Hogan Reviews

Red Dwarf X (because they counted the “Back to Earth” special as Series IX) is a true return to form for the series, with the cast reduced back to the classic four from Series III – VI, with six half hour episodes most of which are good to even great. The next few series sort of drop to middling (if memory serves) but X at the very least was, and as it turns out still is, a real treat to watch. Let’s take a deeper look!

The series opens with “Trojan”, which serves as yet another reminder of Rimmer (Chris Barrie) being a sad, sad man, in the best most funniest way, naturally! Due to a new McGuffin they found they manage to contact a ship from the distant past piloted by Howard Rimmer (Mark Dexter), Arnold’s older brother, and they need help. Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) says they must accept the SOS and does so, and therefore Rimmer is once again desperate to pass his Astro-navigation exam and become an officer so he won’t seem too pathetic. It also has a side-story of Lister (Craig Charles) being addicted to a droid-led shopping service which is surprisingly an equally funny plot. In the end Rimmer manages to convince everyone to dress up as his crew and treat him as Captain as Howard and a mechanoid assistant called Crawford (Susan Earl) beam on board. I’ll leave the end of this Episode for the spoiler section because I want to talk about the specifics because it still makes me laugh thinking about it…

Two Rimmers… and two radiators?

Episode 2 “Fathers & Suns” has Lister reveal that he sends himself a father’s day card each year, intentionally getting so drunk that he forgets what he writes himself, leading to Rimmer pointing out that he is a terrible son to his father, and a bad father for not being more strict on himself (it’s complicated when you’re your own dad…) While Lister gets so drunk he sends his hung-over self a video message trying to force him to do better with his life Kryten and Rimmer install a new ship A.I. called Pree (Rebecca Blackstone) who “does a Queeg” and becomes a real issue the crew has to deal with. The two plots come together well in the end for a good laugh. Episode 3 “Lemons” is a true standout as the Dwarfers are sent back to AD 23 Earth when they assemble a “rejuvenation shower” incorrectly and while searching for lemons to power the remote back to the ship they meet a man called Jesus (James Baxter) who bares a striking resemblance to THE Jesus, and it is the right time period… While Rimmer has some words to add him to his famous people he’s met list the group end up accidentally taking Jesus back with them to the ship and he freaks out when he reads what people in history have done in his name, so when he heads back to Earth he intentionally tries to act as un-Jesus-y as possible. It’s a great laugh and a proper standout episode of the series.

Given their intelligence level I’m not sure how the Red Dwarf crew made it from Britain to India in 23 AD, but hey-ho… at least they got some turbans out of it!

Episode 4 “Entangled” sees Lister lose both Starbug and Rimmer himself to some “BEGGs” (“Biologically Engineered Garbage Gobblers”) and has been outfitted with a groinal exploder that will detonate in 24 hours if he doesn’t pay up. At the same time Cat (Danny John-Jules) finally gets to do something semi-important when he gets “quantum entangled” with Kryten leading to the two to say the same things at the same time and generally enforce coincidences around them. This all comes together when Lister tries to negotiate with the BEGGs and agrees to another poker game and claims he “doesn’t choke” which then leads to the BEGGs coincidentally choking to death, leaving Lister with a few hours before his groin explodes. “Luckily” they come across a frozen scientist called Irene Edgington (Sydney Stevenson) who specialised in being wrong about everything and so they do the opposite of what she instructs to get the device off (and then she stumbles into an airlock and dies, in case you were wondering if she became a regular character). Episode 5 “Dear Dave” is the only below average episode of the series as it sees Lister anger some snack dispensers and worry about a letter that arrived in a post pod (SOMEHOW still finding them and arriving) that claimed as old flame was pregnant. It really was a slog at points as nothing else happened and the other characters had pretty much no plot to follow themselves. Looking it up it seems this episode and the next were written in a hurry when the original two scripts couldn’t be used (they involved Kochanski returning but I guess she couldn’t attend at the last minute) and while Episode 6 was partially based an old film script so actually had a plot set this was clearly, well, a jumbled mess of random scenes, frankly. I’ll save Episode 6 for the spoiler section, because… why not?

Overall Thoughts:

A shot of the whole crew, including Lister with his groin bomb and Kryten staring into your soul.

Red Dwarf X is a great laugh for the most part, three top class episodes in “Trojan”, “Lemons” and “The Beginning”, two good episodes in “Fathers & Suns” and “Entangled”, with only “Dear Dave” being below average. Given the hit rate on VII, VIII and Back to Earth it was a rather big relief to see the show get back on track. My memory says XI, XII and The Promised Land don’t reach these heights either, so… a brief return to form, but a return to form nonetheless.

A quick look at the end of Episode 1 as Crawford is soon revealed to be an undercover Simulant and Howard sacrifices himself to save everyone, admitting to Arnold that he was actually just a chicken soup machine vendor and lied about being a Captain, to which Rimmer responds “I lied too…” only to tell him he actually had more cars that he claimed he did, moments before his brother died. Classic Rimmer, what a git!

When you’d rather go back to bed than fight in a deadly duel… That’s actually what’s happening here, read below!

Speaking of Rimmer’s family, Episode 6 “The Beginning” starts with a flashback of young Rimmer being humiliated at school by his teacher / Dad (Simon Treves) and then fades into a great opener as a rogue droid called “Hogey” (Richard O’Callaghan) arrives and challenges Lister to a “duel across time and space” only to elicit eyerolls from everyone as even “deadly duels” are becoming old hat now in their hum-drum life. The droid however stole a secret map of wormholes from deadly Simulants and has therefore led their annihilator ships to Red Dwarf, leading to the crew having to escape in the Blue Midget ship. They hide in an asteroid and Lister points out that out of everyone Rimmer is the only one who studied both Astro physics and military strategy but this of course only freaks him out. He soon builds up the courage to play a message his father left him to only be played when he made officer and in it his father tells him that he isn’t actually his father, the family gardener is, and this freeing of no longer having to please his father gives him a clear enough focus to create a strategy to defeat the Simulants.

It’s a fun episode all round honestly, the Simulants have some really funny moments and lines and there’s a semi-recurring gag where Rimmer keeps going to explain the ending to “Only The Good…” from Series VIII only to be interrupted. He never actually goes into any detail by the way, so we’ll never actually know…