An
earthquake strikes Altrusia both conceptually and literally in the third season
premiere of Land of the Lost (1974 – 1977), titled “After Shock.”
Behind
the scenes, star Spencer Milligan (Rick Marshall) departed from the series,
replaced by Ron Harper as Uncle Jack Marshall. And a new team of writers, led
by Sam Roeca (Valley of the Dinosaurs) and Jon Kubichan replaced outgoing
writers such as Dick Morgan.
In
terms of the actual storyline, “After Shock” begins with a quake that sends
Rick Marshall -- working inside a pylon -- spiraling home to his home in
California, leaving Will (Wesley Eure) and Holly (Kathy Coleman) to contend
with a shifted reality in Altrusia.
High
Bluff is buried in rock, taking all of the Marshalls’ equipment with it, and a
strange new, two-headed monster (which Holly christens “Lulu”) appears in the
lagoon. Uncle Jack also falls into the
Land of the Lost, a fact which conforms to the one-person-in, one-person out
balance of the strange land as viewers understand it..
Finally,
Chaka (Philip Paley) also loses track of the other Pakuni, Ta and Sa, though
his explanation for their disappearance doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Chaka claims that the other Paku were separated
on the other side of a crack in the land, running far away. But we know from Land of the Lost history
that Altrusia is a small pocket universe that circles around on itself, and so
there’s no way for the Paku to have disappeared or left.
It
would have been better if Chaka simply saw Ta and Sa fall into a crack in the
Earth, though that explanation may have scared the kiddies, I suppose.
After
Will, Holly and Chaka find Uncle Jack by the lagoon, they all go in search of a
new home, and must battle the fearful Sleestak for possession of “The Old
Temple” near the Lost City. It isn’t
clear if this structure is supposed to be the same old temple that was featured
in second season stories such as “The Musician,” though it looks completely
different here.
As
for Jack, Ron Harper is a capable actor, and he did a great job as Virdon on Planet
of the Apes (1974). The writing
here establishes Jack as an engineer, which helps to explain how he is able to
build so many interesting and helpful devices in the Land of the Lost, like wheels
for the heavy temple door.
Gazing
at “After Shock,” one can debate, certainly, the idea of change as a positive
for Land
of the Lost and change as a negative factor. The episode starts out promisingly as Will
reminds an upset Holly that “we aren’t
alone. We’re just on our own.” In some sense, this is the moment the series --
and Rick Marshall -- have been preparing the kids for since the family first
fell into the land of the lost. Everyone has always known that separation was
a possibility.
There’s
an argument to be made that the arrival of Uncle Jack is thus truly
unnecessary, and the series should have continued just with Will, Holly and
Chaka living together, in no need of a father figure. Instead, Uncle Jack’s arrival feels like the
idea of change…without real change. He’s
a new Dad, essentially, and so the story line and characters don’t truly move
forward in a meaningful way.
Even
the idea of losing the cave at High Bluff and moving to the Old Temple is
promising, but its potential largely undelivered by future episodes. The temple set is a really good, really
intriguing one, and very different from the old cave. The set is dotted with all of these large
stone doors, ostensibly leading to other unexplored chambers. But no episode of the series ever explores what
chambers or tunnels lay beyond those doors.
That’s a disappointment, because a core aspect of the series has been,
in episodes like
“Downstream” and “Follow that Dinosaur,” an exploration of new territory.
Instead, the Marshalls and Chaka move in during “After Shock” and never
really look around their new digs. Even
as a seven year old kid, I wondered why the family didn’t explore its new home.
I wanted to know what was behind those doors.
“After
Shock” also shows some of streamlining of core, long-standing Land
of the Lost concepts. Now, both
Chaka and the Sleestak Leader clearly and understandably speak English, for
example. It’s a shift, and again, one with ups and downs. If one chooses, one can register Chaka’s
sudden understanding/learning of English as a side-effect of his experience in “The
Musician,” near the end of the second season, when his intelligence was “evolved”
by the Builders of the Land of the Lost.
I
used to consider Chaka’s new Tarzan/pigeon-English a continuity error, but
after watching several episodes of the second season in which he and the
Marshalls waste precious minutes of story time trying to communicate with one
another via the Pakuni language, I can’t argue that this streamlining is a
dramatic mistake, especially considering the events of “The Musician.”
“After
Shock” is a pretty strong episode of Land of the Lost, the beginning of a
new era that promises some intriguing story-lines. The problem isn’t that the new direction is
bad, but rather that follow-up episodes don’t necessarily deliver on the
potential promised by this installment. The
second episode, for instance -- called “Survival Kit” -- is one of the worst
episodes of the entire series and entirely inconsistent with what we know of
the Sleestaks, the Land of the Lost, its history, and its inhabitants.
Next
week: “Survival Kit.”
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