Headscratchers / Lost in Space

TV Series

• In the first episode the ship's faster than light drive was activated, hurling them across the galaxy in a matter of seconds. If they had such a drive, why were they going to spend years in hibernation just to get to Alpha Centauri?
  • That may be justified in the later film by the inability to control their destination as established in the film.
    • While that may be true in the film, that rule doesn’t seem to have applied in the series. For example, in "The Haunted Lighthouse" when it looked like they were going to get enough fuel to get home and maps to let them navigate, they genuinely seemed to believe they could get home. If they couldn’t control their destination, then maps and fuel wouldn’t have been enough. They also believed they could get J-5 (from that same episode) home if he lived in the same galaxy. There were also a couple of episodes where they had a chance to contact Earth and believed if they could tell Earth where they were that Earth could send a rescue party (“The Astral Traveller” and “Return from Outer Space” come to mind) which only makes sense if humanity can travel accurately over long distances at faster than light speeds.
  • One possibility is that they were supposed to test the hibernation technology along with everything else. If the ultimate purpose of the mission was to set up a colony to help with resource depletion and overpopulation, this probably means that the ultimate goal was that they would send far larger ships with far more people. It may be that humanity had the technology to build faster than light ships for a small crew, but for any ship large enough to move enough people for a colony it would need to travel slower than light. Since the Jupiter 2 was testing the viability of sending people to Alpha Centauri, the mission may have been set up to work in the way that colonisation would work. There was no point sending people to Alpha Centauri faster than light, thereby bypassing hibernation, only to find out later that the hibernation technology itself wouldn't work for some reason. As to why you'd include the faster than light technology at all if you weren't planning to use it in the journey; it gave the crew more choices if something went wrong (and may have been intended to be used for the return journey once they knew they could safely get to Alpha Centauri using slower than light methods).

• Why don't they freeze him (Doctor Smith)?
  • Aside from trying to murder the family, he causes the vast majority of their problems. They literarily can freeze him, yet IIRC they only do it once in the third episode where Don freezes him.
  • Is possible that the equipment requires energy or fuel that they don't have nor can spare. Notice how in any other episodes they ever think in using it nor even for themselves.

Movie

• If Will is leaving school on a ten-year space voyage, why is his teacher even bothering calling home to complain about his attitude? He's going to be a non-issue for the school system soon! She should be filling out a report for whenever he returns to a school system, not calling his parents who the teacher should know are busy packing.
  • Because she can tell he is acting out of a feeling of abandonment by his father. She's not concerned about his behavior. She's concerned about him.
    • Awww...
• How did Global Sedition plan to build its own Hypergate? It's not like a huge construction in orbit would remain inconspicuous to the world powers.
  • Maybe they're building their gate in smaller segments on Earth with the goal of putting it together later?
• Is there a reason they couldn't have just used the hyperdrive again and hoped for a better location?
  • Considering their later power supply troubles, most likely they don't wish to expend power randomly hopping around when they might be able to calculate their current location and work on a new route accordingly.
  • You're underestimating just how big space is. They're lucky they came out at a planet, let alone near a ship.
• Why Spider Smith tries to kill his past self? Even a murderous sociopath like him should know that doing that will cause his own erase from existence. Also, after that he orders Robot to kill John, West, and Young Will. Doing that, either by killing John or Young Will, will cause Older Willie to be erased. Not a smart move considering he still needs Older Will to open the Time Machine. A bit Stupid Evil, maybe ?
  • He's spent over a decade as an insane human/spider hybrid. Odds are, he's lost the capacity for rational thought.
    • It's stated earlier in the film when the Robinsons discover the Time Bubbles on the planet and in space that they're a sort of parallel timeline, not synchronous, so any changes that happened on either plane wouldn't affect each other, or something along those lines, so everybody on the Prime Jupiter 2 could die, but the ones from the Time Bubble would still exist. Which is why Smith attempts to kill his past self and young Will, because he knows it won't affect them in the bubble.
    • There are two timelines: the Bad Future where Will and Smith stayed on the ship waited for John and West to return resulting in Spider-Smith. And then there's the one where Will and Smith went looking for them and were transported twenty years into the future. Since the younger Doctor Smith has traveled twenty years into the future, and Spider-Smith didn't travel into the future twenty years ago and nothing has changed for him, i.e he hasn't been erased (since in the original timeline where Spider-Smith is standing, he and Will never left the ship to search for West and John), it's obvious that this younger Doctor Smith is not truly his past self, but a parallel version of his past self, and so he feels that it's safe to kill him with no repercussions. He would have been erased the instant things turned a different way if it had been otherwise.
• Why did the Global Sedition hire a medical doctor to sabotage the mission? Why not send one of their own operatives to do the job?
  • Presumably Smith was turned to their side after he started working for the mission rather than being sneaked into the program while in their employ, so he was just the highest-ranking double agent they had.
• When John and Major West get into a heated argument over who is in command of the mission, Maureen chastises them for the pettiness of getting into a "pissing contest" while they were all stranded on an alien planet and in great danger. She was right about that, but then she threatens to call Judy to declare John and Major West both unfit, and assume command herself. Wait, what? Declare them unfit? On what grounds? Is being caught acting like a jerk once really considered grounds to be declared medically unfit for command? Pretty much every human being who has ever lived would have to be considered unfit by that standard.
  • I'd say it was just to shut them both up. Or she could be talking about mentally unfit, if they're dragging their personal issues into the leadership situation.
  • Her argument that abusing the mission's command structure would, technically, allow Judy to do such a thing is, in effect, her actual argument: that bickering over who officially outranks whom under the circumstances - untold millions of miles from Earth or all possible connection to their military superiors - is a really stupid waste of time and energy, whether it's John, West, or Judy who eventually elbows his or her rivals out.
• The trivia page says Bill Mumy (TOS Will Robinson) was offered a cameo, but it fell through as he wanted the Future Will and the studio thought that would be confusing. How does that logic work? The entire scene at the end "It's good to see you all!... Don't forget me!" seems explicitly written for Bill Mumy. Bringing the original actor to bless the reboot.
  • Studio heads are idiots. This is a matter of record on some of the other pages...
• The biggest plot hole is the Global Sedition. If the rest of the world is united in their search for a new world, what's their issues? Why are they sabotaging the mission? When it's terrorists we need more information. At least in the series it's a clear space race.
  • Their issue seems to be distrust and suspicion that the rest of the world would abandon their people or at least shove them to the rear of the line for claiming the best territory, etc, on the new world.
  • With a name like 'Global Sedition', one can imagine that they share more in common with GIJoe's C.O.B.R.A than anything in the real world. But in all seriousness, they likely just want their own gate completed first so that they can be the ones to claim a habitable planet and all its resources before anyone else, and be in a better position than the rest of the world who will then have to bargain with them if they want safe passage to that planet or share its resources.
  • If recent events have show us something, people in real life is distrusting of world authority figures, at least some people are. Global Sedition sounds pretty much like an anti-globalization cult of which you can pick many different reasons why exists (racism, religion, conspiracy theories, etc.)

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