Lost in Space (2018) s01e09 – Resurrection

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.

What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s02e01 – Resurrection

So, there’s a lot to say about “What We Do in the Shadows”’s return, like how they figured out an amazing way to keep growing Harvey Guillén’s vampire hunter arc (as he is a vampire’s familiar) and how the show uses a time jump (summer is over, so we get some exposition—unclear if the show was supposed to air in a fall or it’s just a plot device), but the big deal of the episode is Haley Joel Osment.

Osment plays Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou’s new familiar—their last ones kept getting killed off—and he’s a terrible coworker for Guillén. Osment plays on his phone while Guillén does all the work. Guillén is up all night every night killing off the Max Schreck Nosferatu assassins who are after Berry, Demetriou, and Guillén’s master, Kayvan Novak, for some shenanigans last season. And hiding it from them because then they’ll know he’s a vampire hunter.

There’s this great bit about him eating chocolate covered espresso beans to stay up, which Novak thinks are his dried turds. It’s really funny. Excellent script from Marika Sawyer.

Anyway, the setup isn’t Osment being a crappy coworker to Guillén but Osment dying—just like all of Berry and Demetriou’s familiars, only instead of just burying him in the yard, they take him to neighborhood necromancer Benedict Wong.

Wong’s hilarious, selling tchotchkes in his shop and scatting through his incantations to bring Osment back. Now, Demetriou believes in necromancy, but Berry doesn’t, so there’s a bunch of griping Berry, which is wonderful as always.

Only Wong’s legit and Osment’s risen…

Only he’s a zombie.

And none of the vampires believe Guillén. So there are all these chase sequences throughout the house, with Osment just as funny undead as alive. He’s not a regular familiar who wants to be turned into a vampire, it’s just a cool side gig while waits for his 0.5% ownership of a microbrewer to pay-off. Like, it’s awesome stuff. Sawyer gives Osment all this great material and he nails it all.

So good.

It’s downright lovely to have the show back. Just what it needs to be. Novak, Demetriou, and Berry are all great too but it’s really Guillén and Osment’s episode.