Lost in Space and Anne – with an “E” [Media Notes 30]

I just finished watching the second season of Lost in Space and have re-watched the first season. I’ve also watched the second season of Anne with an “E” and most of the third season. They are worlds apart in many ways, but the difference that most interests me is the one Adam Roberts has raised in his post, Provincialism, which is about the ability of localist story-telling to convey large-scale social issues. It seems to me that Anne with an “E” broaches large scale issues – class, gender, sexual orientation, children and adults, race – while Lost in Space is basically about personal conflict in and around a family.

Anne doesn’t present itself as anything more than what it is, a narrative around and about a rural family in early century Canada. Lost, on the other hand, presents itself as a heroic space epic in the mode of the Star Wars franchise and other contemporary science fiction space operas. Lost centers on the Robinson family, who are colonists destined for Alpha Centauri. Earth is dying and the future of the human race depends on this colonization effort. But this is mere framing. All of the action and conflict is local to relations within the Robinsons and among those who interact with them. We have no politics worth talking about, nothing comparable to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica or even the dynastic politics of Star Wars. So we’ve got merely local action magnified to cosmic significance through special effects and an often bombastic soundtrack.

Whereas Anne...She’s an orphan and has to make her way with the middle-aged (bordering on elderly) brother-and-sister couple expecting a boy. She’s got an extravagant imagination which she’s somehow got to shoehorn into an highly conventional rural community. And then we have her friendship with a daughter of the local gentry, and with a boy who returns to the community (after a stint at sea) with a black friend, and an Indian girl who is sent to a boarding school (without her parents knowing who cruel that school would be), and now an upright scion of other gentry has spread malicious rumors about a friend...These all speak to issues that are real and current in North America and the world more generally. But Lost, well, there is human vs. machines/robots, but, I mean, in comparison, who cares? There’s little substance there. Just a lot of high-tech pizzazz surrounding questions of personal responsibility, friendship, and betrayal. Are those issues important? Sure. Are they cosmic? No.