Red Dwarf : Series 3

I've been watching the Red Dwarf series in order, which means I'm not getting quite the same effect as if I had viewed the series on television. So I saw Season Three a week after viewing Season Two. I imagine TV series hold up much better when they're not viewed back-to-back.

Season Three is a complete reboot of Red Dwarf, in the same way that Alias reshuffled its characters but kept the show's premise the same. So what happened? You can find out if you slow the DVD down to read the Star Wars-like credits.

We last left Season Two with Dave Lister (Craig Charles) discovering that he had two children. For the first Season Lister figured he met a great bird (to use Brit slang) eventually, even though he was on a massive ship (Red Dwarf) with no other companions except a humanoid cat (Danny John-Jules) and a hologram (Rimmer played by Chris Barrie). Lister was in for a big surprise when it turns out that it was he who got pregnant, by sleeping with a female version of himself in a reverse universe where women impregnate men. So the twins Lister saw in a picture in one of the earlier episodes were indeed his.

Season Three explains that they kids grow to maturity due to the difference in parallel universes and that eventually Lister drops them off in their mother's parallel universe. Poof! No more twins/Lister pregnant plot.

Holly (Normal Lovett), the monotone droning computer who runs Red Dwarf has changed his appearance. Strangely, he changes it to the female computer he encountered in the parallel universe. Why the creators chose to do this is anyone's guess, but we're led to believe it's because Holly really, really liked the other computer. The new Holly (Hattie Hayridge) isn't so much a deadpan genius as a dithering bimbo with a wide-eyed, vacuous stare. No more "is Holly insane?" plot.

The android Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) that was in one episode in Season Two crashes into a planet. The Red Dwarf crew rescues and reconstructs him, which explains why he looks different. Remember how Kryten had gotten over his subservient attitude and drove off in biker leathers? That plot's over too.

In fact, the only characters that remain the same are Rimmer, Lister, and Cat. Rimmer's still annoying, although less antagonistic than before. Lister's still a slob. And Cat's still Prince with fangs.

When Red Dwarf is funny, it's side-splittingly funny. But those moments take a longer build up. In essence, there are better jokes in Season Three, but there aren't as many. A lot of time is spent developing characters and plots.

Unfortunately, there's increasingly less attention paid to any sort of internal logic to the show. There are a myriad of problems with the Backwards episode, where everyone on Earth does everything backwards (but it only sporadically affects the crew). Rimmer, the hologram who cannot physically interact with anything, increasingly seems to be able to touch and smell, get drunk, and run away in fear from a killer android. At one point, Rimmer even points out how badly Lister smells and then claims he can't smell anything in the very next episode.

There's a very significant shift in the show's focus, from just going for laughs to going for character development and popular science fiction movie references. There are better special effects and more obvious plots. Whereas the first two seasons of Red Dwarf were trailblazing forays because the show seemed innocently unaware of the rest of the science fiction genre, the third season is painfully aware of every movie trope, from the Star Wars scrolling text introduction to an alien that looks like an Alien to a big killer android named Hudson.

The show suffers a bit as a result. Red Dwarf simply didn't have the budget to start spoofing Aliens or any other science fiction show for that matter, and I ended up longing for more low-budget comedy rather than low-budget action. Kryten is a great addition to the crew, but at the sacrifice of Holly, who doesn't seem to have much to say.

Perhaps most unbelievable is that the characters violate each other in deeply personal ways that you can't imagine they would forgive: Rimmer takes over Lister's body, abuses it, and when Rimmer takes it back, Lister kidnaps it and abuses it even more. It's nasty stuff, if you think about it, and it makes Rimmer out to be so utterly unlikable that it's difficult to imagine the two trusting each other ever again.

But chances are viewers who watched the show for the first time weren't keeping track from episode to episode. The scriptwriters certainly relied on that fact. There's a price to be paid in the DVD age and attention to detail is one of them.

Funny? Yes. But I can't help but feel that Season Three is a bit of a step down from Season Two, reboot and all.

Red Dwarf: Series 2

After watching the first season of Red Dwarf, I wasn't expecting very much from the second season. I figured it'd be more of the same...cheap sets, the slob and the neat freak, and some crazy cross between James Brown and a feline bouncing around on screen.

I was right...it's all that and more. But I was wrong to think it would be boring. The show actually takes the time to explore the characters and really get into their heads. In season 2, the show hits its stride.

David Lister (Craig Charles) is still Lister, but he's more subdued. Someone finally realized that watching a slob be a slob is funny in small doses. Which is good, because Lister got on my nerves after awhile. More screen time is given to Arnold Judas Rimmer (Chris Barrie), the real star of the show. It's easy to figure out why Lister is a pig, but the uptight Rimmer is much more intriguing. We delve into his neuroses as well as his past. And Cat (Danny John-Jules) exists primarily as Lister's foil. His quieter screen presence helps let the show be funny rather than distracting.

It is in this season that we first meet Kryten the android (David Ross), a manservant who isn't too good at determining the liveliness of his hosts. We learn about Lister's love life, the death of Rimmer's father (a touching scene that's played straight even though everyone's long dead anyway), watch the blokes play in a virtual reality game, mess with time travel, and enter a parallel universe where women rule.

I can't harp on this point enough: a lot of other science fiction shows ripped off Red Dwarf. Lister gets pregnant by a female, just like Charles Tucker in "Unexpected" on Star Trek: Enterprise. The holographic game is just like the movie eXistenz, right down to the "are we still in the game" twist. And don't even get me started on the time travel plot.

Red Dwarf isn't afraid to mess with its characters something serious. Lister feels bad for Rimmer's lack of a love life, so he transplants a few months of his own romance into the hologram's memory. What a mind-screw that is! Speaking of messing with their minds, Holly at one point decides to play the meanest practical joke in history. Only Red Dwarf has the courage to pull off entire episodes that are fake or inconclusive.

Indeed, Red Dwarf often ends without any solid conclusion. Characters wander off into the bowels of the city (where the heck DID that android go?) and storylines are dropped, only to be picked up in later episodes. Having been exposed the first two seasons of Red Dwarf for the first time ever, I'm looking forward to the show's evolution.

It may be wacky, it may sometimes not make sense, but Red Dwarf's influence on science fiction should not be underestimated. All that, and it's really funny too.

Red Dwarf: Series 1

I've never seen Red Dwarf and really had no specific interest in watching it. But my wife rented it, so it was only a matter of time before I was sucked into the madness that is Red Dwarf.

What is Red Dwarf? Why, it's Star Trek: Voyager. That not good enough for you? I speak as a Red Dwarf newbie, so if you're a rabid fan of the series you can skip this.

Still here? Okay: Red Dwarf is actually a ship. A big, ugly floating city. It's a mining colony, to be precise, and it's crewed by a bunch of folks who are much like the working blue-collar slobs you might find in any city. The closest approximation to the atmosphere is the workaday life of the poor saps that get eaten in the movie Alien. It's grungy, it's gritty, and it's very easy to identify with the crew.

One-armed robots known as "scutters" zip around the ship, performing maintenance jobs at the behest of Holly (Norman Lovett), the ship's computer. Holly appears as a floating head on computer screens; a balding, monotone-voiced face with bad teeth and deadpan delivery. Just about everything else has the possibility of talking on the ship, from the food dispensers to toasters. Most integral to the technology are the holographics, used to recreate one dead crewmember whose knowledge is too important to the mission of Red Dwarf. In essence, the hologram is a technological ghost, able to interact with everyone (even sleeping) but incapable of touching or being touched.

Our two main characters are Dave Lister (Craig Charles), an uber-slacker who pretty much doesn't want to do anything but get drunk, high, or laid and his manager, Arnold J. Rimmer (Chris Barrie), an uptight, neurotic stick in the mud. They hate each other with a passion, a problem exacerbated by Lister's insistence on bringing an illegal animal (a cat, played by...well, a cat) on board. This leads to Lister being put into stasis, a sort of benign punishment straight out of Judge Dredd: the prisoner is put in suspended animation and doesn't actually experience the passage of time.

Then Something Bad Happens ™ that kills off everyone on board. Except Lister, who is safely ensconced in his stasis prison.

Three MILLION years pass.

...

That's right, THREE MILLION YEARS. If there's a concept I had difficulty wrapping my mind around, it's the implications of what it means to have three million years pass you by. A lot can happen in three million years. A lot probably SHOULD have happened in three million years. But Red Dwarf had a small budget to start, so you'll have to forgive the three million questions that undoubtedly pop up about a ship in space for three million years. I mean, metal degrades in three million years, doesn't it?

Anyway, the assumption in Red Dwarf is that most things kept working as they always did. Which really does beg the question as to why there was ever a crew in the first place (and perhaps verifies Lister's belief that he may as well slack off as none of it makes any difference).

Lonely and a little crazy, Holly wakes up Lister. To Lister's horror, Holly uses the holographics to recreate the crewmember "most important to the mission," to keep Lister from going crazy: Rimmer. Rimmer's more or less the same as his past self, except he has a huge "H" glued to his head. Rounding out the cast is the evolutionary descendant of the cat Lister brought on board, known only as Cat (Danny John-Jules). Cat is basically Prince with fangs...my wife, who never saw the first season prior to renting the DVD, thought he was a vampire.

If there's a weakness in the show, it's Cat. He has little to do and is only really amusing to people who have cats, in which case he's either hilarious or very obvious. He does help liven the show up by hopping around and screeching in colorful outfits in a series that tends to have very little movement. There's also the dreadful long shots of the model that is Red Dwarf. These boring pans seem to take place every five minutes and make you really feel like you're trapped on the ship along with Lister. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

The humor is decidedly British, which is good if you're British and not quite as good if you're not. There are a lot of references to European popular culture that are easily lost on Americans (I know I was confused a couple of times) as well as 80s references that really date the show. Still, I was a child of the 80s so I got most of those jokes.

What's amazing about Red Dwarf is its ability to go for the absolutely lowest fart jokes and simultaneously work in high-minded science fiction concepts. Everything from faster-than-light travel, time travel, and holographic technology is explored at any one point in time. This can make the series both confusing and surprisingly fresh, depending on the circumstances.

The first season has almost no budget, but that only adds to the claustrophobia. It does have a lot of funny witticisms, but you have to get past the accents. Lister slurs a lot of his lines (as well he should), which makes him sometimes difficult to follow. But I find it difficult to be too harsh with the show...it's like criticizing an off-Broadway show for being off-Broadway.

What's most telling is how much Red Dwarf influenced other science fiction shows. Star Trek Voyager is an almost play-by-play rip off of Red Dwarf, down to the holographic doctor, the resident comic alien, and the fact that the crew is so far out in space that no laws apply. The only thing that's missing is hostile aliens, but I'm sure they'll turn up soon enough.

It may not be the most polished production, but Red Dwarf did it first.