What I appreciated about the 3 season reboot of Lost In Space, was its handling of male and female characters and their relationships. Maureen Robinson was at once a smart strong woman, but she was also a mother and the wife of a strong man too. With a few hiccups, they became a powerful, mutually supportive team. It also didn't bother trying to make us all accept the idea that the human race would colonize another star system with a bunch of LGBQTLSMFT genetic dead end "self-gendered" colonists.
In this strikingly good series, humans were portrayed as they largely are in nature and didn't focus on the 1 in a hundred sexually befuddled members of our "woke" culture in a ham-handed attempt to educate the rest of us (as so much TV/Movie writing does these days. LIS handled race the way it should have been handled - it ignored racial issues altogether. The writers didn't show us any systemic racism. People were of diverse skin color but all were of one race - the human race as it mostly is these days. Even despite deep misunderstandings with the alien robot race, the people come out triumphant and manage to span the cultural divide between man and AI machines.
John W. Campbell, editor of Analog in the 40s and 50s, used to refuse to publish anything in which the human race came out badly. He shaped science fictions conservative wing for generations to come. Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Orson Scott Card, Jerry Pournelle, Michael Flynn, Michael Crichton, CS Lewis et al. Campbell would have thoroughly approved of Lost in Space.
Lost in Space got it right for serving a large audience. There was little crude language and a whole lot of good stuff in it and not any detectable in-your-face wokeness. If any of the writers were trying to be "woke", they missed the point. They wrote to the values us conservatives believe in. And even some of the bad guys get redeemed.
Hey, it may have been an accident that this series appealed to the conservative in me. It was, after all, a Netflix production, but there it is. I liked it!
© by Tom King
© by Tom King
