Lost in Space is stupid (Part 2)

Season 3: The Promised Planet

I remember seeing this episode as a kid. This episode is a lot of fun but doesn't make a lot of sense.



They finally arrived at Alpha Centauri (or so they think) and land on planet Delta at intersteller relay station 9 which is an advance station for new arrivals for orientation and processing. They're told in a few days there will be a shuttle to planet Gamma where they can join the main colony. Apparently the habitable planets in the system have been populated by humans for 3 years. I'm not sure how they would explain it. The Jupiter 2 left Earth for Alpha Centauri October 16, 1997. They were the first to go so they should be the first to arrive.

By the 3rd season it should be about the year 2000. Actually I'm not sure. There have been episodes where they travel through time for example they landed on Earth in the 3rd Season episode named Visit to a Hostile Planet except the year was around 1950. They left Earth but never explain if they returned to their own time or not.

I'm not sure how many years it was supposed to take to travel to Alpha Centauri but you also have to take into account that faster ships will be built over time and may arrive sooner than the ships that left earlier. My point is that they play fast and loose with time which is stupid. They obviously wrote this for a younger audience who wouldn't question such leaps in logic. For an adult, it's stupid.

Both this episode and Visit to a Hostile Planet use the same special effect.






The shot where they land is also a shot that is re-used again and again. See my last blog post where that shot is used twice for a planet and Earth.



The youngest, Penny and Will are separated from the rest of the group and tested while listening to music and exposed to bright lights. They are told they need to pass the test in order to qualify for the fun colony on planet Gamma. Penny has trouble at first but soon lets go and gets hypnotized by the groovy sounds.




This Delta colony is run by teenagers who seem to like nothing more than to dance to 60's groove music. Will is a square and has trouble becoming "groovy" which is code for getting hypnotized. It turns out these teenagers are actually aliens.




The aliens want to hypnotize the kids so they can perform some kind of transfusion so they can grow old. Apparently their "DNA" forces them to stay young forever.



I'm not sure why living forever is a bad thing. I'm not sure why they want to grow old and die. In the end the aliens fail to perform the transfusion in time. Dr. Smith turns on the music and the kids can't help but dance and Will and Penny get rescued.




The one kid says "All I want to is shave, see?" The unseen kid behind the intercom stops the music and says "We have failed Bartholomew. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we can never grow older ... that as time takes the Earthlings forward ... it takes us back ... back to our end." They don't explain what this means. Will they grow younger and die that way?

Here's why this episode is stupid. Once Will and Penny were separated from everyone, the aliens could have forcibly gotten the transfusion. They don't make it clear what harm might come to Will and Penny but if it's simply a transfusion they need, certainly they could have asked for it. The Robinson's may have been OK giving some blood, plasma or whatever the aliens needed to grow old. Instead the aliens tried to hypnotize them with a combination of testing, music and lights.



They erase the olders memories of the two kids and send them on their way. Luckily Will gives them some memory cones and they remember in time to return and rescue them.

It boggles my mind why aliens around the year 2010 (now) would want to behave like it's 1960. This episode did first air January 24, 1968 so they some how assumed that the 60's motif would continue to be popular for the next 50 years ... which is stupid.

Bonus Stupid: The alien monkey named Bloop Bloop they picked up in Season 1 Episode 3 Island in the Sky ...



isn't seen much after Season 1. We see this monkey during a take-off in Season 2 Episode 1 Blast off into Space.



Then the exact same scene is used again in Season 3 episode 2 Visit to a Hostile Planet.



I haven't finished Season 3 yet but Bloop Bloop is all but forgotten. They simply write him out of the scripts and assume we'll forget him. They treat us like idiots in this respect, insulting our intelligence and that's just stupid. Since Bloop Bloop is part of the family, they should have taken him off the ship when they landed on planet Delta but apparently they abandon him in the ship somewhere to fend for himself. Poor Bloop Bloop. He's an ignored pet sitting in his own poop somewhere ... starving.