Headscratchers / Lost in Space (2018)

• Why didn't Will Robinson order the robot: “You need to listen to the rest of the family. If they tell you not to attack something, you stop!” ...?
  • Because he's a ten-year-old boy with severely diminished capacity to logically think through all of his actions and their consequences? No matter how smart he is, a ten-year-old still has limited understanding and experience to apply to the decision-making process, which is why ten-year-olds are generally not allowed to make important decisions for themselves or others, no matter how smart they are.

• Why didn't the Resolute do anything to rescue the Jupiter units? The Watanabe family had satellite images of the Jupiter crash sites, so the Resolute should have been able to see them. With no contact from the stranded colonists, the Resolute should have sent down shuttles to investigate. Even assuming they had no shuttles, they could have used some of the surviving Jupiter units that didn't detach to bring down supplies.
  • The Resolute can receive radio transmissions because they have a two-way conversation in the finale with the Jupiter 2. This is sort of glossed over — maybe they repaired it at some point, but you'd think they'd have noticed their receiver dish was missing and taken it into account.
  • It seems reasonable to assume that the Resolute had short-range communications, or that it was easier without the planet's atmosphere in the way. They still never explain why the Resolute never attempted rescue/resupply missions.
  • The only possibility that makes sense with the two above is that the Resolute didn't know where the Jupiters landed. For all we know, the Resolute was close to send transmissions, but they didn't know which planet they landed on and were in the generalized area where they think the Jupiters landed.

• Okay, so we steal FTL from the crashed alien spaceship on Earth. Got it. That doesn't explain how we were able to design an interstellar colony ship, manufacture and assemble it plus all the Jupiters, recruit and train a crew, recruit and train colonists, and send twenty-four colonization missions all in three years. It would require all the resources of Earth focused on that singular task, and even then the probability of mistakes and accidents would be incredibly high. Narratively, we need the flashbacks from the Robinsons' point of view to explain the backstory, but it just seems improbable. That and nobody on Earth apparently noticed or commented on the fact that the Resolute was traveling 10 light years (round trip) per month without relativistic time dilation. "Hey, people of Earth, we figured out FTL. Don't worry about the details, just get on our shiny ship."
  • The majority of the population aren't making the trip, so they probably don't care much how it works. And in one flashback, Maureen explains that the engine is beyond classified, implying that some people do wonder, but the government is being extremely tight-lipped about it (and with them deciding who goes to the new planet and who chokes on dust for the rest of their lives, it's unlikely anyone is digging too deeply into it).
  • Most people have no clue how a jet engine works or how wings provide lift, yet we all travel by airplane.
  • If the world's governments announce tomorrow that FTL was discovered, honestly 99.9% of the population would just shrug their shoulders and accept it not really wondering how. Some among the science community might be suspicious however scientists also tend to be skeptics and applying Ockham's Razor most science people would think that it was easier to attain of what was originally thought than ALIENS. So, at the among the people with enough education and knowledge to know something is iffy and enough open mindness to believe it had to be something as outstanding like that a meteore was really an alien spacecraft you get a very narrow gap of basically a few dozen people worldwide.

• Where did the alien spaceship go? The second one, that shows up in the finale. One can guess from observation that each ship carries a single robot as its pilot/crew; the second ship delivered the second robot, the two fight, and then they fall out into space. Well and good. But nobody brings up the fact that there was a second spaceship flying around just minutes ago. The script just sort of forgets about it. Assumption: it becomes relevant in Season 2.
  • It didn't. Probably without a pilot it just drifted away and was forgotten about, or was too far away to be worth bothering with.
  • Or, since it didn't have a pilot, it got sucked into that black hole that was causing the planet to drift closer to the star.

• Why would Will be rejected from the program over a single stress test, despite clearly a very intelligent boy with the world they are meant to travel towards holding no actual dangers where Will's inability would mean little, and more importantly part of a large family unit who's parents and siblings would never agree to leaving him behind?
  • We know he fails at least 2 tests (the water tank and the hyperbaric chamber) so odds are he has failed every stress test they could give him. As far as leaving him behind, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They aren't going to jeopardize the whole colony over a single kid, no matter how well his family tests.
  • Still doesn't explain one thing: The people in charge were just going to say, "Okay, all of you can go except your 11-year-old kid"? That would be a damn cruel system. Besides, it's also unreasonable to expect an adult-level performance from a child that age. The point remains, he's very smart, and how well he handles stress seems like a minor issue.
  • Very true. The only logical explanation (especially when you consider how fidgety Victor is the whole time) is that the standards are mostly PR so they can advertise that only the best of the best are going and bribery is rampant to get family members onboard the Resolute. Perhaps those standards were set in stone for the first few trips, but by the 24th trip, anyone who can afford the bribes can make the trip.
  • Doesn't really matter how intelligent Will is if he can't apply that intelligence in the crunch when it matters. If he's going to fold and be useless every time something goes wrong, the overall mission is better served by someone slightly, or hell, even significantly less intelligent, but who can keep their head in a crisis. And it's not just a case of "oh, Will is useless in the crisis, but after the crisis he'll be very useful," a lot of things they were testing for are situations that, in genuine space exploration, if you screw it up you die. In that light, sending Will on the mission is as certain a death sentence as leaving him behind on a dying Earth, but Will's weight on the mission could be taken by someone who could actually survive and contribute.
  • But none of that addresses the elephant in the room: With Will being rejected from the program, the Robinson family either has to opt-out as a whole, or they migrate, leaving an 11-year old child behind on Earth to fend for himself. WTF? How was this not addressed? Did the people setting up this program not understand that this would inevitably occur, the moment they insisted that small children were screened and tested as well as the adults? For that matter, how did all the others pass the test? The Robinsons are a neurotic mess, and the other Jupiter crews don't seem to be much better.
  • Incidentally, why are the colonists subject to so much screening? They're not going to do space exploration, they're just going to build houses, live there, and built a society, which takes a wide variety of skills and characteristics. This sounds more like a eugenics program than any rational selection process. On top of that, whatever selection was done for the crew has failed spectacularly. There is wide-spread smuggling and the security guards are sadistic thugs
  • As the series demonstrates, just because you've made 23 trips without incident doesn't mean something isn't going to go wrong on trip 24. We made twelve trips to the Moon; on trip thirteen, everything that could go wrong did. And who's to say Alpha Centauri is completely safe and secure with no challenges for the colonists to overcome? Really, when the fate of one's entire species is at stake, being Crazy-Prepared should be the default setting. As for splitting up families, there's probably several who did opt out if they couldn't all go, or left the children who didn't make it with other relatives. If there are no other relatives, there are likely foster systems set up. In actuality, there are probably kids on the Resolute who are traveling with foster families, since they passed but their parents or siblings did not. Though now we stray into WMG territory.
    • Important correction: Apollo made four trips to the moon prior to 13, and only two of those touched down on the surface.
    • Also, not everything that could go wrong did. They got home safe, remember?

• Why didn't the "Fuel Crew" put the tanker back down on the rock to try to plug the leak after getting Evan out from under it?
  • No guarantee sitting it back down wouldn't damage the tanker's shell further. The rock could've torn more of the shell and defeated the purpose, or caused them to lose even more fuel than they did. Think of it like a nail in the wall. It fits snugly when you first hammer it in. But, if you pull it out, then push it back in, there will be some give because you opened up the hole and made it a little bigger.
  • It would have made more sense to continue pulling on it until it tipped onto its undamaged side; they still would have lost some fuel, but not a whole tanker full.

• Why are the Jupiters designed with such redundancy and durability? The craft were supposed to be used for housing the families on the way to the colony, then for use on a fairly safe planet as a home. Why are they designed with all the failsafes, emergency supplies, and backups of a fallout shelter? It makes sense for the first few trips to be prepared for every contingency, but the Robinsons are on the 24th expedition. All of the trips had been safe and uneventful up until the robot attack, so there was no reason for maximum redundancy at this point.
  • Well, once you have the design finalized, it's easier to mass-produce that then redesign it to be a cheaper, less-capable model. Plus, with this unprecedented leap in human space exploration, it was likely considered most beneficial to have every Jupiter able to take anything that got thrown at it, because you never know what can crop up. That's how modern-day real-life space travel works.
  • Why do the Jupiters have to serve as habitats at all? That is incredibly wasteful, because a new set has to be built for every trip. Much better to use standard prefab housing and keep the Jupiters, which only have to serve as transports back and from the Resolute with the ship?
  • To address both above questions: The Jupiters were more than likely meant to be temporary habitats and meant to be reusable spacecraft, as the colonists were going to be building homes and also using buildings on Alpha Centuri that previous colonists built. There's nothing saying that the Jupiters weren't designed to be multi-use as the Resolute was designed to be multi-use as well. Spacecraft in our actual history were designed to be multi-used or had sections that were designed to be multi-used, such as booster rockets. The Space Shuttles were a clear example of multi-use spacecraft. Discovery had 39 missions before it was retired. Atlantis had 33 missions that it was used before it was retired. Endeavour had 25 missions before it was retired. And seeing the Resolute itself was being used multiple times for the trips back and forth between Earth and Alpha Centauri, it's likely that the Jupiters were also being reused as well. Makes more sense than constantly manufacturing new Jupiters to replace previous ones left behind with the Colony and have the same numbers (meaning that if they already manufactured a Jupiter 2, it would have been with the first mission, not the 24th). So, the Robinson's Jupiter 2 may have been used by 23 different families before them. That also means by having those redundancies and durability, it makes their use still possible for the lifespan of the mission.
    • It is revealed in Season 3, when the Robinsons make it to Alpha Centauri, that the shuttles are massed produced and are not reused by multiple families during the past trips. One of the Chariots seen when the Jupiter 2 lands is one marked M23, indicating that it may have been on a vessel named Mars 23 (as the 24th Colonies' vessels are named after Jupiter, it'd make sense the M is Mars and indicates that past missions were named after other planets/Roman Gods).

• Ok, the colonists in Season 2 were marooned on the desert world with the metal eating rust for seven months. Why did the rust only start attacking and deteriorating everything metal only after the Robinsons showed up and never before?
  • I'm pretty sure the metal parasite was from the new well they were digging. It only became a problem when they tapped into that watercourse, which is coincidentally when the Robinsons showed up.

• The people in charge of the Resolute seem to have the Idiot Ball glued to their hands. Okay, so, your ship is reliant on a stolen alien engine and a heavily-damaged alien robot in order to make its lightning-fast trips to Alpha Centauri - without one or the other, it's not going anywhere. Billions of human lives hang on this setup. So who do you entrust this literally priceless and irreplaceable "equipment" to? Someone interested in ensuring that the robot is maintained to the best of our ability and has a reason to trust and help us, or... someone who gleefully tortures the robot to the brink of death, putting the lives of everyone on board and on Earth at risk?

• The entire situation involving the colonists on the Amber Planet makes no sense. The planet is in what's presumably the Robot's home system, meaning he would easily be able to navigate back. Instead of being secretive and duplicitous about it, all the captain had to do was explain that they could and would retrieve the "stranded" colonists after the Resolute was repaired, then hop to Alpha Centauri, get the OGS back up and running at full capacity, return to the Amber Planet, and retrieve the remaining colonists (and help Scarecrow, assuming he wasn't returned to the planet beforehand.)
  • The captain, like many authority figures, is clearly overly committed to need-to-know security. In real life, excessively narrow definitions of “needed information” have been known to cost lives and doom missions.
  • That assumes the colonists can survive on the Amber Planet indefinitely, which may not be true since people travel to/from the Resolute very frequently and all of the infrastructure on the planet seemed dedicated to supplying the Resolute and not creating a self-sustaining colony. There's also the very real possibility that the planet will become uninhabitable or impossible to leave after a certain point.