As one of my film festival nominations, I chose Lost in Space which is a Netflix Original show created by Irwin Allen. Similar to the other two movies I nominated, Lost in space is a show that has individuals tasked with exploring planets. In Lost in Space, a boy named Will and his colony land on an Earth-like planet in the hopes to find a suitable place to live. Unlike earth however, there are advanced robots which are hostile towards the group but Will manages to find one of these robots very injured and nearly dead. Will helps him recover and this robot helps him and his family throughout the show.
The reason I nominated this show is because it touches on a lot of applied plant ecology related ideas. In one of the episodes for example, Will and his colony come across a plant that used to be native to earth but had gone extinct centuries ago. The colony was shocked because the last time the plant was seen, advanced space travel hadn’t existed so there was no way humans could have planted them.
They ended up recalling that centuries ago, a spaceship carrying said plant was launched from earth but unexpectedly exploded but there was no real news coverage on it so they had no clue what happened. In the episode, they ended up concluding that the robots had attacked and destroyed the ship but this plant had launched seed all over the place in the wreckage. These seeds travelled and latched onto the robots who then travelled back home. This explained how this plant was found thriving on another planet, even though it had gone extinct on earth due to growth conditions no longer being met.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 