All Creatures Great and Small (2020) s02e01 – Where the Heart Is

The season two premiere opens very similarly to the first episode, with Nicholas Ralph back in Glasgow. He’s visiting his parents (for Easter), so four and a half months after the Christmas special, and mom Gabriel Quigley wants him to move back home. There’s a job at the local vet office. The practice has the latest technology, serves household pets (a growing industry), and prospective boss Euan Macnaughton values Ralph’s opinion.

And dad Drew Cain is getting a little old for working on the docks.

So Ralph tentatively agrees to return home permanently for the job, which will be open in approximately six months. Potentially the present action of the season.

When he gets back to Yorkshire, he keeps this job offer a secret from everyone there. This episode’s all about secrets, big and small. The other big one is Callum Woodhouse not passing his veterinary boards and, therefore, not being board-certified. It’s unclear how much this exam result matters—can Woodhouse practice without the results—but brother Samuel West is noticeably uncomfortable when housekeeper Anna Madeley wants to get Woodhouse a gift recognizing the achievement.

So West’s lying to Madeley quite badly, and she suspects something’s going on.

Then Woodhouse—who’s mostly just stocking the dispensary at the practice—has his own secret. Thanks to a busy schedule, he gets to attend guest star June Watson’s parakeet. Except it drops dead, so Woodhouse gets the idea to just replace it with another, as Watson’s blind. It’s the comic subplot in the episode, also involving West and Madeley to fine result.

The other veterinary case involves Philip Hill-Pearson’s sheep and the neighbors’ dog. Unfortunately, the dog’s terrorizing the sheep, leading to some severe consequences. Complicating things is the dog’s owner—it’s Imogen Clawson, little sister to Ralph’s love interest, Rachel Shenton; both Clawson and Shenton are pals to the practice in general, so when Ralph finds out the dog’s in danger of being put down, he and Clawson cook up a scheme to save the pup.

Also, under the surface is whatever’s gone on with Ralph and Shenton since Christmas, when she canceled her wedding (at her wedding), leaving Ralph open to pursue her.

The arc’s got some humor thanks to Woodhouse and Clawson gently teasing Ralph about his crush on Shenton, but it soon gives way to a conflict between city slicker Ralph (who doesn’t think you should kill a dog for barking at sheep) and the country folk. West, Pitts, and even Shenton don’t take kindly to Ralph’s input on the matter.

Amid all the contemporary drama is Madeley wanting to make Ralph feel at home again on his return—he was away visiting a couple of weeks—and seeing how West’s aggressive attitude is affecting Ralph, without knowing Ralph’s contemplating that job offer.

Lots of quiet drama, genial humor, and fine acting. Ralph does particularly well with the personal conflicts, guest star Hill-Pearson’s great, and Clawson and Woodhouse are both excellent.

“All Creatures” is off to a somewhat strange start for the season—not sure there were any secrets in the first season—but it’s a good start.

The Lions of Leningrad (2019-2022)

Lions

The Lions of Leningrad is European without being Russian, albeit then translated (from French) into English. But it’s a Russian tragedy, complete with a love quadrangle, flashbacks, gulags, and revenge.

The comic opens in Leningrad, 1962. The police arrest an indigent who’s broken into a concert hall. Only the arresting officer is a nitwit who just wants to torture an indigent; good thing a female officer is doing the questioning back at the station. The female officer, whose name is entirely unimportant, is writer Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem’s first entirely wanting female character. Lions doesn’t do a Madonna or whore thing; it does a Madonna, whore, or witch thing. Whores and witches are different. It’s incredibly annoying because the Madonna is kind of the protagonist. Even though she’s not the indigent recalling the flashback to the female officer, the Madonna’s the only character artist Thomas du Caju can reliably render. He gets the boys mixed up, which isn’t great in a comic with a dozen or so male characters throughout.

The flashback takes the comic back to 1941, when the indigent is a teen, playing Revolution with his friends. There’s the one girl, the Madonna, Anka, and the three boys, Maxim, Pyotr, and Grigory. All three boys are in love with Anka, who’s not interested. As the war comes to Leningrad and their lives go into disarray, the boys don’t stop pursuing her, making things more difficult at home. Her father didn’t raise no sluts, so he beats her whenever one of her male friends is nice to her. Then tells her to play some Mozart because music knows no nationality; who cares if the Germans just killed your friends. What about Stalin, after all.

Anka spends the entire comic suffering for the boys—which will also be a thing in the 1962 bookends—and gets nothing for it. Despite her character showing the most agency as far as Homefront derring-do, it’s only to set up her next interaction with one of the boys.

Maxim is the party secretary’s son, Pyotr’s the son of intellectuals (you know the kind), and Grigory’s the one with a single parent, his mom. The party killed Dad for complaining about his deathtrap airplane, and, as the story starts, Mom’s gotten lonely, and Maxim’s dad, philanderer or not, is a fetching distraction.

After the initial attack, where the teens get their Lions name—they survive a German attack and manage to escape back to Leningrad in a stolen jeep—the comic’s going to be about the long winter of 1941, with lots of starvation, desperation, murder, and betrayal. If the boys aren’t trying to screw each other over, their parents are trying to screw them over by proxy.

For the most part, Anka and Grigory remain the most sympathetic, though Grigory’s arc is mostly just thinking his mom’s a slut and mooning over dead dad. And even though he’s always trying to pressure Anka into sex, Maxim’s not as craven as his party member father.

Writer van Rijckeghem will occasionally try to texture the story—there’s a footnote explaining the historical accuracy of a Santa Claus analog—but he’s mostly contemptuous of his characters. There’s whataboutism with the Nazi’s attack (Stalin’s bad too, you know), and the boys aren’t so much friends as all hounding Anka and being collaborators in that effort. Everyone thinks Grigory’s dad’s a traitor, everyone thinks Pyotr’s parents are traitors, everyone thinks Maxim’s dad’s a party stooge—the only one no one comments on is Anka’s controlling, abusive dad.

There’s a running “Stalin banned x” gag, which is the closest the book ever comes to having successful comic relief. Unfortunately, Van Rijckeghem ruins it by making it into a pressuring Anka moment, but for a while, it’s all right. And it leans into the hustling nature of the characters’ lives in Soviet Russia in wartime. Everyone’s trying to survive, one way or another. Some folks just spend most of their time soapboxing about others… Anka does not.

She’s the female savior, just like the female officer in the bookends; she’ll make everything all right for the boys. Nothing else matters. The comic even ends on that note, which is a particular flex given the third act. Van Rijckeghem blunders a doppelgänger arc something fierce.

Speaking of blunders, de Caju’s got some awful moments. He’s got dead characters coming back to life—after not clearly dying—and then his action sequences can be nonsensical. More frustratingly, he’s got some good panels, where he’s clearly worked on the characters and their expressions, but they’re few and far between. Everything else is rushed, with faces sometimes looking copied and pasted.

Then all the shading is in the digital coloring, and there’s no real inking.

The cityscapes are all pretty solid, though.

Lions of Leningrad has its compelling, devastating moments—there are cannibal gangs during the long winter, for instance—but it’s never edifying as historical fiction. Van Rijckeghem’s just not a good enough writer to trust the historicity. He’s also got a substantial unaddressed plot hole, and everyone just has to go with it for the story to work. Then the trite bookends don’t pay off, except to reinforce the female savior stuff.

Someone’s got to save the boys, after all. They sure can’t be expected to do it themselves.

Seobok (2021, Lee Yong-ju)

The first act of Seobok is an espionage thriller (or the first act of one), the second act is a buddy action road picture, the third act is a Sturm und Drang superhero movie. Well, superhuman movie, at least.

The best part is the second act when spy-who-tried-to-get-out-but-they-pull-him-back-in Gong Yoo is teaching new charge Park Bo-gum the ropes of the world. Park is the world’s first cloned human, except the scientists couldn’t resist genetically engineering him a bit, so he’s also got a decent set of mutant powers. Telekinesis mostly, which looks exactly like Magneto’s powers in a fight scene.

Despite only being ten years old, Park looks twice the age. And we find out there are reasons he’s more verbose and intellectually capable than a tween. He’s awkward, constantly asking Gong questions with the Five Ws. Treacherous action scenes will fully pause so Park can ask Gong why he’s phrasing a statement a certain way. It’s not quite comic relief, but it does make for some amusing interchanges between the pair as they bond.

Gong only took the job—from former boss, Jo Woo-jin—for selfish reasons, which he’s happy to tell Park about, then surprised when Park gets upset about it. Even though all of Park’s mortality lessons have come from “mom” Jang Young-nam, the lead scientist on his project. Her chief sidekick is Park Byeong-eun, who’s kind of a wiener, but is also Gong’s point of contact in the lab. So when it comes time to show off Park Bo-gum’s superpowers, Jang gets him to demonstrate, while Park Byeong-eun tells Gong what they’re seeing.

Also involved with the cloning company is owner Kim Jae-gun, who doesn’t show up until halfway through the movie, despite having a bunch to do in the third act.

The spy stuff is okay—Jo Yeong-wook’s music covers for there not being a lot of story with it, just mood and intensity. Gong and Jo have some history, which we find out about during one of the flashbacks, and their relationship bristles just enough without the details. Especially with the music. Music’s awesome.

The flashbacks are not a particularly successful device. As something happens in the present action, the movie cuts to a pertinent flashback. Sometimes Gong is telling Park a story, sometimes Park is telling Gong, but writer and director Lee skips over giving the actors the chance to act out those moments, instead going full into flashback. There are no rules; there are other flashbacks just for viewer edification. The scenes themselves are usually compelling because Lee tries hard with them; even the worst flashbacks are well-directed sequences. But there are also some well-acted ones, particularly by Jang and Park, whose “mother and son” relationship only exists in those flashbacks.

Seobok opens with one American actor, Paul Battle, not getting any lines, just emoting and being assassinated well, which made it seem like the film would avoid bad American performances. The plot involves the South Korean National Intelligence Service working with the CIA, so more Americans seem inevitable, but it’s a long time until Andrea Paciotto shows up for a terrible monologue. Paciotto’s real bad. But predictable.

Lee Mo-gae’s photography is quite good; again, the scenes where Gong’s introducing Park to the world are the best, not just for actors, but the lighting as well. The world from Park’s perspective has a lot of personality.

Given all the narrative constraints and contrivances, Seobok starts forecasting likely resolutions before the halfway point. But the ending’s worse than it needs to be. Lee goes for visually impressive bombastic instead of anything character motivated, which was where the film got its momentum.

Despite having little to do in the third act, Gong’s a great lead. It’s a movie star-type role, and he excels. Park’s successfully essays the film’s most challenging part. Jang’s pretty good; her performance suffers because she’s barely in the movie. Sidekick Park Byeong-eun’s in it slightly more, and he’s good. Ditto Jo. Most of Seobok’s acting is solid.

There’s just not much acting to do in the third act when the VFX take over. The end’s inevitable by the third act and obliviously so, which turns it into a race against time. Is the film going to make it to the finish before its charm runs out?

It makes it. Barely. And leveraging a lot of that earlier momentum. Then the postscript’s okay, with good Jo music making it all more palatable.

Thanks to Gong and Park and their buddy action road movie, Seobok’s got a lot of good moments. They add up to a mostly entertaining, occasionally too wanting, genre mishmash.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e08 – Trust

Remake show creators Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are back with the script credit for the series finale. It’s an entirely acceptable conclusion, with competent but unambitious direction from Jabbar Raisani; most plot threads get resolved. However, the big one—Toby Stephens and Russell Hornsby playing “My Two Dads” with Taylor Russell—gets rushed through while raising the question about Hornsby’s age difference to Molly Parker. If he went into cryosleep twenty years ago and just woke up, he was in his mid-forties when he fathered Russell; Parker was in her twenties. But they already established they were in astronaut school together, so maybe she was just better at it than him?

Doesn’t matter.

There are big resolutions for Mina Sundwall, Maxwell Jenkins, and Parker Posey. Everyone else—including Russell—has smaller, mundane ones. Actually, almost entirely professional ones. Sundwall and Posey get the most character development. Jenkins gets another chance to do his messiah arc, with “Lost in Space” leaning in on as many last-minute deus ex machinas as it can fit in the episode.

It’s too bad there wasn’t more for Russell since it was her show for the first half of the season, and no one replaced her; things just got busy.

The evil robots attack, and thanks to some entirely predictable and very convenient plot developments, there’s both a full robot battle. The action focuses on the kids—Sazama and Sharpless’s recurring theme for these finales is putting as many children in immediate danger as possible—but the special effects work is all solid.

Speaking of the robots, the show cops out once and for all on the “humans enslaved intelligent beings” story thread.

It’s a better episode for Posey and Sundwall than anyone else; Posey because she gets an actual character arc, Sundwall because she gets to run the episode for a good while. They take it away from her to focus on Jenkins, having to get in a last-minute appeal to the tween male demographic.

Parker’s big moment this episode involves a continuity-lite recollection of her marriage to Stephens (forgetting she spent the first season and however much time before very angry with him). Stephens has even less, playing second-fiddle in his scenes with Hornsby.

With a stronger show bible, maybe a shorter second season, and a different male lead—sorry, out of the twenty-eight episodes, there’s probably two Stephens is good in—“Lost in Space” would’ve been more successful. As is, it’s much better than expected. Though Parker and Posey both have their moments, Russell and Ignacio Serricchio are the standout performers. And Sundwall and Jenkins are about as good as can be expected for whiney super-kids who whine they’re not super enough. They’re always sympathetic.

It’s a decent show and a nice sci-fi adventure production, albeit highly derivative.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e07 – Contingencies on Contingencies

This episode has such an exhausting amount of Toby Stephens being macho someone calls him on it to his face. Stephens is convinced the robot—now on Alpha Centauri with the humans—has gone rogue. Raza Jaffrey, who points out he almost stole a space-camper and abandoned over a hundred people to the elements, tells him to take it down a notch and think it through.

Complicating the issue isn’t the robot’s guilt or innocence, it’s his “victim.” Douglas Hodge, the guy who enslaved the alien robot, lied to the people of Earth (and the colony), tried to kill a bunch of mechanics, and so on; he’s got the only key to saving the colony from the imminent alien invasion. If this guy had died or been incarcerated after his first blatant act of murderous villainy, the show could’ve been a season shorter. For all his macho posturing, Stephens never held him to account for trying to kill his kids or whatever either.

Instead, Stephens wants to take it out on the robot. If they just included the subtext about the robot being a better dad than Stephens, it might be something; the whole family is like, “Maybe the robot’s not a bad guy,” and Stephens telling them he’s smarter. Though “Lost in Space” is always about Stephens never being smarter.

Too much Stephens and too much green screen hurt the episode, which is otherwise a fine Leslie Hope-directed outing. Easily her worst episode, but not her fault and still better than most.

The episode begins with the Robinsons arriving at Alpha Centauri to discover… the alien robots haven’t beaten them there. Everything’s jimdandy, other than Mina Sundwall having to decide between nerdy poet Ajay Friese and bro Charles Vandervaart. But all the stakes are otherwise chill. Even Parker Posey just gets to get into an SUV and autopilot off to her own little plot of land.

At least until the robot goes rogue and Sundwall and Taylor Russell decide Stephens is wrong, so they go looking for it, bringing along Ignacio Serricchio. They’ve got a race against time, race against Stephens plot going, while Molly Parker and Russell Hornsby try to figure out how to prepare the colony for an eventual attack. We get some backstory on Parker and Hornsby. It’s relatively boring stuff, which tracks since it never should’ve been a plot point in the first couple seasons—mixed-race Russell and her mostly ginger family. The biggest question gets resolved with an institutional cop-out to alleviate responsibility or accountability from everyone. “Space” really has no idea what to do with its long-running story arcs.

Eventually, there’s some Rock’ Em Sock’ Em robot action and a deluded callback to the first episode for Russell, plus potential character development for Sundwall. Though the script—credited to Zack Estrin—has a chance to give her the agency for it and instead transfers it to Friese, which could be better.

But it’s a compelling episode. Way too much hinges on believing Stephens is a brash, thoughtless asshole, but what can you do.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e06 – Final Transmission

Yet another short episode. And it’s got a huge dramatic beat in the latter half, but not for the cliffhanger. In fact, everything after the dramatic beat just serves to reduce the impact of that beat. It plays very awkwardly, which isn’t director Julian Holmes’s fault, just the script’s. Katherine Collins gets the credit; as per her usual, there’s a lousy sappy monologue from one of the cast members. It’s worse than usual because it’s not in dialogue but pre-recorded monologue, so they’re trying to edit to match.

Despite crashing on a bog planet—Dagobah without matte paintings—for once, the space-camper is almost ready for flight. They just need to clean things up and wait for Ignacio Serricchio to arrive. He’s busy walking with his pet chicken in a long shot. Maxwell Jenkins and Toby Stephens go up top to watch him approach and have a painful conversation about Jenkins getting older. I think he’s as tall as Stephens or taller, but I don’t remember them mentioning it.

There’s a better check-up scene between Molly Parker and Parker Posey, harkening back to their original bonding scenes in the first season. It’s okay, but a reminder the show never really gave the two of them anything to do together.

Then we get some earth-shattering news (well, not really) about how the Cylons found Earth in the first place (and when), and it changes everything, meaning Jenkins is going to have to go out and have a showdown with the alien boss. There are a handful more revelations (“Lost in Space” really does go with “It’s okay to enslave artificial beings”) before the huge dramatic beat and fallout. The fallout is everyone scrambling to get to the next episode so they can have their narrative stakes and eat them too.

The episode features Stephens’s worst acting on the show (I’d say so far, but it’s almost over, right… this season’s it). A lot of it is the script’s fault, though the show has never written Stephens’s character to suit the performance, so what can you really do about it. We’re in the final three episodes, not much.

What’s so much worse about it is when the show acknowledges the deficiency—Parker Posey comments on it this time—only it never improves.

There’s also some middling acting from Jenkins, but it’s big swing stuff—embracing his Messianic possibilities—so it’s easier to let it slide. The Stephens stuff isn’t even disappointing; instead exasperating and tedious.

The episode resolves one of the show’s longest-running “mythology” arcs, and it’s the weakest weak sauce. You’d think with so much activity on this arc, they’d have something better planned for the finish.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e05 – Stuck

It’s another short episode, but it’s also a Leslie Hope-directed episode, and she does not disappoint. Even saddled with flashbacks to when Taylor Russell was a baby, and Molly Parker has taken her home to mom Colleen Winton’s farm to raise her. It’s where we find out Parker gave up being an astronaut to have Russell and, even though most of their relationship development’s in the flashback, it’s a reasonably good episode for the two of them.

The Robinsons’ space-camper has crashed on an unknown world, having diverted away from the Alpha Centauri colony at the last minute to keep the evil robots from finding it. Everyone except Parker and Russell could eject, but their seats malfunctioned. So the episode’s the two of them in danger—not only is Parker sitting on a seat of dynamite, they’re sinking into alien goop, and the engines are offline. I wonder how many times the engines work on “Lost in Space.” I feel like it’s less than a third of the time.

Anyway.

The rest of the cast is paired off on adventures, even if it’s just Ignacio Serricchio and his pet chicken. The pet chicken sequences are outstanding, with Hope finding humor in the absurd dangers.

Toby Stephens and Mina Sundwall go looking for the robot together, bonding along the way. It’s a good sequence for Sundwall, not so good for Stephens. It’s probably Stephens’s best work this season so far, but—once again—it relies on his character not actually being anywhere near as with it as he’d need to be to survive so long “Lost in Space.”

Maxwell Jenkins and Parker Posey have the least amount of material, which has Jenkins trying to recover his backpack from a precarious hanging situation while Posey yells at him to hurry up. There’s a little bit of character work for Posey, who’s on—if not a redemption arc—at least a considered failed redemption arc. Though it’s a little weird her confidant is a kid. They don’t quite make that angle work.

But the stuff with Russell and Parker is where the episode excels, thanks to Hope, Russell, and Parker. While “Lost in Space” isn’t really anyone’s showcase, Russell’s gotten the best arc throughout the series, with this episode just drawing attention to the differences in her story and the other kids’. Jenkins has his tween boy adventurer thing, which isn’t character development, and then Sundwall’s got a love triangle. Unfortunately, that love triangle is thinner than the relationship stuff she had before because they can reduce it to tropes.

It’s so well-done, it makes up for the finale’s solution being something they could’ve done the entire time and even talked about doing. They just had to put it off for dramatic tension’s sake.

Hope’s direction is “Space”'s greatest discovery.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e04 – Northing Left Behind

So far, this season has had fifty-ish-minute episodes. This episode’s only forty. It’s got a couple things to do, and it does them expediently, which makes it a bridging episode of sorts.

While the kids are safely in spaceflight, thanks to Taylor Russell and Russell Hornsby, their parents—half a galaxy away or whatever—are in more danger than before because the evil robots know where they’ve got their spaceships hidden. So it’s going to be a countdown to disaster episode for Molly Parker and Toby Stephens. They’re out of time (again) and have to prepare for imminent destruction (again), but they’re going to make sure the robots can’t get to their kids (again). Or to the Alpha Centauri colony. They’ve got to destroy all their records.

It ends up being a reasonably amusing Ignacio Serricchio sequence, where he gets to pal around with former boss and now subordinate and good friend Tattiawna Jones. We also get to see some other familiar faces, though not Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who I think got killed off offscreen so they wouldn’t have to bring him back.

Except the evil robots aren’t just satisfied destroying the adults, they want to get rid of the kids too, so when the kids get ready to fly to safety, an evil robot possesses their robot. Again, so convenient the robots have the technology to communicate across galaxies in real-time with no lag. It’d be such a pain for the narrative if they couldn’t.

But even if the kids do go save the adults, they’re still no match for the Cylon fleet, which means they’re going to need a great plan to succeed. After some character development masquerading as escalating action for Russell and Hornsby, Maxwell Jenkins takes the lead on the “saving the day” stuff. Because Jenkins isn’t just trying to save the adults, he’s also trying to figure out how he and his robot can go off on their secret mission.

Despite the stakes being weird—the adults burning documents like they’re expecting the SEC inspectors to serve them a warrant, the kids bickering like a Disney after-school special—once the episode gets going with the sci-fi action suspense, it does pretty well. Julian Holmes’s direction is outstanding on those sequences.

There are some decent reuniting moments, and the cliffhanger setup is appropriately harrowing, even if it does just get the show right back to its… end of season one ground situation? Makes you wish someone would just say, “Oh, no, we’re lost in space… again!”

Another notable item—there’s finally a gay couple in “Lost in Space.” They don’t get names, they don’t get dialogue, but they do get to embrace each other, waiting for the robots to blast them out of the sky, just like all the straights in a montage sequence.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e03 – The New Guy

While I’m sure they didn’t bring in Russell Hornsby—as Taylor Russell’s long-lost (in space) biological father—to offset Toby Stephens’s energy vampiring, but Hornsby does have that effect. The nicest “Lost in Space” has been in ages is when Mina Sundwall, being introduced to Hornsby, gives him a hug.

Hornsby will have an arc, mostly with Russell, about being a real spaceship captain and not one who lets the computer fly for him. They’re prepping the ship for take-off, and he can’t stop talking about the importance of real experience over autopilot, even an autopilot programmed by Molly Parker. The show’s cagey about Parker and Hornsby’s history, allowing for a backstory bombshell in the resolution. Well, as much as a twenty-year-old, mostly inconsequential reveal can be a bombshell.

Parker spends the episode with Stephens, Ignacio Serricchio, and their robot. Regular robot is just helping get the ship ready for take-off, but the new robot (the one the humans enslaved to fly them across the galaxy) is helping Parker and company get an alien engine to save the day.

Stephens doesn’t trust the robot (what with the enslaving thing), while Serricchio tries humorously to bond with it, and Parker tries to form a meaningful connection. That plot is an action-thriller one, involving planning, a chase sequence, and last-minute twists and turns. The CGI is a little off—not the action, but the rock formations where Parker and the robot hang out (down the block from Kirk and the Gorn). The director, Sarah Boyd, directs for better scenery than Parker ends up with. It’s okay—thanks to a good twist—but ought to be better.

It’s not all the CGI’s fault. Mopey Stephens drains the energy out of scenes.

Meanwhile, Maxwell Jenkins has a sci-fi Indiana Jones plot in the alien ruins, complete with Indiana Jones-esque music. Sure, it’s more like a Kingdom of the Crystal Skull spin-off than Raiders and kind of tedious for the payoff—he finds a giant space pipe organ and plays tones while he ought to be getting ready to get on the spaceship.

His delay does give Parker Posey something to do, in this case, ominously threaten Russell because the kids are planning on putting adult Posey in cryosleep for take-off. They’d rather have Hornsby be the awake adult, sucking up extra oxygen. Posey’s got a decent arc about not wanting to be put under since she’s kind of a fugitive. The writing on it’s not great, but Posey’s panic is good. Plus, it all ties up neatly with Jenkins needing a co-conspirator.

The tense action finale—space action John Williams riffs, not space grandeur John Williams riffs—has a lot of emotional impact, which is cool. But, on the other hand, the hard cliffhanger is less effective because it’s a wheel-spinner.

The episode’s better throughout than its conclusion, with some definite highs.

Lost in Space (2018) s03e02 – Contact

It’s only taken twenty-two episodes, but “Lost in Space” finally addresses some fundamental questions about its robots. Did something make them, or did they make themselves? The show skirts around the robots having agency and sentience to make the human eagerness to enslave them a little less creepy, presumably. Though Molly Parker salivates over the idea of doing it in this episode. It’s so funny how they brought it up once and then completely forgot about the morality issue.

Everyone’s got something to do this episode, even if it’s staring into the main action of the scene like you’re superfluous (both Parker Posey and Ignacio Serricchio do it). I haven’t checked, but I’m assuming season three is the last one for “Lost in Space,” so they’re trying to wrap things up. And doing it very quickly; thank goodness the robots come equipped with a walkie-talkie feature allowing communication across half a galaxy or so.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The episode starts with Taylor Russell finding real dad Russell Hornsby alive in his cryotube. It’s unclear whether he escaped the ship or if the ship moved him over to an escape vessel without waking him up. It seems like the latter, but there’s also not a lot of talk about Hornsby. See, Russell can’t bring herself to tell him he’s her dad, so instead, they talk around it. When they finally start getting on the same wavelength… well, the writing’s not good, but Russell’s sincerity carries through.

Zack Estrin has the writer credit. It’s not his first (though the last episode he got a credit on was episode two of season three, so exactly one season before), but he’s not particularly impressive. Combined with Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s direction and the frantic but good special effects, it all feels like “Lost in Space” is in a hurry to wrap up. The time for character development has passed.

And not just for surprise reveal characters, but the main cast as well. Mina Sundwall has reverted back to her sarcastic mode, which has some okay lines, just nothing for the character. She, Maxwell Jenkins, and Parker Posey are trying to find the robot, who wandered off last episode with the reveal of an alien civilization in the distance. There are some setbacks and fretting about Posey’s reliability as a comrade, but eventually, the episode gets to setting up its way out of the current predicament. Luckily, Jenkins and Sundwall get into position at just the same time Parker and Toby Stephens do in their plot.

Parker’s full of life again, ready to go get her kids and stop feeling sorry for herself. So she and Stephens are flying down to a planet to recover a destroyed robot, so they can torture it into flying them where they want to go. Serricchio is along for the ride, which just means wisecracks. There are some all right ones too.

One Aliens riff later, they find themselves in danger from an unknown robot. And over in the other plot, the robot keeps telling Jenkins they’re in danger. Shame the robot’s got such a limited vocabulary because if he could string two sentences together, they wouldn’t have needed the episode.

It feels like the end of the first act (of “Season Three”). It could be better, could be worse. But trying to wrap up the series in eight episodes gets “Lost in Space” a lot of leeway. As does avoiding having all the little kids in it. The action just sticks to the main cast; it also seems we’re leaning in on Jenkins as messiah, which will at least be a flex, something the show’s managed to avoid doing for almost its entire run.