Well, the entire thing makes no sense anyway. An expensive interstellar COLONY ship isn’t going to have five members of one nuclear family and one non-family member on it. Not much of a ‘colony’ and a little creepy if you’re looking at long term populating of the colony world. But of course, in 60’s TV terms, a lot cheaper than a cast of 20 or so. Hell, most of the cast of original Star Trek were ‘day players’ (ie, no long term contract).
Then, if you’re a ‘foreign agent’, you’re a traitor being paid to sabotage the ship. BUT, once you’re ON that ship and away from Earth (where presumably, your payment and your foreign contacts are), you don’t really have a lot of incentive to continue to sabotage the ship now do you! For anyone of intelligence, it becomes “Oh wait, I kinda want to live, so maybe I’d better start being a good guy now”.
Plus, you know, there are two daughters in that family and you’re one of two non-family males on the ship. Sure, she’s a little young, but give it time…
*Its mission is to take a single family on a five-and-a-half-year journey (stated as 98 years in the pilot episode) to a planet of the nearby star Alpha Centauri (the pilot episode refers to the planet itself as Alpha Centauri), which space probes reveal possesses ideal conditions for human life. The Robinson family was selected from among two million volunteers for this mission. The family includes Professor John Robinson (Guy Williams), his wife, Maureen (June Lockhart), their children, Judy (Marta Kristen), Penny (Angela Cartwright), and Will (Billy Mumy). They will be accompanied by their pilot, US Space Corps Major Donald West (Mark Goddard), who is trained to fly the ship in the unlikely event that its sophisticated automatic guidance system malfunctions.
Other nations are racing to colonize space and they would stop at nothing, even sabotage, to thwart the US effort. Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris), a medical doctor and environmental control expert, is actually a foreign secret agent. He reprograms the Jupiter 2’s B-9 environmental control robot (voiced by Dick Tufeld) to destroy critical systems on the spaceship eight hours after launch. Smith is trapped aboard at launch and his extra weight throws the Jupiter 2 off course, causing it to encounter a meteor storm. This plus the robot’s rampage causes the ship to become lost.*
Smith was, IIRC, at least occasionally useful. Gilligan was constantly screwing things up. I’d probably have killed either one sooner or later, but I’d have killed Gilligan first. I mean, Gilligan is Shredder Guy. So, feet first into the shredder he goes, if I’ve got access to a shredder. Otherwise, he gets cut up for bait.
I’ll grant you that Gilligan is friendlier and nicer than Smith. However, that doesn’t make him more tolerable to me. I can get along better with someone who has his own best interest in mind than I can with an amiable idiot.
He probably would have come back to haunt you in another 30 years or so with his own troop of slavishly devoted minions. And you would have been forcibly marooned on your own planetoid crying “SMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITH!!!”
The “doctor” part changed, too, IIRC. He started out as an M.D. – the one who checked out the whole crew of the Jupiter 2 before launch – but in a later episode, he talked himself into trouble when aliens heard him call himself “doctor,” and they presumed he mean “medical” – Robot jumped in to correct that point – “No, his degree is in–” and Smith shushed him, out of sheer vanity apparently – and the aliens wanted him to perform brain surgery on their leader. “If our leader dies, your life will also be ended!” I forget how that episode ends.
Of course, it made no sense that aliens would expect a physician of some other species could help one their own, but by that time nothing about the show made any sense at all anyway – they were encountering space cowboys and giant talking carrots every week and they all spoke English – in the first, B&W season, before somebody heard the call of the camp, the show was something just a little bit closer to serious hard SF.
As was touched upon in at least one other thread, this was typical of most Irwin Allen shows: they would start out really good and then go rapidly downhill after the first or second season, presumably due to the stable of hack writers he employed to churn out scripts to meet the production schedule. This was particularly true of Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; the latter reached its nadir with episodes like “The Werewolf,” “The Old Sea Captain’s Ghost,” and “Silver-Skinned Aliens Hijack Seaview So They Can Use Its Atomic Reactor to Hatch Their Eggs.”
I loved Time Tunnel, even though it required complete suspension of disbelief; the best thing about Land of the Giants right from the start was the two chicks with big boobs.
I seem to remember in the first run, that Smith had re-programmed the robot to kill any members of the crew when he (the robot) got them alone. The robot was going to shoot electricity out of his claws and destroy Will, but Will found that if he spoke in a deeper register, the robot would obey him (Dr. Smith had programmed the robot).
The robot was supposed to be an “environmental control robot” IIRC.
I remember the downward spiral of the series. It started off as an adventure (“Swiss Family Robinson Goes to Alpha Centauri”) but turned into camp and I lost interest.
But I agree - Smith was annoying at best and a danger at worst. Someone should have read “The Cold Equations” before take-off.
In another episode, the family had some of the “pure neutronium” they needed to get back to Earth, but they had to trade it for Smith, who had been kidnapped by aliens or something. Maybe that was when my willing suspension of disbelief failed - they were able to carry the containers of neutronium with one hand, and even as a child I knew that wouldn’t be possible in Earth-normal gravity.
All this shit I remember. Where I parked the car - not so much.
They clearly changed directions from SF to camp. If you watch the PBS show on SF TV shows they were trying to emulate the formula for Batman with brightly colored characters and sets. People seem to forget that color TV (and color TV shows) were new in the 60’s. My parent’s first color TV was an RCA in 1965. I can date this because of the house and school I went to. Only about half the programs were in color back then. Seeing the Wizard of Oz in color was a really big deal back then as it was the ultimate demonstrator of the technology. I’m not sure why they emulated the campy format of Batman other than it was very successful. And as anyone can attest, these programs were done by splitting pennies down the middle. They would share monsters between the sets with a little paint thrown in for good measure.
After the third or fourth time Gilligan’s antics thwarted a chance at rescue, he would just mysteriously disappear. When rescued, everyone would just shake their heads, throw up their hands and say “I dunno, he just disappeared one day. We um, eventually assumed he went swimming and a shark got him or something. We just never saw any trace of him again!”
Dr. Smith, I would just leave on one of those semi-habitable planets they seemed to run into every other week. I’m sure that, in time, the nylon bindings would loosen up and he’d have a chance to survive…
