Discovered a couple of older shows now streaming on Netflix and liked both for different reasons, despite their similar premises.
Scavengers Reign is about a crew of space-traveling scavengers marooned on a strange distant planet. They arrive to the surface in their escape pods separated from each other by long distances, and each escapee or pair of escapees face unique challenges based on the diverse biomes in which they landed. Other crew remain in cryogenic pods in the damaged spacecraft orbiting the planet. The world is bizarre, beautiful, and incredibly dangerous. The characters’ arc is one of self-discovery as they struggle to stay alive among the utterly foreign and hostile environment. This one is not for kids, or the squeamish, although I hate body horror and I enjoyed it. I often marveled at the imagination of the creators. I feel like these promo images, with their existential taglines, do it justice:
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Lost in Space (the latest remake) ran from 2018-2021 but Milo and I just discovered it on Netflix and it was our show for a solid month or two as we worked our way through its three seasons every night we had time. Milo really liked it. He called it “Stuck in Space” early on and I made it…stick…so that’s what we called it from then on. He also commented that if he had written the show he would have called it “Robot, Good Good”. It is family-friendly, pretty wholesome, action-packed, and engaging even for adult nerds like me. The number of plot holes increased right at the end as they tried to wrap up their 3-season arc in the last two episodes, but other than that I was happy to leverage my suspension of disbelief to cover up any other shortcomings. We’re now searching for our next show, as being equally invested in a story is a great bonding experience for us. Tearing ourselves away from yet another cliffhanger episode (they’re all cliffhanger episodes) on a weeknight so Milo could go to bed was a uniting challenge.
Besides Robot, our favorite character was Don West.
