I realize that times were more trusting in the sixties, but to let your 10-year old son and 13-year old daughter go gallivanting around the Galaxy with a strange man you've only known for five minutes is total bad parenting. And speaking of parenting, what is up with Mr. and Mrs. Robinson? Will and Penny disobey them in every single episode and they are never punished; sent to their rooms; given a timeout, or on the receiving end of a good butt whipping. Every show Mrs. Robinson allows either Will or Penny to slip from the Jupiter 2 and get into some sort of jam.

I really like this episode. There's a lot to enjoy. Not as noisy and frantic as the episodes to come, this is sentimental without the corn. Great scene between John & Maureen regarding the children being dragged into space and Hapgood remains one of the best LOS misfits,villians, or aliens ever on the show.
Better written and directed, too, than some of the stuff in Season 3.
One big question, though: What the ingreidients in Maureen's famous, Space Pie?

The beginning was hilarious: "There's a missile coming straight for us...let's sit tight, and not move out of the way."
And they were so trusting back then! "Here, Will, my 10-yr old son...stay here alone with this strange man we don't know from anybody for a few hours. Heck, maybe you and your teenage sister should go off into the cosmos with him."
And then there was Hapgood complimenting Judy on her mother's space pie.Another point of interest: in this early episode, there were still trying to maintain some mystique/menace around the robot...dramatic threatening music plays when he enters the scene.The TV fascination w/ westerns and "country folk" was still in full swing at this time; "Wagon Train" was in its last year, but "Bonanza", "Gun Smoke", and even "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "The Andy Griffith Show" were still going strong, and it seems LIS couldn't resist shoehorning a cowboy into their sci-fi (syfy?) millieu. Not a whole lot happens here, this one was more of an introspective episode, but there was some good character acting and family sentimentality. And I think that when I was a little kid I would have thought the spore monsters were pretty cool. One thing I remember fondly from LIS is the way the epilogue always tied into the following episode, even though the episodes themselves were largely self-contained and unrelated. That's a cool idea TV should revisit.