Red Dwarf XI and XII are an odd one, as they don’t have the “wow Red Dwarf is back!” feel of X and frankly don’t have the mostly good-to-great writing of X either, and while neither series falls as low as VIII they stand out so little that my rewatch for this review at times felt like I was watching them for the first time because I remembered so little about them. Well, with that said, let’s take a look at XI and see what, if anything, stands out!
The series opens up with “Twentica” which ticks the old (and weird) cliché of a sci-fi show doing an early 20th century, prohibition/ganger era story as two simulants go back in time and alter the timeline to stop human’s technological progress so they can dominate the species. The Red Dwarf crew once again go back in time and to Earth (which again begs the question why they don’t just pop back to a week after the radiation leak and live out the rest of their lives, but hey-ho) and end up dealing with speak-easy’s that hide the fact they’re using maths and science instead of alcohol, which was a good laugh. A pair of bickering simulants had some good lines as well but you can’t help but think Doug Naylor had one idea of a science speak-easy and struggled to fill 30 minutes around it. Episode 2 “Samsara” is much the same as it deals with everyone discovering a ship that has a “Karma Drive” on it, which rewards those who do good and punishes sinners. Lister (Craig Charles) and Cat (Danny John-Jules) struggle while Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) and Rimmer (Chris Barrie) figure out that the drive had been reversed and the bad behaviour was being rewarded. Again, fun idea for a few gags but a long flashback to the ship’s crew and a pair having an affair just padded it out and by the end again you got the feeling that Naylor liked the idea of a Karma Drive but was struggling to stretch the concept across the whole episode.
I want to make a joke along the lines of “this was my face when I watched this!” but Lister’s face is more confusion than anything else, and I never felt that watching it…
Episode 3 “Give & Take” was a bit more like it, as after a confrontation with a weirdly cartoony looking medical droid leaves Lister without any kidneys the group has to try and convince Cat to donate one of his, which given his selfishness was next to impossible. In the end they paradoxically go back in time a week, drug and transplant a healthy Lister’s kidney’s into current Lister’s body and then put the old Lister back. It links with some dialogue at the start of the episode, so it was well written in that sense, and had some good lines. Episode 4 “Officer Rimmer” is likewise a much better effort. The crew come across a ship that “bio-prints” its crew whenever needed and when Rimmer tries to shoot the ship down but actually accidentally saves it the bio-printed Captain (played by Stephen Critchlow) promotes Rimmer to officer at long last, leading to classic Rimmer smugly looking down on Lister and Cat gags and a Rimmer World-like set up where he bio-prints copies of himself that ends up causing trouble for everyone. I have to say that the bio-printed Captain having got jammed in the machine and ended up with a “crushed” face legitimately made me laugh and continued to do so through his whole appearance. Simple visual comedy I know, but what can I say? It worked!
Should have screengrabbed the Captain with the badly photocopied face, really… Oh well, an all-Rimmer barbershop quartet is good enough!
Episode 5 “Krysis” sees Kryten have a mid-life crisis including changing his outer shell to a red sports card style one and other such gags, then Lister takes him to see an older model to show him how far he’s come only for this older model, called “Butler” (played by Dominic Coleman), to have achieved far more than he ever has. It also includes the crew finding a station set up to talk to the universe itself, which is revealed to be a singular sentient entity (with a voice similar to Morgan Freeman, naturally) Overall the episode was one of those where I got what the gags were going for but I just didn’t find it that funny. Episode 6 “Can of Worms” is your classic call-back episode, in this case bringing back the Polymorph race. They rescue what they think is a female Cat person but not only does it turn out to be a Polymorph but it impregnates Cat Alien-style and he has to “give birth” to loads of little Polymorphs that leads to a bizarre scene of Lister pulling out various household objects from Cat and putting them in a nearby bin that you can only get in a sci-fi comedy show… Cat ends up trying to save them due to parental instinct which leads to a classic “which is the real one?” duplicate crew showdown. It was fine, nothing amazing, but kept me entertained for a half hour.
Overall Thoughts:
The crew essentially talks to God itself, then doesn’t really mention it as any kind of big deal again. Sounds about right!
Red Dwarf XI was… fine. Episodes 1 and 2 were average, 3 and 4 were good and 5 and 6 were poor and average, respectively. Overall, as I remembered, the series was a fun way to kill half an hour a week but it’s not even close to the prime years of Series III – VI and watching the episodes in much closer proximity to each other only made the samey-ness more obvious.
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