Red Dwarf: Everybody’s Dead, Dave (2009-2020)

Dave is a TV channel in the UK which probably needs a bit of introduction for non-Brits. Back in 1992, the BBC and Thames Television (the London part of the regional broadcasters that made up ITV at the time) started a new jount venture – UK Gold, now rebranded as Gold, which would act as a satellite and cable channel that could be a repository for reruns of old material. Over time, this became the first channel of what would become UKTV, a cluster of commercial channels which, after some ownership changes, is now a wholly-owned commercial subsidary of the BBC, offering channels on satellite, cable, and over the digital airwaves, some free and some subscription-only.

UK Gold was a big enough success to spin off UK Gold 2, which would be rebranded as UK G2, a home for youth-oriented programming. Subsequent to this, in the late 2000s UK G2 got rebranded as Dave – marketed as “The home of witty banter”, it would be the comedy channel in the UKTV lineup, hence the jokey name. This would coincide with UKTV looking to spice up their offerings with more original programming. With 2008-2009 spanning the 20th anniversary of Red Dwarf‘s glorious launch and the 10th anniversary of its humiliating conclusion, and with Red Dwarf being a natural fit into Dave’s lineup already, the idea of making some new Red Dwarf stuff made a lot of sense.

This would bring an end to the longest hiatus in the show’s history. Back in the day, fans of the show were perhaps spoiled by getting roughly one season a year in the classic run of late 1980s and early 1990s seasons, and the delay before the airing of seasons 7 and 8 felt interminable. In retrospect, we didn’t know how good we’d had it – not only were we better off without season 8 and most of season 7, but the four year gap between Out of Time and Tikka To Ride was less than half the duration of the 1999-2009 hiatus.

Believe it or not, it wasn’t just the poor quality of season 8 that kept it off the air (though those episodes do constitute a good argument for the show going away for a while). Doug Naylor had spent much of the intervening time trying to get a feature film of the show off the ground, but simply wasn’t able to get the funding, despite some false starts (at least some of which appear to have been the result of scammers trying to work a grift on Grant Naylor Productions, rather than sincere interest). Meanwhile, the four main cast members all had other irons in the fire. Chris Barrie became Lara Croft’s butler in the Tomb Raider movies, Craig Charles was presenting Robot Wars, Robert Llewellyn was fronting Scrapheap Challenge, and Danny John-Jules was getting roles in stuff like the second Blade movie. If anything had been learned from season 7, it’s that any Red Dwarf revival would need all four of them onboard.

Initially, the plan was to create four shows – a two-part story, a “making of” episode, and an improvised live show. The latter was junked due to cost issues; the “making of” material was consigned to DVD extras, and the revival story was extended to three episodes. It was time to go Back To Earth…

Back To Earth

Nine years have passed since the events of Only The Good…, and things on Red Dwarf have gone somewhat back to normal. Holly has been deactivated, due to his core systems getting flooded when Lister left a tap on by mistake. Kochanski is gone; at first we think she’s died, though it’s later revealed during this story that she simply got fed up of Lister being a sadsack and took a shuttle to go off on her own adventures. Rimmer is, once again, a hard-light hologram; it’s not clear what went down there, though later stuff in the Dave seasons suggests that this is the original hologram Rimmer, the one who went off to become Ace back in Stoke Me a Clipper, having made his return at some point, not the resurrected Rimmer we met in season 8. Indeed, all the resurrected crew are gone: it’s just the quartet of Lister, Rimmer, Kryten, and Cat, back together all again.

When the Cat spots a giant squid swimming about in the water tanks on G-deck, the gang realise that the squid’s probably responsible for the water supply acting up of late, and decide to eliminate it. Little do they realise that it’s a joy squid – a female counterpart to the despair squid from Back To Reality, which instead of using despair to render prey helpess uses joy to render them passive. This prompts a series of ever-more bizarre hallucinations, beginning with the restoration of Science Officer Katerina Bartikovsky (Sophie Winkleman) as a hologram, who declares she’s going to take charge of things, beginning by deleting Rimmer and aiding Lister in recreating the human race and culminating in a journy through a dimension portal to what turns out to be 21st Century Earth, where the gang discover that Red Dwarf is nothing but a television show…

I previously reviewed this back when it first aired; I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. The Joy Squid twist is a little too obvious, and whilst I can see why it would be tempting to use the anniversary special to do a meditation on what the show means to its real-world fans, this is squandered in favour of self-serving whinging about the show not being on air, cracks about the fans being big nerds, and other self-indulgent bilge. At about halfway in, the story gets completely bogged down in extended ripping-off of Blade Runner, and sure, Red Dwarf has had its moments of parody and riffing on landmarks of pop culture before, but there’s where parody crosses the line from a wink and a nod into extended plagiarism and this is well on the wrong side of the line.

Red Dwarf: Crash Landing (1997-1999)

Every five years, Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan runs a “best episode” poll, and over the course of their discussion of the poll results they’ve developed the concept of “the bubble”, that being the top 36 entries on the poll results. This is based on the broad consensus in the Red Dwarf fandom that the first six seasons of the show represented its golden age. Some fans outright reject everything that came since; some argue that it went through rougher patches but had a mild return to form later on; a few perhaps feel that the series started going to hell once the melancholic streak of the first two seasons began to fade.

In general, though, the idea is that those first six seasons, with their 36 episodes between them, are the benchmark by which Red Dwarf is measured. In general, in the Ganymede & Titan polls, those six first seasons collectively tend to dominate the bubble; that means that exceptions to this rule are interesting. If an episode from the first six seasons happens to fall out of the bubble, that’s generally a sign of an episode that’s regarded as being unusually lukewarm for the show’s classic period.

By contrast, if anything from after season 6 makes it into the bubble, that can be a sign of an episode punching above its weight and overcoming the affection of the fanbase for the original six seasons. That said, the polls do show signs of recency bias, with more recent material polling reasonably well and then quite often sinking down to a more natural level as the novelty factor wears off, the joy of getting new Red Dwarf material in any form fades, and any shortcomings of the new material becomes more apparent on rewatches.

In this article I will review some 16 episodes of Red Dwarf. Of them, only two of them have ever made it into the bubble – and as of the most recent poll, none of them make it in there.

The Mid-1990s Hiatus

Grant Naylor hadn’t planned on Red Dwarf vanishing from 1993 to 1997. After their 1980s seasons established the show and the early 1990s saw the show going from success to success, they concluded season 6 with a cliffhanger at the BBC’s behest, the plan being for the show to come back sooner rather than later.

However, this was not to be. Several of the show’s principal actors had increasingly packed schedules; Chris Barrie’s other sitcom, The Brittas Empire, was becoming a success in his own right, and Craig Charles was much in demand as a presenter. Things were further derailed when Craig Charles was accused of rape, refused bail for three months, assaulted whilst awaiting trial by a knife-wielding fellow prisoner, and acquitted after the tabloids had a field day raking over his penchant for cocaine and strip clubs which had emerged during the trial. (Acquittals in such things don’t necessarily mean nothing bad happened, especially when – as seemed to be the case here – the investigation had significant shortcomings, but Charles has at least not had any #MeToo-esque accusations come out against him since, even when he slipped back into harder drug use in later years.)

Charles’ ordeal ran from mid-1994 to early 1995, putting the brakes on any reunion, and by the time it was even possible to get the cast back together, other changes had taken place behind the scenes. Whereas Red Dwarf had previously been written by Grant Naylor – a gestalt entity formed of the writing partnership of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor – creative differences had broke out and Rob Grant decided he’d rather explore other projects, leaving “Grant Naylor” extant only as the name of the Red Dwarf production company. It would be Doug Naylor who would be the sole showrunner going forwards, writing or co-writing each and every new script.

Still, Naylor had been there for the first six seasons – he must have known what made them work, right? Whats more, Ed Bye, director of the first four seasons, would be onboard to direct both the seventh and eighth season, to give a further sense of continuity.

These two seasons would also be eight episodes long, the better to rack up the episode count to meet US syndication requirements. Did this rush for quantity result in a dip in quality? Well, let’s see…

Red Dwarf VII

In order to tackle the challenge of writing the show without Rob Grant, Naylor shared the writing duties this time around whilst remaining in a firm supervisory role – some of the episodes he would write solo, whilst on others he would work with co-writers. Apparently, the process here was that the co-writer would do an initial draft and then Naylor would do a second pass on it to bring it into line with the Red Dwarf style, or at least his particular take on it. (For the purpose of this review, if I don’t mention a co-writer in conjunction with an episode, you can assume it’s a Doug Naylor solo number.)

Though this meant that extra hands were involved in the writing process, Naylor retained full control of the final scripts, and so whilst the mixed reception of this season has sometimes been attributed to those outside contributors, ultimately I think Naylor has to take primary responsibility for the overall outcome, for good or ill. And there is good in season seven, despite it also having significant shortcomings.

In fact, the season opened strong – opening episode Tikka To Ride is the one episode from this season which sometimes troubles the top 36 in fan polls. It’s tasked with resolving the cliffhanger ending to Out of Time, and does so in more or less the way anyone who was paying attention during the episode would have expected – by stating that by blowng up the time drive Rimmer paradoxed the crew’s future selves out of existence, thereby paradoxing their future selves’ attack on them out of existence, thereby saving everyone. Naylor accomplishes this in a somewhat clunky fashion, with a monologue to camera by Lister explaining it away in a pre-credits sequence, before the main body of the episode offers us a different time travel story.

Production differences are evident early on; the live studio audience and multi-camera setup was gone, a laugh track was added in, and the footage was post-processed to look like film. For space shots, model work was out and CGI was in. Even Kryten’s head has been updated, and residual paradoxes from the time fault have apparently greatly expanded Starbug‘s capacity, allowing for the use of larger sets. All this seems to be part of a concerted effort by Naylor to make the show seem more epic and filmic and less like a rinky-dink low-budget sitcom, which would be in keeping with his long-held ambition of making a Red Dwarf feature film.

Red Dwarf: Sustained Burn (1991-1993)

Back in the late 1980s Red Dwarf rapidly evolved over the course of three brief seasons from a deep space sitcom with a strong melancholic streak to a boisterously comedic science fiction series which, despite a somewhat lighter tone, was still informed and enriched by the deeper character work undertaken by the core cast in the first two seasons. In the eyes of many fans, the golden age of the show extended into the early 1990s – a time when the show offered up two seasons that essentially reiterated on the model set by Red Dwarf III, and a sixth season that shook up the show’s status quo whilst continuing its evolution.

Red Dwarf IV

Season 3 wrapped on the Kryten-focused The Last Day, which benefitted greatly from being the last episode of the season written – meaning Grant Naylor had a better handle on how Robert Llewellyn was playing the character. Clearly, they saw the potential in Kryten-based episodes, because this season opens with not one but two. The first of them is Camille, which opens with a continuity error (Lister is trying to teach Kryten to lie, when he deliberately lied at the end of The Last Day to overcome Hudzen 10) but then progresses into a robotic romance plot when Kryten encounters the titular mechanoid (played by Judy Pascoe). Or does he? Everyone else perceives her decidedly differently – each seeing her as their own fantasy partner…

This is, of course, a riff on the concept of The Man Trap from Star Trek season 1 – but Camille isn’t out to fatally drain anyone of salt, she’s just a GELF with illusion powers. She isn’t even being malicious – she even warns Kryten there’ll be complications if he introduces her to other crew members – she’s just terrified that she won’t be accepted in her true form, and she’s engineered to use her powers as an instinctive default. As it happens, Kryten does accept her – and being the most emotionally mature of anyone aboard ship with the possible exception of Holly, he encourages her to leave with her husband once he tracks them down, having potentially arrived at a cure for their condition.

It’s a charming little romance arc unfolding in under half an hour, as well as extolling the virtues of being understanding when a partner reveals something about themselves that’s unexpected or unusual. It works particularly well because whilst Judy Pascoe is not primarily an actor, she and Llewellyn are able to fall back on their real-life chemistry to make the whole thing work. With Pascoe playing Camille in android form and voicing her Lovecraftian true form, the episode also provides roles for other actors, with Francesca Folan offering an interesting take on the hologram of Rimmer’s dreams and Suzanne Rhatigan doing the same for Lister; Folan’s role here is a bit meatier because her initial encounter with Rimmer is a bit meatier than Rhatigan’s scenes, since it sets up the “illusory desires” plot point. (Cat, meanwhile, finds that his physical ideal is, well, himself.)

Of course, once Camille reveals her real form the other roles fade away a bit, and the episode risks feeling a little rushed – it’s trying to cram a fairly detailed story and a whole emotional arc for Kryten into its running time, after all. Still, Grant Naylor are more or less able to thread the needle, and are even able to work in a meaty character idea; the episode begins with Lister trying to encourage Kryten to be able to lie more fluently, insult people, and generally express negative emotions and personality facets his programming doesn’t allow, and by the end Kryten has gained some capacity to do this, and all it took was breaking his heart to do it. This is spun as a positive – beause an inability to do those things was limiting Kryten and making him a slave to his programming – which in turn suggests the idea that there’s perhaps some value in broken hearts.

Red Dwarf: Launch Trajectory (1988-1989)

Bottle episodes in television are spoken of by some as a necessary evil – a thing you occasionally find yourself obliged to do when the budget is tight and you want to knock out a nice, cheap episode which just needs the core cast members and a minimum of locations (reused ones from other episodes are ideal) and a big focus on dialogue to avoid the need for anything expensive or complicated to execute. You can certainly make an argument that all of those factors are things which pull away from using the full potential of television as a medium; the more archetypally bottle episode-like an instalment of a show is, the more it starts resembling a stage play.

On the other hand, I’ve often enjoyed bottle episodes of shows, and I think they can serve a useful purpose in sorting the wheat from the chaff. In fact, let me go out on a limb: any show which claims to put any sort of emphasis on deep characterisation can only claim to have succeeded at that if it’s plausible to create an entertaining bottle episode of that show. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the show in question actually did this – although that would be where you get the clinching proof – but it should be a plausible possibility.

If you can’t imagine a show’s cast of characters, either collectively or as a select subset of them, being able to carry a bottle episode then that’s a crystal-clear indication that the characters just aren’t able to carry the show full stop – for better or worse, the attraction of the show is in the action of the more eventful episodes, not in the interpersonal relationships of the characters, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

On the other hand, regardless of the genre you are working in, if you can craft a really memorable bottle episode then you know you’re onto something with your cast of characters – because you’ve proved that their interactions and their relationships with each other and their personalities are interesting and worth paying attention to in their own right, and your characters are more than mere paper dolls existing solely to facilitate the action of your plot.

As Robert Grant and Doug Naylor – collectively calling themselves Grant Naylor – proved in the 1980s, this remains true even if the bottle in question is several miles long.

Red Dwarf I

Dave Lister (Craig Charles), Third Technician, is a low-ranking crew member aboard Red Dwarf, a miles-long spaceship operated by the Jupiter Mining Corporation tasked with weighty responsibilities like maintaining the chicken soup machines under the watchful supervision of Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Second Technician, his roommate. Rimmer is fussy and career-oriented, a stickler for the rules with ambitions of passing his Engineer’s exam and making his way further up the promotional ladder; Lister just wants to have a good time with his fellow slackers, take it easy, and maybe score with navigation console operator Kristine Kochanski (Clare Grogan).

Then Captain Hollister (Mac McDonald, fresh off playing the doomed colony administrator in Aliens) discovers that Lister has smuggled a cat onboard after a spot of shore leave, breaking quarantine regulations, and demands that Lister give up the cat. Refusing to do so, Lister is punished with a stint in stasis – a process which freezes the recipient in time for a period, saving on the life support and food and board coasts for looking after them and forfeiting their pay for the duration. In terms of his subjective experience, Lister is released from stasis more or less as soon as he enters.

Objectively speaking, his stay is longer than expected – because as Holly (Norman Lovett), the AI which operates the ship explains, a radiation leak has killed almost everyone onboard. Lister survived because he was in stasis; Lister’s cat survived because it was stashed away from the cargo hold. Holly was left with no choice but to direct Red Dwarf out into deep space, steering away from inhabited regions so as not to present a contamination risk, and wait until the radiation died down sufficiently to let Lister out safely.

This took three million years – meaning that the only other known lifeform on the ship was the incredibly stylish Cat (Danny-John Jules), last apparent member of a species that was descended from Lister’s cat and evolved to make best use of the ship’s environment (and therefore ended up humanoid). Fortunately, Holly’s systems are able to sustain a single holographic simulation of a dead crew member, in order to help conserve Lister’s sanity. Lister is hoping for a chance to reconnect with Kochanski – but Holly’s algorithm instead selects Rimmer…

Red Dwarf: Back to Mediocrity

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

LOOK THERE’S A HELL OF A LOT OF SPOILERS IN THIS ARTICLE BUT I AM TOO ANGRY TO CARE.

Back To Earth, the three-part return of Red Dwarf after a decade’s hiatus, began with a promising first episode. I won’t pretend it was up to the usual standards of the series in its prime – it wasn’t – but it made a good effort. The events of seasons seven and eight were happily ignored, the crew were alone on a giant ship in the middle of deep space, they were interacting in a fairly funny manner during an encounter with a dimension-hopping squid that chose to take a nap in their ocean-sized water tank. True, there was a noticeable lack of Holly, and an overlong and overmaudlin scene to let us know that Kochanski had died again, but considering the depths the series had reached with its 7th and 8th seasons I can forgive all of this.

Things began to go south with the sudden and unexplained manifestation of a hologram of the ship’s hot Russian science officer after the four main characters are exposed to exploded squid juices. Suddenly, I was reminded of Back to Reality, an episode in which the crew apparently get back to Earth but are in fact hallucinating after an encounter with a mysterious squid. Given that this three-part epilogue to the show is called Back to Earth, and given that it begins with an encounter with a mysterious squid, I feel that I was justified at this point at feeling a certain amount of concern, a mild worry that everything subsequently onscreen would prove to be utterly inconsequential. The ability of the science officer to construct a deus ex machina portal to Earth using a mining laser and squid bits only increased my concern, as did the sudden leeching of jokes from the second half of the episode in favour of cleavage shots.