Note: This Article Contains Spoilers From Netflix’s Lost In Space Season One
Space is a beautiful beast. Yet space is a beast humanity still has yet to conquer. What could it possibly take for humans to explore space safely?
Peak physical and mental health are at the top of that list. When creating the reboot to Lost In Space the writers (Matt Sazama, and Burk Sharpless) definitely kept the harshness of space survival in the back of their mind.
Trailer For Season One Here:
Real astronauts not only have thorough backgrounds in sciences and chemistry, but they also must undergo intense physical training to prepare them for changing conditions in space. Let’s not forget the countless hours spent running through emergency procedures and problem-solving. It was fascinating to see a scenario where those skills were exactly what helped them survive -skills that were trained and tested before their family embarked on a dangerous journey to a new frontier.
Will Robinson’s growth throughout the first season articulates how important those skills really are. Not only does his sister Judy almost literally get frozen thanks to him freezing at a time he needed to be collected, but his inability to handle stress was known to be lacking before even leaving Earth. Given the circumstances, his mother, Maureen, pulls some strings to get him accepted to the program, so they could venture into space as a family. Though Will’s age presents a very strange problem for future space travel, does his age affect his ability to adapt to the ever-changing conditions? In this case, he seems to be able to adapt just fine. His knowledge helps them identify a magnesium vein to help them unfreeze his sister Judy from the frozen pond.
Their Jupiter ships were a brilliant idea for a new colonization! It’s always nice to see writers planning out these expeditions in such detail. Every part of the ship shows a function, and everyone on the mission seems to have a fairly firm grasp of how the ship really works. They were able to gather information quickly to help them better understand their situation with returning to the Resolute.
Maureen plays a beautiful role in showing how knowledge of physics can change your situation completely. By climbing into a weather balloon and letting it float into the atmosphere to gather visual data to determine the strange weather patterns was brilliant. She also may have not discovered the star was being eaten by a black hole if she hadn’t.
A jimmy-rigged Jupiter was fashioned from a small group of extremely intelligent people to create a rocket in an attempt to contact the Resolute. The level of detail they went to describe the systems they needed to take out, gave the feeling that they were truly calculating everything that went into that ship.
John Robinson displays perfectly how physical condition in that scenario also gave them the edge to come out on top. Due to his physical training, he handled waking up from a G-force induced knock-out in enough time to vent the ship’s engines before they overheat.
Judy talks her sister Penny through a procedure on her mother’s leg that may have saved Maureen’s life. At fifteen it would be incredibly difficult to have to take a scalpel to your own mother with little to no medical training. Still, Penny passed mission training which gives her a leg up.
The Lost In Space reboot takes the concept of space travel and injects a harsh dose of reality. Space will be difficult. Space will be painful. It will take a whole lot of time, knowledge, and sacrifice. How much time you put into your knowledge will greatly effect how much sacrifice you will face on the road ahead.
The Robinsons will take you along for a thrilling ride that no adrenaline junkie could ever match. They teach us the rigors of space will truly take humanity’s best and brightest.
Andrew Uphoff is an independent author and blogger for ten years. When he’s not indulging his inner coffee nerd, he’s looking for new ideas to help push humanity towards the future. A love for fiction, video games particularly, has always driven him to expand on the ideas within the universe of another writer’s mind. Now he hopes to provide a thought-provoking dialogue both in fiction, and reality. www.chainedreality.com.