episode #61 - Visit to a Hostile Planet

episode #61 / Air Date: 9/13/67 (episode #2 of 3rd season)
written by Peter Packer; Directed by Sobey Martin

The Jupiter 2 is having problems as it moves through space, perhaps due to impurities in its fuel reserve. John & Don try to compensate - there are the usual blow-ups and the ship moves into some kind of warp; everyone aboard is knocked out due to intense acceleration. When they wake up, however, they find - to their pleasant surprise - that they are near Earth. The "nightmare" (as Smith puts it) is over! They go in for a landing and end up in some parking lot, at nighttime.

The group splits up into 3 parties to look around - no sign of any other people yet. Each soon discovers that they have ended up in Earth's past - in 1947, to be exact. Smith & Will run into a couple of nervous residents who soon start shooting at the Robot. As far as most of the resident Earthlings are concerned, the group is some invading force of aliens - Voltones - based on sci-fi stories published up to that time. Smith soon dons the garb of a local firefighter and pretends to be a visiting chief & expert, there to help with capturing the invaders.
This has its amusing moments, though the local populace is portrayed as total dunces and is a bit overdone; some of this reminded me of the comedy film The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming - just that here it's aliens from outer space, not invaders from a foreign land. This episode obviously is a comedic comment on the whole legend of Roswell - 1947 - Area 51 - flying saucers and so on, as well as the famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles in 1938. BoG's Score: 6 out of 10

NOTE: at one point, John tries to explain to the populace about how they're from the future and mentions that men landed on the moon in 1970 - he was off by just one year! (unless we look at this as a parallel reality) Or, the group's presence altered the future and men then landed on the moon in 1969. In any case, it's sobering to realize how people in the sixties expected the space program to escalate until, in the nineties, such space flight as done by the Robinsons would be possible. Didn't happen in our reality...
Lost in Space Trivia: One of the locals is played by a young Robert Pine, who had a long career in front of him on TV & film (C*H*I*P*S, Empire of the Ants); in one scene, he ropes Judy and is surprised to find that he snagged a girl not an alien - funny.
Also, as expected, the group leaves Earth at the end of the episode, but now (seems to me) they are lost in space and time...! Aren't they...?