*sigh*, here we go then. This is the series I’ve been “dreading” rewatching for this run-down of Red Dwarf as I kind of liked it when it aired (though more for discussing new episodes of Red Dwarf with my friends than the episodes themselves) and then it went down in my eyes with each rewatch, to the point where I got to my first DVD watch I thought “I doubt I’ll ever watch that again…” and yet here we are with the Blu-ray version for the sake of this blog. I’d love to say the series has gone up in my estimation in the previous years, but nope. One episode still stands out as fun though flawed, but the series as a whole is definitely the low point of Red Dwarf. Oh well: let’s take a look, then THIS time I really won’t rewatch it again!
The series starts off with an interesting premise as the nanobots that rebuilt Red Dwarf at the end of Series VII rebuilt the whole crew again, including Rimmer (as Chris Barrie’s big film career didn’t go as planned…) and I remember thinking as it aired for the first time that some more modern sci-fi heavy Red Dwarf plots but involving a whole city-sized crew, with Lister (Craig Charles), Cat (Danny John-Jules), Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) and Kochanski (Chloë Annett) being the only people familiar with being three million years into deep space and the kind of crazy things that can happen was a great idea. Sadly this isn’t what they went for, instead Captain Hollister (still played by Mac McDonald!) and the original non-senile version of Holly (Norman Lovett) spend the opening three-parter “Back in the Red” testing them to see if their crazy story was true and then once they get that verified they send all of them plus Rimmer (who tried to use Lister’s knowledge for his own gain) to a hereto unknown prison level of the ship for breaking various laws. There was a fun twist where they thought they were escaping only to find out they were hooked up to a VR machine (thus proving their stories were true) but otherwise the opener is a bit of a drag, with Rimmer using the Sexual Magnetism virus to sleep with half the crew being out of character (as in it should have somehow not worked, Rimmer having slept with all these beautiful women kind of ruins a good number of gags…) and everyone putting in false teeth and wearing mop heads to pretend to be the “Dibbley family” as yet another callback that didn’t work, and the less said about Cat dancing with various badly animated CG ships the better.
Captain Hollister is back! … What? It’s hard to find positives here…
So despite all their knowledge (especially Kryten!) they all get tucked away in a deadly, mismanaged prison complex that has never been mentioned before (why did Lister get put in stasis in Series 1 for breaking the ship’s rules if there was a prison?). Funnily enough though the next Episode, “Cassandra” is the highlight of the series. Lister signs everyone up to the “Canaries” thinking they were a choir unaware they’re actually a special group of convicts that get sent out to potentially deadly locations to scout them and see if they’re safe for officers, which again given Red Dwarf was just a Jupiter Mining Ship I have no idea why they needed such a thing, but I’ll get off that subject now… maybe. They’re sent to an abandoned spaceship and meet Cassandra, an A.I. that can 100% accurately predict the future, which she proves several times. She reveals that Rimmer will die but he gets out of it by swapping his jacket with his name on it with someone else, which makes me laugh. That at least is classic Rimmer! Cassandra reveals he will actually die after being caught sleeping with Kochanski, which he is thrilled about but again in the previous story he slept with a whole bunch of attractive women so that gag loses its effectiveness somewhat. I won’t ruin the ending here because it’s one of the few highlights, so I’ll save that for the spoiler section…
I’d explain how this was a thing, but it’s far funnier to leave it here with no context…
Sadly we now reach the real dregs of the series. “Krytie TV” sees Kryten moved to the female wing of the prison due to not having any genitals and figuring out he can become popular by filming the female prisoners showering the showing it to the men, something that panics Lister and Rimmer because they have managed to get a retrial and Kryten’s reality TV-like antics end up putting it in danger. Now some people dislike the episode due to its “controversial content” but honestly I dislike because its badly written and not very funny, regardless of the subject matter. We then get a two-part story dubbed “Pete” where Rimmer and Lister drive Hollister so crazy that they get thrown in “the Hole”, basically a solitary confinement type deal though the two find a Welshman named “Birdman” who, well, has a pet bird. Meanwhile Kryten and Kochanski find a “Time Wand” on a Canaries mission that can reverse time around specific objects. The two storylines converge and Birdman’s bird gets turned into a T-Rex, which causes havoc on the ship. The T-Rex by the way, looks horrible as much like Series VII they were trying to push still-emerging CG effects on a 90s BBC budget and funnily enough it didn’t stretch to a convincing life-sized T-Rex…
Does it look crap? Yes. Would a practical effects version look better? Probably not. The key is to not write a T-Rex scene in your BBC comedy episode…
The finale, “Only the Good…” once again has some good ideas but doesn’t quite pull it off. A genetically engineered metal-eating virus arrives on Red Dwarf causing the whole crew minus our lead quintet to evacuate ship (never to be seen or mentioned again, by the way…) and Kryten comes up with a plan to find an antidote by going to a mirror universe where everything is the opposite, and therefore the virus will actually be a cure. They create this universe but its Rimmer who goes through and he becomes infatuated with the universe as due to it being the opposite he’s captain of the ship and Hollister is the low-lever crew member trying to suck up to him. Not the worst episode, and I’ll talk briefly about the ending the spoilers but the worst thing about it is the ending cliffhanger is never followed up on. By the time the next special aired the crew had aged so much that doing a reprisal wasn’t feasible so they just never address it (well, apart from a couple of gags in Series X at the expense of people who really wanted a resolution anyway…) It’s the perfect sum-up of Series VIII really, it’s just disappointing…
I have to give special mention as well to the jokes and dialogue: it’s sometimes REALLY bad. There are a few classic Lister / Rimmer bunkbed exchanges that still work, but there really are some low-brow or just plain unfunny “gags” that makes me shake my head. At least Doug Naylor recaptured a bit of his old ways in the next few specials / shows… well, sometimes. I think we can all agree that Rob Grant must have been the more intelligent writer when it came to jokes based on series 7 onwards’ quality compared to the original six series…
Overall Thoughts:
A humiliating scene no doubt, but not as humiliating as appearing in the series as a whole! Way-hey!
Red Dwarf VIII is a hard watch. The jokes rarely land, the re-worked setting is uninteresting (and makes no sense!) and with one exception none of the plots are fun or interesting. I can’t express how happy I was when “Back to Earth” was announced ten years after this aired as that decade where Red Dwarf ended with this was depressing. Say what you want about the “Dave era” of Dwarf but thankfully none of those series fall this low…
I mentioned the ending to “Cassandra” was good, and it was! Lister figured out that Cassandra was trying to engineer a scenario that would upset him because she knows he’s the one who destroys her (which makes no sense as she would therefore foresee these attempts wouldn’t work, but whatever…) and so enters her lab to tell her he’s not going to destroy her and that this was one prediction she got wrong, putting his chewing gum on the wall as he leaves… only for that gum to fall onto a switch which sets off a Rube Goldberg machine sequence until a coffee mug spills onto her main system which causes her to explode, Cassandra giving Lister a knowing look just before it happens. Still makes me laugh, especially Lister’s simple reaction of “… smeg.” afterwards.
What Cassandra needed to predict was the show returning in a decade with better scripts, that would’ve been a relief for younger me…
As for the end of “Only the Good…”? Well, Rimmer gets the antidote, arrives on the real Red Dwarf but can’t find anyone. A vending machine he’d taunted earlier tries to get revenge by firing a can of drink at his head and just as Rimmer is about to be taken away by the grim reaper himself Rimmer kicks Death in the nads and runs. That’s it. The original ending had Rimmer on the verge of death and then cut to credits, but apparently it didn’t go down well so they quickly filmed the more comedic ending instead but honestly that felt even worse as it was completely out of place in the series’ more sci-fi leaning tone! Oh well, in the next special Rimmer is apparently the original hologram Rimmer from Series 1-7 somehow and how this cliffhanger is resolved is never mentioned…
Hogan Reviews 