Lost In Space

Imagine a future in which Ralph Nader is President. The United Nations has meaningful input in foreign policy. The word “woman” has been replaced by “womyn.” Eating trans fats and red meat is a crime, and gasoline is outlawed. It’s an alternate universe where the most smug, soft-headed brand of liberalism has triumphed — and it’s the only place I can imagine “Masters of Science Fiction,” a collection of sci-fi shorts released today on DVD, finding an audience.“The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” set the standard for science fiction anthologies on television, but sometime after 1965, when “The Outer Limits” went off the air (“The Twilight Zone” ended in 1964), television forgot how to make more of the same. Both series were repeatedly revived with diminishing returns, and the latest train wreck to hit screens is ABC’s “Masters of Science Fiction,” which fails because the people behind it seem to think that their job isn’t to tell entertaining stories, but to exult the human spirit.This six-episode anthology television show, which aired last year on ABC, was designed to put quality science fiction on the air, adapted from the best writers in the genre and cast with great actors. After seeing the results, ABC decided to hide the show on Saturday nights at 10 p.m., and even refused to broadcast two of the weakest episodes, which are, unfortunately, included on this DVD (“Little Brother,” and “Watchbird”). It’s one of the few times that I’m on the side of the networks: For once, they did the right thing.In “A Clean Escape,” Judy Davis and Sam Waterston play a therapist and a man who may be the President of the United States, and the episode revolves around her efforts to make him feel really, really bad for unleashing weapons of mass destruction in a unilateral attack on America’s enemies. There’s a second evil President of the United States in Howard Fast’s “The Awakening,” in which space angels arrive to make us give peace a chance, but America’s leader, of course, refuses to disarm. Then he gets all choked up when he sees one of the Space Angels and decides to disarm anyway. His change of heart is difficult to follow, since the alien looks like a cross between a moth and a Precious Moments figurine with a light bulb shoved up its rear end.Walter Mosley’s “Little Brother” is about how human beings will always triumph over machines because they can think. And feel. And love. Gag. Robert Sheckley’s “Watchbird” stars Sean Astin (“Lord of the Rings”) as a nerd who invents a weapons system shaped like a flock of stiff, unconvincing mechanical birds that wreak havoc when the Department of Homeland Security unleashes them in America.You may already have noticed one of the series’ central flaws: Who are these writers? When I think “Masters of Science Fiction,” I think Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick — not Howard Fast, John Kessel, and Robert Sheckley. The budgets are low, the special effects are tacky, and the dialogue is risible across the board. But it’s telling that the only two episodes that don’t make you cringe with embarrassment are by name-brand authors. Robert Heinlein (“Starship Troopers”) sees his ham-handed short story, “Jerry Was a Man,” become the tale of a rich socialite (Anne Heche) who takes in an android as a pet. At the conclusion, she goes to court to prove her android is human, because it cheats, likes cigarettes, and has other vices. The result: Ms. Heche ditches her husband for the amorous machine, and the economy collapses as the country’s slave labor force suddenly gains rights and goes on welfare.Even more cynical is “The Discarded” by Harlan Ellison, one of the genre’s most disagreeable cranks, a veteran of “The Outer Limits” and a truly great writer. “The Discarded,” based on his short story, stars Brian Dennehy and John Hurt as two hideously mutated freaks trapped in an orbiting leper’s colony for other freaks, the victims of a blood plague that transformed them into gag-inducing monstrosities. But now, Earth needs its freaks to help the very people who exiled them, so the planet sends a handsome emissary to convince them to come to the aid of their homeland.As host Stephen Hawking says in one of his jerky, halting introductions, “When the fate of so many rests in the hands of so few, can the failure to be held accountable ever be forgiven?”No, it can’t. And neither can this series.

Lost In Space

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