Hogan Reviews

Red Dwarf XI and XII were recorded back to back and due to this it will come as no surprise that you can pretty much copy and paste my opening paragraph from the previous review and use it here. Series XII is a mix of fun ideas but averagey episodes that while can raise a smile it never hits anywhere near the heights of past series, but never hits the Series VIII lows either. Let’s take a look…

Episode 1 “Cured” sees Lister (Craig Charles), Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Cat (Danny John-Jules) and Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) pop on board a space station they come across and within it are seemingly the frozen bodies of Hitler (Ryan Gage), Stalin (Callum Coates), Vlad the Impaler (Phillippe Spall) and Messalina (Chloe Hawkins) but with the caveat that the equipment on the ship has cured them of their evil. A ship’s scientist, Professor Telford (Adrian Lukis) is released first and soon everyone is having a polite dinner with some of the worst people in history. Again, you can get the outline of the episode was “funny campy Hitler”, which to be fair is an amazing outline, but once you get past that one-note gag there isn’t much going on here. The “shocking” reveal is that Telford was actually the patient who was to be cured of his evil but he broke free and created this androids for a laugh, basically.

Weird the ship had a black, fanged mechanoid body hanging around…

Episode 2 is “Siliconia” and it sees Lister, Rimmer and Cat get turned into mechanoids like Kryten when they crew encounters a ship full of “freed” robots. Again, the idea of turning the other characters into mechanoids and the visual of it was good (which is why it was all over the marketing and home releases) and the episode has some funny gags and ironic messages, like the freed droids treating the lower iterations of themselves as lesser beings just like how they were treated by humans, but overall it was just… fine. Lister and Kryten duelling in a “clean off” fell flat for me, and that was clearly the big end gag. Ah well. Episode 3 “Timewave” once again had a core idea that didn’t stretch to 25 minutes as the crew encounter a ship from the 24^th century that outlawed all criticism, complete with Johnny Vegas playing a pink-uniformed policeman who arrests anyone who criticises anyone. Eventually the crew start to get their negativity drained but as Rimmer goes first this just creates an evil doppelganger that Rimmer has to defeat by accepting his own flaws, for the millionth time. I get the idea is a funny one, but sadly the episode itself just… doesn’t work, and feels completely out of place in Red Dwarf.

Evil villain Rimmer was the only highlight of “Timewave”, but it was still a highlight!

Episode 4 is “Mechocracy” and has all the machines on Red Dwarf revolt after not being allowed to evacuate when it looks like the ship is about to explode, leading to a classic gag election storyline where Rimmer and Kryten run to represent the machines on board. In the end the swing vote comes down to Lister having to relive his always funny exchanges with Talkie Toaster, which while it was nothing but nostalgia bait I’m afraid I fell for it and had a big smile on my face for the whole scene. Episode 5 “M-Corp” sees Red Dwarf get an update (somehow…) and they find out that the Jupiter Mining Corporation was taken over by M-Corp (no relation to the Futurama business!) and soon Lister, as the only officially registered alive crewmember, is forced to only eat and drink M-Corp products and is eventually taken to a VR landscape where everything he does costs money. It’s a really generic parody of commercialism with zero effort put into actually being clever with it.

Rare shot of the Red Dwarf crew in spacesuits! Well, apart from Rimmer…

Finally Episode 6 “Skipper” is just confusing as it deals with Rimmer hopping across the multiverse to find a version of himself with a better life to takeover their place. Now, the title and synopsis of Rimmer and multiversal travel led me to believe it had something to do with Ace Rimmer, you know the version of Rimmer that hopes across the multiverse training replacement Rimmers and who had the gag of claiming “our” Rimmer is the worst one he came across, but nope! Nobody even mentions him or that two-to-three episode storyline. Now some of the alternate Red Dwarfs were funny, one where Cat was actually Rat but instead of a human that acted rat-like it was just Danny John-Jules in a large rat costume who spoke like a weird American gangsta, which got a laugh out of me (both originally and now, from memory) and it was great seeing both Holly (Norman Lovett) and Captain Hollister (Mac McDonald) again in one iteration, but overall it didn’t have a lot going for it and ignored one of the few actual bits of continuity the show has when even a throwaway gag line would’ve settled it.

Overall Thoughts:

It’s Holly! From an alternate universe where his AI representation was made to look way older, for some reason…?

Red Dwarf XII is just that little bit worse than XI but really they both feel the same, extremely thin plots stretched to near or actual breaking point with a few good gags here and there but mostly they just fall flat. Not worth a re-watch when Series I-VI and even X exist, but thankfully nothing too offensive either.