges.

This Mrs. Robinson does not have an affair with a character played by Dustin Hoffman. Koo-koo ka-choo.

Oh, the pain, the pain, the pain

At one point in a representative second-season episode of this series, which was once upon a very arid and sheepish time the rest of the world's most prominent reference point when it came to seeing what SF has to offer, Will Robinson steps up to defend the spaceship's perennially endangered stowaway. "Dr. Smith may be any number of things," Will declares, "but he's no murderer!"

Well, uh, hate to burst your bubble, kid, but, uh, actually, that's exactly what he is. As originally portrayed in the first few few episodes (and as reflected in this season's episode "The Prisoners of Space"), Zachary Smith was an evil saboteur whom nefarious interests had entrusted with the task of ensuring that the crew of the Jupiter 2 never returned to Earth alive. He was very much a murderer, if not in actuality then at least in intent. Though this aspect of his character was eventually swept under the rug as the tone of the series devolved from theoretically serious to theoretically funny, he remained a murderer in potential, as there were any number of times he proved willing to sacrifice the lives of the Robinson family in exchange for his own momentary gain. Smith was a lazy, cowardly, egotistical, contemptible sociopath, who might have been a genuine threat had he not been so inept that only the constant intervention of the Robinson family was able to keep him alive. The episode "Prisoners of Space" (which jarringly uses black-and-white clips to recap his nastier moments from season one) judges him not guilty by reason of insanity, but even that's being generous. He's more like a fey Lex Luthor, without any aptitude for the work.

Guy Williams (who had achieved fame after a successful run as Zorro), June Lockhart (who had played second banana to a collie) and Marta Kristen (a pretty girl whose purpose on the show is to be a pretty girl) had signed up expecting to star. They did not expect a recurring villain, who was never intended to survive the first season, to become the star—or for their own characters, who were generic at best, to be shunted into the background. But that's what happened. The line readings of Jonathan Harris were just so over-the-top vainglorious, so unmistakably the only real signs of life in the entire enterprise, that he hijacked the spotlight for good.

Watching the series now, it becomes clear that this mutation was entirely to the show's benefit. Guy Williams and Mark Goddard are standard square-jawed heroes, but there's nothing particularly interesting about the characters they play. June Lockhart has little to do but remind the rest of the cast to wash up for dinner. Marta Kristen is practically reduced to an extra. The kids are cute, but little more than that (though Billy Mumy was a lot better on a scary episode of The Twilight Zone, and later on in some of his adult roles). The show's one major special effect, the Robot, may be the most useless mechanical helper the genre has ever seen outside the works of Henry Kuttner or Douglas Adams: His arms are about as vestigial as a tyrannosaur's, and his main contribution to any crisis is waving them around spasmodically while shouting, "DANGER! DANGER!" The sets are foam rubber, the storylines idiotic and the logic totally nonexistent. As science fiction, the show's been called the nadir that the advent of the original Star Trek, only a couple of years later, heroically rescued us from (though a careful review of both shows reveals that they have a lot more in common than fans may sometimes like to admit). But it had Dr. Smith. And that was enough. Without him, the show would be a total failure. With him, it's a guilty pleasure.

One episode in this bunch deserves special mention. "The Curse of Cousin Smith" features the titular relative (Henry Jones) parachuting onto the generic planet of shapeless purple rocks to pursue a long-simmering family feud. The Smiths welcome him in, only to find out that he's as much a nuisance as the Doctor himself. It's a dumb episode, even by the show's epic standards, but it's most interesting for the questions it doesn't ask. To wit: If the Robinsons' prototype spacecraft was the only one of its kind, and is hopelessly lost in space, how did he make contact with the alien beings who threw him out of their own vessel? How did he know where, out of a whole big universe, to track down his errant cousin? How come nobody among the Robinsons is stunned by his miraculous appearance, or interested in finding out if he can help them find their way back to Earth? And since that episode ends without his departure, or any real resolution to the feud storyline, what happens to him by the time the next episode starts?