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Jan 13, 2020

The Top 10 Hunks of "Lost in Space," Season 2

I can't tell you how much I hate Season 2 of Lost in Space, the reboot of the classic 1960s series about a family of space explorers that gets lost en route to Alpha Centauri.  It's one ridiculous life-threatening situation after another, each solved by the family sticking together, because, you know, Family is Everything.

We left off with the Robinsons being zapped through a space warp and facing a solar system full of threatening robot spaceships.  How will they ever get out of this one?

Episode #1: They evaded the threatening spaceships off-camera (way to ruin a cliffhanger!).

For the last seven months (thus explaining why Will Robinson is noticeably older), they've been stuck on a planet with a methane atmosphere but an ocean of H2O.  Is that even possible?  They turn the Jupiter 2 into a boat and sail to an electrical storm.

Episode #2: They're stuck on a crevice on a giant waterfall that leads to an alien artifact. Huh?  There's writing on it, which the Robinsons can't decipher. 

Well, of course not.  You can't translate script unless you are familiar with the language it's written in.  That's why we couldn't decipher Egyptian hieroglypics until we found the Rosetta Stone.  Did anyone consult a linguist?

Episode #3: They finally reach the Resolute, the mother ship which got zapped into the space warp , too.  It was abandoned quickly -- food left on the table, "Space Cowboy" playing -- except for a little girl and a horse.

They didn't have enough time to turn "Space Cowboy" off, but they had enough time to evacuate all the animals except for one horse, which has been living on air for seven months.

Turns out the colonists left because a rogue robot was chasing them.  One that they couldn't just shoot.  But the Robinsons quickly subdue it. Families that Stick Together can do anything!

Episode #4: The colonists have spent the last seven months on a desert planet.  Suddenly they encounter a virus that dissolves metal.  Coincidence that it shows up the moment the Robinsons appear?  And  John Robinson is stuck down a well.

Episode #5: Judy is chased by dinosaurs.  What do the dinosaurs usually eat, when there are no humans around?  We see no other plants or animals anywher on the planet.  Do they live on air?

Meanwhile, on the Resolute, Penny and Vijay are trapped in a giant trash compactor full of plastic bags of garbage, including banana peels.

Can you believe that a spaceship is so bad at recycling?  Can you believe that they have bananas?

Episode #6: The  metal-dissolving virus infects the ship, so they're going to chop off the part with the classroom, where Penny, Vijay, Dr. Smith, and a teacher are trapped.  Meanwhile, on the planet, Maureen and Will discuss how much they care about each other, because Family is Everything.  Then they are attacked by hyenas. 

Really? What, exactly, do the scavengers scavenge?  Is there any other plant or animal life around, except for dinosaurs? Did anyone consult with a biologist?

That's as far as we've gotten.  Lord help me, there are four more episodes.

Any gay characters:  Are you kidding?  This is Lost in Space.  Family is Everything. Or, as a reviewer on IMDB says: its "made for mentally normal people,without any SJW agenda or without any scenes or characters meant to fulfill the dreams of any kind of pervert viewer."  Made by straights for straights.

Beefcake: For the first three episodes, it was just the Robinsons:

1. Toby Stephens (top photo) as John Robinson, a former Navy SEAL who got divorced from Maureen just so they could get together again.

2. Ignacio Serricchio (second photo) as Don, smuggler and all-around nogoodnik who got trapped with the Robinsons and joined the family.

Plus Penny, Judy, Maureen. Dr. Smith,and Will,who is 14 but still looks prepubescent.

Once they get to the mother ship/desert planet, there are a variety of dour-looking business and drudge-worker  types running around.

3. J.J. Feild (third photo) as Adler.  He was in charge of piloting the Resolute back and forth between Earth and Alpha Centauri, so he didn't see his wife and kids for two months at a time, and now he's probably lost them forever.  Family is Everything.

Wait -- I thought this was an exploratory mission, that the Robinsons were pioneers, boldly going where no man had gone before.  Turns out there are regular Earth-Alpha Centauri shuttles.  They were just passengers on a bus.

4. Raza Jaffrey as Victor Dhar (left), who seems to exist primarily to disagree with the Robinsons and have a son for Penny to date.






5. Ajay Parikh-Friese as Vijay, one of the three or four teenagers on the Resolute, who gets talked into a caper by Penny, only to get almost trash-compacted to death and then blasted into space in a storage bin.












6. Douglas Hodge (seen here in Salome's Last Dance, 1988, which looks like a far more interesting movie).  On Lost in Space, he plays Hastings, who wants to "get the Resolute to Alpha Centauri at any cost," even if he has to leave the colonists behind on the desert metal-eating world.




7. Bradley Stryker (seen here from The Final Stab, a homoerotic horror movie from 2001) as BK.  I don't know who that is; maybe a miscellaneous colonist.










8. Adam Bogen  (left) as Andre.  Ditto.

9. Sergio Lavaggi, a Vancouver-based fitness model who doesn't have any shirtless shots on instagram, as somebody or other.












10.  Johnny Ghorbani as "Concerned Parent"in the last episode.

The bad news: None of these hunkoids ever take their clothes off, not even when they're being decontaminated.

The good news: most of them have been in far more interesting projects, where chests are on display and gay people exist.

7 comments:

  1. You have a show about family, this is what you get. Though most families (Star Wars, any DC superhero team post-Crisis) spice it up with some dysfunction.

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    1. In the first season, John and Maureen were divorced, so they had that conflict until they decided to reconcile, and Maureen felt guilty because she bribed someone so her son would pass his "space colonist" exam. In the second season, it appears to be that Penny doesn't think she'll ever be able to live up to the superheroic standards of the other Robinsons.

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  2. I am curious how you feel about Dr. Smith being played by Parker Posey? I loved her in some indie movies a few years back.

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    1. Originally I disapproved of making Dr. Smith a woman. It seemed like a purely homophobic move, trying to evade the question of Smith being gay. Plus there were already three women and two men in the family, so why cut down on the beefcake potential even farther. But she turns out to be my favorite character on the show, theonly one who's not a square-jawed stalwart. My leaest favorite characters, by the way, are practically perfect Judy and "I'm a former Navy Seal,I got this" John.

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    2. To be fair, the "Dr Smith is gay" thing also involves him being a mole. And the entire thing is, he's in love with Will. Yikes!

      Ahem. It's like Batman. Dick (Hah!) was 8 when he became Robin, and Frank Miller's version has him as a stalker who kills other Robins so he can have the Bat all to himself. (Miller even makes it clear that being in love with a child is fine, so long as you're in love with a girl.) So we opt for Marv Wolfman instead. While he has a girlfriend, he seems more attracted to minds, and can have three male options, one of whom is all mind.

      Is it really necessary to embrace the whole "gays are pedophiles" trope? Of all the self-hating bullshit...

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  3. Maybe I will try watching this, after all. i still like to watch the campy original series.

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  4. The coolest thing about this version is the robot

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