It’s unfortunate Molly Parker and Parker Posey are only going to get antagonistic scenes together because they’re good opposite one another. “Lost in Space” hasn’t really tasked Posey, and this episode’s the closest so far. Posey has kidnapped Parker after inadvertently killing Toby Stephens and Ignacio Serricchio. How was Posey supposed to know Parker was acting as ground-based mission control and Stephens needed her to fly his spaceship into orbit. Posey’s abject inability to assess the ground situation before she unleashes her schemes stretches credulity. It’s the most unbelievable thing in the show. No way Posey would’ve made it so far.
Posey’s plan for getting off the planet is to turn back on the robot’s spaceship and have it fly her out of there. She promises she’ll send help for the stranded survivors, but Parker doesn’t believe her. It’s also immaterial because they will not figure out how to turn on the spaceship until the last possible minute. They will learn many things, not just about the robot and his spaceship but the show in general. Turns out humans didn’t all of a sudden discover interstellar travel when there was a calamitous asteroid strike on Earth, one of the alien ships crashed (or something), and so NASA or whatever stole its engine.
There are flashbacks, complete with cute moments with static electricity for Mina Sundwall and Maxwell Jenkins, and Parker does really well with the figuring out.
The A-plot is Jenkins and Sundwall discovering they inadvertently found the secret to getting off the planet a few episodes ago—fossilized animal dung. They’re not sure what kind of animal it’s from—Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa tells them it’s an apex predator—but they know where to get it: a cave where everyone has to remain silent while chipping away at poop stalagmites. The whole band of survivors gets involved, including Raza Jaffrey and Sibongile Mlambo, who get maybe their series-best material here. Jeffrey’s got an excellent scene opposite Jenkins (who’s convinced Stephens is still alive because why not believe in the impossible, it’s a sci-fi action disaster show, after all, and it’s not like Stephens isn’t top-billed). Jaffrey’s out of line and awkward, but Jenkins is being obnoxious. Then Mlambo has a good scene opposite Sundwall and Jenkins, easily her best fully conscious scene.
Taylor Russell spends the episode trying to find and rescue Parker, which the script sets up like a big problem only to reveal it just requires Russell to check the GPS on the SUV Posey stole.
It’s a slight but good arc for Russell, who starts the episode almost telling Jenkins off for being the dipshit who let out Posey.
I just realized—Molly Parker Posey.
Anyway.
It's a little too perfunctory a script credited to Kari Drake, but Tim Southam directs the heck out of it. The cave sequence is a combination of Alien and then Jurassic Park, so, basically, what if Roland Emmerich wasn’t a terrible director.
The cliffhanger’s a tad annoying—the show really seems to be leaning into outrageous hard cliffhangers to encourage bingeing, something the show didn’t do earlier in the season—but for the season’s penultimate episode, it’s very solid.
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