In the second part of our interview with writer Richard Dinnick, attention turns to Legendary’s tie-in to Lost in Space. The first volume, Countdown to Danger, hits shelves this week, with its stories slotted around the adventures seen in the first season. [NB This interview contains spoilers for  Lost in Space season 1]…

 

You’ve done various books for Legendary, but how did you get involved with Lost in Space?

Robert Napton asked me if I’d like to do it? Would I? Yes, I would! I was a huge fan of all the Irwin Allen stuff from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, to his movies and everything.

It was the polar opposite of Doctor Who in terms of access. For Lost in Space I got all the scripts – with my name printed all across them in a diagonal – in autumn last year. Then I got rough cuts of episodes online, and when I was out in Los Angeles in February this year, we had meetings with the execs, showed them what I’d already done, and talked about what they wanted to see. They liked what I was doing.

It was great to be asked to do it. I had so much access because the plan was not to do an adaptation of the TV show but to do stories that fitted in with the TV show – so we had to find gaps where adventures could take place. There’s time on the Resolute to fit a story in before the robot attacks (spoilers!) – in fact, the first one I’ve done is pretty much set on the Resolute. The others I’ve done are set in gaps in episodes.

I went through every script with a fine toothed comb, and found an hour here, five hours there, there’s a day, there’s a night where we can put stuff in.

Was there a timeline on the scripts in the way Russell T Davies did with Doctor Who Series 1?

It didn’t say Day 1 or Day 2 but it was pretty obvious from the dialogue and the way people reacted to things how much time had passed. I was picking up where they cut away. For example, in an early episode, Penny is trying to put the Chariot together and she discovers it doesn’t have its wheels on, and we cut away to something else. When we cut back, she’s got the wheels on the Chariot. So we could have a scene in the garage with the Chariot where she’s talking to Judy or on the radio to someone… it was stuff like that.

The Rosencrantz & Guildenstern of Lost in Space…

I’ll take that! It was enormously fun. I was amazed at what I was allowed to do with characters and storylines. They were amazingly receptive to my out-there thinking as to what we might do. I’d come up with something and they’d come back, and say, yes, but how about this?!

Presumably now they’ve left that planet, references in series 2 aren’t likely to flash back to that planet; they’re still going to be Earth or the Resolute…

Exactly. We have flashbacks to Earth as well because that’s part of the show – Lost… in space, as well as Lost in Space.

How many stories have you written so far?

I’ve done four. There are four volumes, 40 odd pages per volume. There’s another writer, Brian Buccellato, and we’ve got one story each in the first two volumes, then there’s a standalone two-parter of mine then a standalone two-parter of his.

The artist, Zid, worked on Kong: Skull Island also for Legendary and has done such amazing photorealistic work. It’s like he’s taken frames from a film that’s been made of what I’ve actually written and painted them. They’ve paid for the actors’ likeness so the execs want it to look like these guys. There are splash pages and double splash pages that I’ve described that he’s drawn so fantastically. There’s some really cool stuff in there.

What do you enjoy most about working on Lost in Space?

Doctor Who is a romp and you can do “grown up stuff” as it were in it but what I liked about Lost in Space is that with this you can do far more emotional reality about the issues with Will, why he is who he is. He doesn’t have any friends, and like most writers, you can relate to that. He’s a genius as opposed to a writer! I’ve enjoyed that little bit more grown up stuff and going into darker areas.

People asked why we needed a darker grittier version, but I think the show did it well.

You’ve got to have shades. Any drama that doesn’t have jokes in it is a little bit dry.

 

Lost in Space Volume 1 is out now from Legendary

Click here for the first part of this piece in which Richard Dinnick discusses his Doctor Who work