Little show lost

Sci-fi reboot adrift in that vast space between shows for kids, adults

Pawing through pop culture’s never-ending garage sale, Netflix has come up with a conspicuously big but flat remake of Lost in Space, Irwin Allen’s initially serious, then kitschy 1960s sci-fi TV series based on a comic book that was itself based on an early 19th-century novel called The Swiss Family Robinson, about a family shipwrecked in the East Indies.

In the hype surrounding the U.S. race to the moon, the Robinsons became a space family, marooned among the stars. They lasted 84 episodes before succumbing, in part, to their sworn enemies, Batman and Star Trek.

The new Lost in Space (now on Netflix) is visually adequate but substantially thin, a stack of matzoh crackers where one hoped for frosted Pop-Tarts. Set 30 years in the future, Toby Stephens and Molly Parker star as John and Maureen Robinson, a couple on the verge of divorce. He’s a military man whose extended absences from home have distanced him from his wife and three kids. She’s an astrophysicist, ready to move on.

The Robinsons — including bickering sisters Judy (Taylor Russell) and Penny (Mina Sundwall) and their sensitive kid brother, Will (Maxwell Jenkins) — are approved to join a select group of colonists who will leave an irreparably polluted Earth and travel to a hospitable planet that orbits Alpha Centauri.

In a misfire of story structure, we join the Robinsons in the first episode already en route to Alpha Centauri. Lost in Space leans on flashbacks to fill us in on their personal backstories, but not enough to give the characters a necessary vitality. Disaster strikes the Resolute, the mother ship on which they’re travelling, and the colonists evacuate on their assigned family shuttles to a nearby planet. The uncharted planet seems at first like an outdoor enthusiast’s dream — snowy mountain peaks, gravelly deserts and lush forests with fields of flowers that bloom when you clap.

Trouble abounds, of course. While the Robinsons struggle to free their ship from a frozen glacial lake, Will makes a new friend: a deadly, super strong robot of mysterious origin, which reboots itself to become his sworn protector, and learns those crucial three words — Danger, Will Robinson.

Soon enough, the Robinsons encounter other survivors from the Resolute, including a cunning pseudo-psychologist named Dr. Smith (Parker Posey), who lied her way onto the Resolute’s manifest and — true to the original male character from the ’60s series — can’t be trusted as she schemes to make certain of her own survival. Then as now, the biggest problem of Lost in Space is tone, which unfortunately makes it the perfect show for Netflix, where anything goes in the attempt to make everything stick.

Setting aside the fact that this Lost in Space is unforgivably predictable, badly written and slow as Christmas, it also suffers from a lack of clear intent: Is it meant for kids and teenagers, mainly? Is it meant as a homage to the original? (Thus pardoning a messy mix of genres?) Is it just another piece of Netflix content that doesn’t really know what it’s trying to be?

The answers may be lost in space.