WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Netflix’s Lost in Space Season 3, streaming now.
Netflix's Lost in Space abounds in the jigsaw-shaped conflicts that bind siblings to one another and create the seemingly insurmountable disconnects between one generation and the next. The Robinson family dynamic tills fertile soil for jealousy, animosity and passive resentfulness to grow and fester, but many of these issues were addressed in the first two seasons of the sci-fi adventure.
Season 3 revisits some of these family misfires as the two sets of main characters are separated and attempt to rebuild their lives through the haze of their grief. While some hit familiar and discordant notes, one offers a long-awaited introduction into complicated relationships, and the show handles it with grace while avoiding unnecessary tropes.
Maureen and John Robinson have thrown themselves into survival mode since they sent their children off to Alpha Centauri and safety, or so they thought. After setting the Resolute on a collision course toward destruction, the remaining colonists aboard their Jupiters found a way to rendezvous in the corona of the Danger system's star, hiding their electromagnetic signature from the AR (alien robots) that have hunted them until they could come up with a long-term plan. John has been busy scavenging supplies and parts from crashed shuttles that weren't able to escape their pursuers while Maureen buried herself in pipe-fitting and welding work.
Although the two share quarters, they seem to communicate mostly through a white board, on which they scrawl their daily intentions with little to no evidence of intimacy. John reaches out to Maureen only to be rebuffed by her refusal to lean on him or take sincere stock of how deep her depression has flung her from her true path. This is the third time during the series' run where they have been at odds and unsure in the status of their marriage. Neither speaks to any discord, but it's clear Maureen doesn't value the relationship in the same way she once had and the same could be said of her reaction to finding out in Season 1 that John's deployments were voluntary. The status quo for their relationship is at its worst tenuous and at best, engaged in some form of resigned or complacent temporary happiness.
Here, though, it feels less grounded in the circumstances surrounding them, albeit no one can prescribe how someone responds to grief, especially on the scale that all of the surviving adults are experiencing. Maureen's reaction is not unreasonable by any means, and in some ways it may provide some comfort to retreat to a familiar place of self-imposed isolation, but it also implies that while so many of the main characters have grown into broader versions of themselves, Maureen seems stuck in a distance cycle as far as her marriage is concerned. It does not last long and things revert to some semblance of normalcy but it has been a year since the children escaped and in that time it is unclear how much of it has been spent in this manner though it does not appear to be a sudden occurrence.
The two siblings that have always been at odds are still not seeing eye to eye as the season begins. The sense is much more vivid among the children that where they are as the season starts is where they have been since audiences last saw them. Penny resents Judy because she thinks she is the cause of their current situation. Whether Penny is referring to the fact that Judy was the one that came up with the idea in the first place for the families to split apart or because her attempt to gain access to the Fortuna's systems led them to crash on the broken planet, it is entirely plausible that it could be a combination of both. Again, this is not an unreasonable place to position them but it does come across as a space that they could have grown out of given that they are very reminiscent of past dynamics each of them have had to move beyond.
When Judy releases Grant Kelly from his cryosleep, she introduces a new familial path for her character to explore. Although she doesn't tell him immediately who she is, she does reveal the truth at a suitable moment before too much time has passed for him to settle on a definitive impression of her. There is no sneaking back to camp and asking that anyone keep her secret until the right time or manufactured umbrage on Kelly's part at the shock of his fatherhood. The two of them behave like adults dealing with a momentous moment, but one that must be tempered by the life and death stakes they find themselves in and navigated with mutual respect. As they continue to get to know one another they invite a deeper bond but are never given much time in the show to nurture that connection.
Once the Robinsons are reunited, Kelly is shunted off to Alpha Centauri while the main family battles through more problems that only science and trademarked ingenuity can solve. Kelly's insertion creates other opportunities for the family to redefine themselves and their relationship to one another in a series of one on ones that culminate in the blended family mosaic offered at the end of the series. It hearkens back to the holiday scene from season one before the Robinsons ever set out from Earth and Maureen and John were very much the loving couple, though everyone at that table has changed in profound ways. The show does not take advantage of displaying that as clearly at times in how they engage with one another but ultimately succeeds at presenting one of television's most unique families at their very best.
Lost in Space Season 3 is streaming on Netflix.