Fans have been speculating on the nature of time travel in Lost in Space for many years and at times, it can be quite difficult to understand. A science fiction story about saving the people of the world and travelling to settle on another planet, it is about the Robinson family whose mission gets sabotaged and they get lost in time and space.
Professor John and Maureen Robinson and their children, Judy, Penny and Will, along with stowaway, Dr. Zachary Smith face a temporal distortion and travel to the year 2078 from 2058, instead of simply travelling forward in space.
It is Will’s experiments for school science projects that create the device which causes the temporal distortion. Older Will from the future manages to create a window in time that one can walk through, with some materials from the Jupiter-2. Thus, time travel in Lost in Space is simply about pushing some buttons in the time machine.
It is not without its limitations, however. Only one person can be sent back in one trip. Will Robinson’s aim is to go back to a specific moment in time to make things right, not to spy on the future in general. The experiment also destroys the planet on which the Jupiter-2 had landed and forces the family to take a leap again.
Time travel in Lost in Space can be used to change history. It is in order to prevent the moment of the death of their family that Will Robinson sends his father to the past and John is able to save his family be recalling the exact sequence of events.
This will cause consequences, however, since older Will as he ceases to exist because the past that formed him has changed. Dr. Smith, too, can be cured of his spider bite. And John loops back to his present. Time travel plays a rather important role in teaching lessons about the importance of family to the Robinsons.
It can be a little difficult to wrap your head around the intricacies of time travelling in the Lost in Space universe. But temporal loops are always confusing and fans might appreciate several rewatches before it all makes sense.
