"Oh, the pain! The pain!" - Jonathan Harris as Dr. Zachary Smith, perturbed by some imagined malady
Lost in Space: Season Two, Volume One DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Last time, as you recall, the crew of the Jupiter II - Professor John Robinson (Zorro's Guy Williams), his wife Dr. Maureen (Lassie's June Lockhart), their three children, beautiful Judy (Marta Kristen), sensitive Penny (Angela Cartwright), and precocious Will (Billy Mumy), pilot Don West (Mark Goddard), and their robot named, well, Robot (voiced by Dick Tufeld) - were hopeless lost in space thanks to sabotage committed by bad guy stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris). With no way to communicate to Earth, much less return there, the motley crew resigned themselves to settling on the mysterious planet on which they crash-landed. Each week they met strange aliens, fought the elements on their new home planet, and foiled Dr. Smith's never ending plots to somehow betray his fellow castaways and return to Earth on his own - all in beautiful black-and-white. How do the episodes in Lost in Space: Season Two, Volume One differ from those in Season One? Well, each week they still meet strange aliens, fight the elements on their NEW new home planet, and foil Dr. Smith's never ending plots to somehow betray his fellow castaways and return to Earth on his own - only this time, their adventures are in bright, shiny color.
At the start of the first season, Dr. Smith was depicted as a nefarious evildoer, a secret agent from some foreign country who would have been perfectly happy killing the Robinsons by sending the Jupiter II careening out of its orbit if it meant giving his home country the upper hand in the space race. By the end of the first season, Smith had evolved from wicked villain to bumbling antihero, a lazy, selfish ingrate who would willingly sell his own mother for the chance to return to Earth, but is so ineffectual that he is ultimately harmless. In season one, Smith was responsible for the series' most memorable and entertaining moments. Producer Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno) and the show's creative team were obviously reluctant to change this formula for season two, which premiered on September 14, 1966. Harris is billed in each episode as a "Special Guest Star," but by the second season, he is Lost in Space's de facto star.
Smith is a wonderful creation - a brittle, honey-coated villain that audiences can root for with little guilt. He is so petulant and immodest that he insists on holding a solemn ceremony in which he dedicates a statue of himself even as a massive earthquake threatens the destruction of the planet around him. He shameless goads young Will and the women of the crew into doing his work, claiming that his back is acting up. He even continues his highly amusing habit of using Will as a human shield in order to protect himself from danger.
Much of the credit goes to Harris' wonderful performance. He plays Dr. Smith as if tearing into a juicy role in a long lost Shakespearean comedy - a comically criminal Falstaff of outer space. With Harris, shrieking is elevated to an art form. He makes it seem so easy and ingrained that viewers are almost lulled into thinking that Harris IS Dr. Smith - that somehow no acting is involved. Surely the actor must have pranced and preened in such a way off camera, too. This misconception is neatly deflated in "West of Mars," an episode that allows Harris to show off his range in, appropriately enough, a mistaken identity plotline that could easily have been cribbed from the Bard of Avon. While exploring his new planet, Dr. Smith runs across his doppelganger, a gunslinger named Zeno (Smith, in a dual role) who is on the lam from an intergalactic sheriff (played by The Brady Bunch's Sam the butcher, Allan Melvin). Zeno is courageous, tough, and decidedly butch - everything that Dr. Smith is not. After forcing Dr. Smith to swap clothing, the bandit takes his place aboard the Jupiter II and allows Smith to be carted away for execution by the sheriff. The differences between Zeno and Dr. Smith provide a startling showcase for Harris' talents. In essence, he deftly plays four characters here: Smith, Zeno, Smith as Zeno, and Zeno as Smith.
In some ways, bringing Dr. Smith front and center is a welcome event. Many of the episodes in the first season were more effective at provoking sleep than Nytol. The episodes presented in this set are more compulsively watchable than those in the first. Smith brings much-needed humor and verve even to episodes that do not revolve around him. Several of the best episodes included here are somewhat tongue in cheek. In "Wild Adventure," Smith is pursued by a space siren (Vitina Marcus) who becomes smitten with him. As a resident of the "green dimension," her lime-colored skin, shiny green spacesuit, and oddly appropriate salad bowl headgear combined with her nonsensical coos and sighs make for fun viewing. She makes a return appearance in "The Girl from the Green Dimension," where she declares that the fey Smith is "pretty, like girl."
Humor also helps to elevate "A Visit to Hades," in which Smith discovers a harp that serves as a key to a prison holding political anarchist Morbus (Gerald Mohr). Smith, however, believes that the prison is actually Hell, and that Morbus is Beelzebub himself. Mohr gives a slyly amusing performance in this offbeat standout episode. We even get a glimpse at Dr. Smith as a lisping, Prince Valiant-haired youth in a flashback. Other strong episodes (Smith-centric and otherwise) include "The Ghost Planet," "The Android Machine," and "The Wreck of the Robot."
The focus on Smith has the unfortunate effect of alienating the audience somewhat from the Robinsons and Major West. They all come across as too gullible and trusting. In the course of these sixteen episodes, Dr. Smith nearly causes the Jupiter II to become trapped on an exploding planet, tries to sell Will to a traveling space circus, sets the spacecraft on a direct course into the sun, and stubbornly befriends malevolent beings while pooh-poohing those that might be of help. He endangers their lives and well being as many as four times in each episode, yet they continue to treat him as any old crew member, often assigning him delicate tasks that they surely must know he will bungle. In the real world, Dr. Smith would be left on an inhabitable planet or, better yet, fed to one of the beasties encountered by the Jupiter II. At most, the Robinsons get slightly peeved at him, and even miss a chance to return to Earth in order to save him from another of his dumb exploits ("Wild Adventure"). Why? Because, as Ms. Robinson says, "he's human." This could have easily been solved had the writers given Smith some trait or characteristic that made him indispensable to the crew - like the ability to make a killer crepe suzette - but as it stands, the Robinsons' blind forgiveness of his benignly evil ways makes the family seem less than human. (Maybe he has some sort of godlike ability to force tunnel vision on anyone he meets - in "The Prisoners of Space," even an intergalactic court acquits him of his crimes when he snookers them into believing that he is innocent by reason of insanity). Throughout it all, Bill Mumy holds his own as Smith's frequent foil, but surely the other actors were aware of the fact that even the Robot got better lines than they did.
Smith mania reaches its nadir in "Curse of Cousin Smith," a misguided episode that introduces Smith's long lost cousin Jeremiah (character actor Henry Jones, who appeared on everything from MTM spin-off Phyllis to Falcon Crest). How can a show about a family shipwrecked in outer space bring in a long lost cousin, you might ask? Have him parachute in, of course! This episode is ridiculous to the point of inanity, up to and including the end when, his storyline played out, cousin Jeremiah simply disappears.
The second season continues to display much imagination when it comes to low-budget set design. "West of Mars," for example, features a spaceship that resembles a giant flying birdcage. Zeno's untamed planet includes a cartoonish Wild West set that looks as if it was lifted out of a mid-60s variety show. The planet's gunslingers tool around on mechanized carousel animals - giraffes, horses, ostriches. The creepy alien villains in "The Wreck of the Robot" wear glittery blue bowlers atop their glittery blue featureless heads - Bob Fosse reimagined as a sci-fi nightmare. "The Dream Monster" contains a memorable set of golden men that resemble Academy Awards run amok. The overall effect is hokey but fun. Low budgets do, of course, sometimes lead to unfortunate choices. "The Golden Man," the episode that follows "The Dream Monster," recycles the idea of golden creatures. It also features ordinary vinyl beach balls masquerading as land mines and barbed wire Christmas lights (don't ask).
Sci-fi classics like Star Trek took on big issues big issues like racism and war, using the foreignness and distance that sci-fi provides to take on challenging and thought-provoking problems that otherwise would have been off limits. While Star Trek can sometimes be viewed as a microcosm of modern life, Lost in Space is concerned only with adventure, humor, and fun. The most sophisticated message it attempts to convey is "beauty is only skin deep." What it lacks in brains, however, it more than makes up in laughs - intentional and otherwise.
In the 1950s and 1960s, TV seasons were longer than they are now. Most current shows produce around twenty-two episodes a season. In the 1960s, the number was closer to thirty-two. All twenty-nine episodes of Lost in Space's first season were released in one boxed set. Season two, however, is being released in two volumes. The net price will remain the same, but the hope is that casual fans will be more willing to buy two lower priced sets than one larger set. The episodes included in Season Two, Volume One include "Blast Off Into Space," "Wild Adventure," "The Ghost Planet," "Forbidden World," "Space Circus," "The Prisoners of Space," "The Android Machine," "The Deadly Games of Gamma 6," "The Thief From Outerspace," "Curse of Cousin Smith," "West of Mars," "A Visit to Hades," "Wreck of the Robot," "The Dream Monster," "The Golden Man," and "The Girl From the Green Dimension." Can Dr. Smith and Will survive an attack by a space knight at the end of "The Girl From the Green Dimension"? Viewers will have to wait until the November 30, 2004 release of Season Two, Volume Two to find out.
The sixteen episodes are divided onto four discs. The discs are housed in slim, clear keepcases. The front covers each feature a different publicity photo - Robot on disc one, Will on disc two, the Robinson parents on disc three, and Dr. Smith (with the aliens from "The Golden Man") on disc four. The back covers include episode titles, air dates, plot synopses, writer and director credits, and production stills for the episodes found on the DVD. Because the cases are clear, the double-sided coversheets show through to the inside of the case. The interiors include episode titles and chapter titles. The DVDs feature the same publicity photos on its accompanying case. The four keepcases slide into a cardboard sleeve which employs a clever variation on the series' opening credits imagery.
The DVD menus are similar to those from season one. The static main menus mimic the opening credits. The sub-menus make inspired use of production stills from the series.
