Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Land of the Lost (1991 - 1992): "Siren's Song" (October 24, 1992)

In “Siren’s Song,” The Porters, Stink, Tasha and Christa go back to the beach to visit Namaki, the mer-man they met a few episodes back, in “Life’s a Beach.” 

While resting, however, the Porters encounter a crisis.  Annie (Jenny Drugan) disappears without a trace, and Mr. Porter (Timothy Bottoms) blames himself.  Of late, he has been thinking of his dead wife, Natasha (Marta Du Bois), and how he spent more time focusing on his career than on his family.

The Porters and Namaki go in search of Annie, and Kevin finds her in a dark grotto, mesmerized by a siren that has taken the form of their mother.  When Kevin is ensnared by this witch as well, Mr. Porter must save the day. 

The siren’s true form -- that of an old crone -- is revealed, and she is freed from her imprisonment in the grotto once she acknowledges her own guilt, and once Namaki defeats her guard...a monstrous dragon.  

“I was once a beautiful woman,” she reveals, but was so obsessed with her beauty that it became more important to her than her own family.

Having exorcised that demon -- just as Mr. Porter exorcises his -- the siren finally goes free.

Many episodes of the 1991 – 1992 Land of the Lost remake bear a close resemblance to episodes of the 1970s version.  This week’s entry, “Siren Song” is a case in point.  The installment plays like an echo of the original series episode “Album,” which saw Will (Wesley Eure) and Holly Marshall (Kathy Coleman) ensnared by a Sleestak trap that took the form of their dead mother.  In that case, the “siren” appeared in a cave, or grotto, much as she does in “Siren’s Song.”  The close replication of details regarding the Siren’s disguise (as a deceased parent) and her location (in a cave…) can’t be coincidence.

The resemblance to “Album” is worth noting, but it doesn’t severely undercut “Siren Song’s” value as one of the better entries in the remake’s second season.

For one thing, there is a sturdy literary antecedent at work here, and Annie Porter mentions it explicitly: Homer’s The Odyssey, and Odysseus’s encounter with the monstrous sirens.  This is a nice touch.

For another thing, the siren has appeared frequently throughout cult-television history, in series as diverse as Space:1999 (“Guardian of Piri”), Star Trek Voyager (“Favorite Son”) Millennium (“Siren”) and even Batman and Smallville.  The siren is thus a legitimate cult-tv “monster,” and in Land of the Lost she is well-cast indeed. 

Marta Du Bois plays the siren both in beautiful human form, and in scary old crone form. Long-time TV fans will remember Du Bois from her memorable turns on Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982), Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Devil’s Due” [1990]) and Voyagers.

Also, finally, “Siren’s Song” provides some much-needed background detail about the Porter family. We not only meet a specter of Natasha, the dead matriarch, but we get a little bit of insight about Mr. Porter’s life before he arrived in this strange world.  Apparently, he was a workaholic and a bit of a narcissist too, traits he shares in common with the life-form banished to the grotto.  The episode “Future Boy” even makes note of this, when Annie tells the boy from 2062, Simon, that her father used to “work all the time.”

I enjoyed this episode of the remade Land of the Lost more than many because of its attention to character, and because of its call back to franchise history, and more than that, TV history.  Du Bois is also, perhaps, the most notable (and welcome…) guest star of the entire remake catalog.

Next week: “In Dinos We Trust.”