scientific advances predicted in the 1960s had
finally been realized and were now ready to be
implemented to help solve the problems that cast a
cloud over this decade. As a dramatic adventure
series, each Lost in Space episode continued the
narrative theme of the previous show, thereby
providing the audience with the opportunity to
monitor closely the development of the characters,
to trace the changes they underwent consequent
to the new challenges encountered during each
episode, to chart the course of the evolution of
the relationships that the characters formed with
one another, and, most importantly, to solve co-
operatively the social and political problems they
had brought with them from earth.
For our purposes,the most interesting character
is that of Dr Zachary Smith, played by Jonathan
Harris. Although his vanity never permitted him
to admit to being over the age of 27, Dr Smith
was clearly a mature male in his 60s. Most notably,
Dr Smith was a walking compendium of human
faults. Among his most egregious character
traits, he was sly, cunning, ruthless, guileful, lazy,
shiftless, greedy, selfish, egotistical, vain, boastful,
corrupt, arrogant, haughty, aristocratic, insensi-
tive, weak, cowardly and vindictive. As such, Dr
Smith neatly personified every entrenched and
‘out of touch’ aging male political leader seen to be
responsible for plunging the world into chaos and
strife during the 1960s. Dr Smith also represented
the belligerent, self-serving and corrupt political,
medical, military and industrial establishment
ruling (and, in the eyes of the younger revolution-
ary generation of Americans, ruining ) the United
States. Because he was a paid saboteur for an enemy
nation (easily assumed to be the Soviet Union),
Smith also represented the ruthless, determined
and characteristically dehumanized elderly totali-
tarian party bosses ruling the Soviet Empire. In
short, Smith personified the corruption of the
ruling elite power brokers.
The premise of Lost in Space centered on the
adventures, trials and tribulations of the Robinson
family – an intellectually accomplished, eugeni-
cally perfect American family, along with their
young pilot, Major West, who have been selected
to travel through space for the purpose of establish-
ing a colony on a distant planet suitable for human
life that orbits the star Alpha Centauri. Although
the action of Lost in Space takes place in the near
future, relative to the early 1960s (1997), the |
tremendous social and political tensions of the
1960s were magnified and projected into this
future and used as the justification for the space
colonization program. Colonization of space was
portrayed as a logical solution to the over-
population then suffocating the earth.
Cold War political tensions were similarly
projected into this future. Dr Smith, a military
colonel and medical doctor working within the
NASA-like US military space agency (Alpha
Control) responsible for the mission, is also a secret
agent of an unnamed foreign power and has been
ordered to sabotage the mission and thereby
thwart the United States’ efforts to be the first
nation to colonize space and lay claim to it. While
ingeniously programming the ship’s mobile
‘environmental control’ robot to destroy the ship
8 hours after lift off, Smith becomes accidentally
trapped aboard the spaceship prior to lift off and
is unwillingly forced to share the fate of the
family he has plotted to kill. Although the efforts
of the Robinson family and Dr Smith to halt
the robot’s programmed total destruction of the
spaceship Jupiter II were successful, sufficient
damage had been done to the ship to send it off
course in ‘hyper drive’ – presumably beyond the
speed of light – leaving it helplessly lost in an
uncharted corner of the galaxy with no viable
means of either returning to earth or resuming its
original mission of colonizing the planet orbiting
Alpha Centauri.
Even after the spaceship crash lands on a hostile,
unknown planet, Dr Smith remains convinced
that his survival and return to earth depended
on the elimination of the Robinson family,
whom he regards as adversaries and obstacles.
During the first few episodes of the show, Dr Smith
is seen deploying one scheme after another to kill
the Robinsons either singly or as a group so that he
can hijack the spaceship and attempt a return to
earth.
In the third episode of the series, ‘Island in the
Sky’, the nefarious and treacherous Dr Smith
attempts to further his murderous ambitions and to
deceive the Robinsons yet again by pretending to
have undergone a reformation6. Having been held
captive in a freezing tube but later released by the
robot, who remains under his control, Dr Smith
piously informs the mistrustful Robinsons who
have been shocked to find him running around
free: |
