Tied to the mast

I remember the compulsion of sitting in front of the family TV, watching Lost In Space, everyday after school for what seemed a very long part of my preteen life. Despite my mother's warning that sitting that close to the TV would make me infertile, I now have kids of my own, and one--the three-year old--loves to watch cheesy old sci fi TV shows. "I love it because it has monsters!" he says. Maybe those XRays from the TV did have an effect after all.

Watching a bit of the first episode of Lost in Space last year at EMP/sci fi museum in Seattle Center brought back such memories that I wound up watching way too long--the whole episode, in fact. Everybody got ahead of me and lost. (Since I had the car keys, by definition it was they who were lost & not I.) Due to the museum's futuristic metalic skin we had no cell phone reception, so it took a couple of hours of everyone wandering around EMP /sci fi museum before we all got back together. There's probably some some irony in this.

So it was natural that after the Battlestar Galactica 1980 series ended mercifully quickly, watching Lost in Space would be the next adventure that we, father & middle son, would undertake.  Hulu, it turns out, has the whole series available for free streaming on demand.

Unfortunately, now that we've started watching Lost in Space on Hulu, all the charm it ever had for me has completely dispelled. In fact, I can't imagine why I don't remember it being so bad. Sure, the science and the effects are bogus; we expect some of that in sci fi. It's the stories, the characters' behavior, the exposition that are terrible--what were the scriptwriters thinking?

And what were the actors thinking the scriptwriters were thinking? While he wasn't Will, the boy genius he portrays, Bill Mumy was certainly bright enough to realize the things the script has Will do are stupid, as in get yourself killed stupid. 

Example: Will wanders out as the deathly cold night descends, (despite being told sternly not to), to fix the broken chariot. The robot, programmed by Dr Smith to kill off the members of the team one by one, goes after him, finds him, and menaces him with Tesla-bolts. Will climbs the chariot & screams for him to stop but just as the robot is about to blast him into his constituent ions--hey, To be continued next week!

Turns out sitting on top of the chariot for a week does Will some good: he remembers that (as he's done a couple of times before) if he imitates the Doctor's voice--the only person the Robot is programmed to obey--mirabile dictu, it obeys, and spares his life.

And Dr Smith. Why do they tolerate him when time after time he tries to kill them or get them enslaved by aliens? They seem to love the old goof no matter how evil & absurd he is, in that silly, naive 50s & early 60s TV sitcom way--even a pediophile would be a harmless eccentric to be laughed off. Apparently Batman is at least partly to blame. Lost in Space was up against Batman in the TV schedule when it first aired, so they decided to compete by turning Lost in Space into a farce. (Biff! Boff! Zowie!) That way it sucked even more, but differently, and, more importantly, it sucked that way on purpose.

Why am I paying so much attention to something that makes me cringe? When each plot twist is another turn of the screw in the solar plexus of my internal dyspeptic literary critic?

It's Hulu's that's to blame. If it were available on Netflix instant view, (or if we were watching on DVD), we could watch it on the TV and I could lie back on the couch with the tot--close my eyes, daydream, twitter, whatever--while it passed painlessly by. But because Hulu is determined not to compete with TV, the only way to watch anything on Hulu is on a computer. So we watch Lost in Space in my office, on my computer, me balanced on my exercise ball/office chair, tot on my knee, compelled to watch at full attention, just like before.