Astra Lost in Space Season 1
SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.
101: Planet Camp 2019 July 3
(First watched 2026-10-04) Definitely more full of general anime tropes than the last few shows I've been watching. Hey it's the klutzy girl and the genius and the wannabe hero and so on. BUT the premise so far seems pretty interesting. Students suddenly finding themselves thousands of light years from home, but a chance to work their way home if they can pull it off. I'm of course a Star Trek guy, I can see shades of Prodigy and Starfleet Academy here.
One thing very early on that stuck out. The show starts in 2063 and interstellar space travel seems to have become commonplace. Our lead klutzy girl meets up with a grandma-type who mentions her own experience going on a school space camping trip when she was young. Which would seem to push how far back interstellar travel was common back to the 2030s at least? This show was made in the early 2020s so either it's taking a very optimistic viewpoint of the near future, or it's a show set in a world where earlier time periods don't match our world either.
102: Wilderness 2019 July 10
(First watched 2026-10-05) I like that the alien world has plenty of alien plants and animals. This kind of thing is more difficult and expensive to pull off in primarily live-action format, so it's good to see an animated show take advantage.
This time we learn more about the history of Quitterie. Is this going to be like the first season of Lost, where in different episodes we keep learning the complicated backgrounds of the cast?
Near the end Zack and Kanata discuss the ship's broken communications equipment, and that the apparent recentness of the damage points to one of our characters being responsible. Maybe, but considering all the other weird shit going on I think that's not the only possibility. If a weird ball can send them across the universe to a place where a ship is mysteriously waiting, adding on "someone else breaks the communication equipment just before they take the ship over" doesn't seem like too big an ask.
Speaking of the weird ball, they run across it in the forest here. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser.
103: Meteor 2019 July 17
(First watched 2026-10-06) Didn't get MUCH of a character past history this time, but what we got was pretty important. Funi remembers enough for them to get the idea that they were intentionally brought together to be eliminated, rather than this stuff being happenstance.
They talk about how if one of them is working against the others they might be on a suicide mission, but it seems like everyone worked together pretty hard to help take care of this episode's emergency when working against them or even inaction could've resulted in doom.
Ulgar's found a gun on board and keeping it secret. They mention guns have been banned for 100 years... that's another thing that seems like it doesn't match with our own history, unless they're talking about specific countries.
104: Star of Hope 2019 July 24
(First watched 2026-10-07) Another weird planet, another weird survival situation, another person's past enlightened.
They do seem to jump to conclusions a lot. They hang out on the planet for a day, get sick, and start theorizing HARD about the nature of the fungus, its poisonous pollen, and its relation to the local animals. Kanata then goes even further in thinking he won't be allowed to find any of the antidote unless he lets himself get poisoned first. They survive, but... lucky.
105: Paradise 2019 July 31
(First watched 2026-10-08) For the main characters, it seemed like a pretty easygoing episode. Slice of life stuff on a planet not presenting problems, no real character backstory moment, theeeen Ulgar. Pulling a gun on Luca. Kanata declares him the enemy at the end, but I don't think that's so clear. Ulgar had a reaction to learning Luca was the son of Senator Marco Esposito, so this seems like something to do with that rather than as part of an assassination plot. If it's the latter he sure did a shitty job ignoring the very names of the people around him who may be targets.
Aside from that, we also for the first time got a bit of a view of the people left behind. It does seem a bit early to start declaring them legally dead, even if there are no further good avenues for search. Given the lack of any evidence found, I'd think the most obvious suspicion would be some kind of kidnapping.
106: Secret 2019 August 7
(First watched 2026-10-09) Yep, the shout of Enemy was a jump-to-conclusions red herring.
A twofer on backstories this time, with Luca and Ulgar. For the first episode or so I wasn't sure if Luca was supposed to be male or female, so I guess if anyone was going to have the surprise reveal of being intersex, it rings truest that it's him.
107: Past 2019 August 14
(First watched 2026-10-10) Charce's turn at backstory. And from what he says, it's more apparent than ever this world has a very different history to our own. Anyway, turns out he IS a prince, or near enough. The other secret part of his story... well, they make it so obvious they must mean for the viewer to get it right away even if the other characters can't. He had a friend called Seira who had similar hair to Aries though it kept from showing her face and the memories were in sepia so we couldn't see the hair color. Then after losing contact with the injured Seira, Charce happens to transfer to the same school Aries recently transferred to. Gee, I wonder if there's a connection.
So the Astra gets busted up with no hope of them being able to fix it for space flight... and they find another ship of the same class that's more busted up but in different ways. The amount of coincidence in helping progress things is maybe moving past Lost territory right into Dark Tower.
108: Lost and Found 2019 August 21
(First watched 2026-10-11) OK, that reveal at the end... well, the way the show has been going, I expected it to be something pretty wild. But this seems like something that should've been suspected earlier? Or at least, I feel like if I got a new adoptive sibling who looked exactly like I did 7 years earlier, I'd have at least noticed the similarity even if not jumping to a wild conclusion.
109: Revelation 2019 August 28
(First watched 2026-10-12) Man. This episode really laid it all out, and most of it I did not see coming. Funicia a clone of Quitterie? Nope, everybody a clone of their "parent"! I thought the parental troubles they had in common was some combination of easy storytelling and teenagers not understanding their parents. But nope, their parents are legit monsters who wanted to take over their bodies! Aries's origins are also still a mystery. Last episode strongly pointed to her actually being Seira. But if so who was Seira a clone of, that was being raised among commoners in fairytale land?
The end also has the reveal that... they're not from Earth. Or not exactly. I knew this part was coming because of the short clip I saw that interested me in the series to begin with, but I'm still curious about the details. Also, if they call their planet Astra... didn't they name the ship Astra after learning it was an old word for star? So it's like someone seeing the word earth on a plaque, learning it means dirt, and deciding to call their ship the Earth?
110: Culprit 2019 September 4
(First watched 2026-10-13) OK, this episode finally had the clip I saw some time back, with them discussing how they spoke the same language but the planet seemed different and countries were oldschool. So regarding Astra, at first I was thinking it was a distant future Earth with enough time for things like sea level changes to affect its appearance. Certainly the names of the continents seem like anagrams of Earth continents, so maybe they were just feeling really stupid when naming things. The connection between planets is still unclear. The main crew and Polina remember the same history until the Cuban Missile Crisis. They seem to remember different things after that. The sci-fi part of my brain says alternate universe, but it doesn't feel like the show is going that way. Best guess now--after Polina went to sleep, the wormhole exodus led people to Astra. Then for whatever reason the powers that be changed the story of history to cover up whatever unpleasant truth. This goes along with altering the date system, so what they're calling 2163 would really be... who knows, 2263, 2363 on the old Earth calendar? The main problem with this theory I think is that if there's really been such a huge time gap since Polina went to sleep, the Astra (the ship) should seem extremely oldschool, so I wouldn't have thought someone like Zack trained for modern ships would be able to adapt to it so easily.
Aaaand the enemy is Charce. Willingly going along with this murder-suicide plan due to... loyalty to the king he's a clone of? This doesn't do anything to help enlighten us on the Seira/Aries situation, either.
111: Confession 2019 September 11
(First watched 2026-10-14) Ahh. The reason the Aries/Seira stuff wasn't clicking was because Charce was previously feeding half-truths.
Given the situation, "right hand man" was a pretty funny turn of phrase.
112: Friend-Ship 2019 September 18
(First watched 2026-10-15) OK, so it's 2163. Most of the mysteries wrapped up pretty nicely. A stretch to think an entire generation would agree to hide the reality of a planetary migration from the next generation, buuuut that's fiction for you. Also, spaceship design hasn't changed much in a century.
Overall, satisfying conclusion.