Gallery Princess of Space

What a delight! Despite the story itself having a few painful moments, mostly regarding rebellious robots, this could be Penny/Angela at her most beautiful. As I suggest elsewhere, the story itself is pure fairy tale, with Sheila (Mrs. Irwin) Allen as Penny’s fairy godmother, really. And Sheila is herself delightful, meriting the honor of not one, but two, solo pictures of her in this gallery. When Penny steps out for the first time in the formal gown (what color is that, pale aqua?), she is breathtaking. I don’t think we’ve seen ANY of the regular characters in anything like non-uniform clothing before, so naturally this alone is a pretty big jar to our sensibilities. My gosh, we’re seeing Penny’s bare shoulders! But as I note elsewhere, this scene basically triggered all of my “Daddy” instincts, and it was like seeing one of my own daughters getting ready to go off to the prom. You get a very good sense of Penny’s fraility under all this, too. You can see her just trying to hold it all together. A lot of Angela’s wonderful expressiveness again! Haven’t seen whole lots of that late lately, and I suspect this is her last really big performance of the series. Some elegant movement too, revealing her dance training — watch her gestures over the rock after the shoes vanish, early on. And something which is always one of my favorites, the last scene as Penny runs away! A bit blurred this way, unfortunately.

Please see my comments on this ep under “The Written Word” for more observations, the only other thing I will say here is that Sheila has one of the best lines of the whole series here, which I think captures the real heart of Lost In Space: “If people don’t believe in magic, they’ll turn into machines themselves.”

“Aunt Gammie”

And now . . . the magic which is Penny . . .

This slideshow requires JavaScript.