Little more than a month after the first season dropped, Netflix has renewed its rebooted version of space-family drama Lost In Space for a second season.
Despite fairly polarised reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, the show’s admirers have been glowing in their praise, with the New York Times calling it ‘a distillation of several generations’ worth of family-adventure and science-fiction blockbusters‘ in the vein of Spielberg at his height.
Child actors Maxwell Jenkins (Betrayal, Sense8), Taylor Russell (Falling Skies), and Mina Sundwall (Law & Order: SVU) came in for particular praise. However, Parker Posey (Party Girl, The House of Yes) as Dr. Smith was almost unanimously picked out as a weak point, leaning more towards jarringly outright villainy than the campy, Dick Dastardly-style Dr. Smith of the original – a legacy the writers will no doubt have in mind going into the second season.
The original 1965 series, dating all the way back to the days of black-and-white television and set in the far-off year of 1997 AD, followed a family of would-be space colonists who became stranded on an alien world. An unashamed sci-fi take on The Swiss Family Robinson (the family’s actually still called Robinson), the essentials are all still in place in the reboot, although the time frame has moved to the still-optimistic year 2048.
Despite the trend towards darker and edgier media, the reboot remains as family-oriented as the original (contra the recent Star Trek: Discovery and its foul mouth). However, this has not stopped the usual small but vocal elements of the fanbase from adopting the unnamed robot (Brian Steele, an obviously appropriate name) as something of a sex symbol – though, given its sleek humanoid appearance, as opposed to the lightbulb with claws of the original series, you can’t really blame them.
While the second season has only now been formally greenlit, the creators have apparently been working on it for a while now – both decisions which are understandable given the amount of money Netflix has pumped into the series.
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