Between The Wheels

I quite enjoyed my daily journey through The Phil Silvers Show last year and this year I've set myself an easier task - the 74 episodes of Red Dwarf.

There are twelve series and in my opinion it peaks around about the fourth or fifth, then goes badly downhill after that.

I:1 The End

I've seen this one four or five times, now. It was first shown in February 1988. Establishes the context of the series. We see the Red Dwarf in its usual mode as a highly populated mining vessel. We see Lister as a likeable, irreverent slob and Rimmer as officious, petty and small-minded.

Quite interesting to see Lister smoking in a few scenes. And I laughed at the references to modems and "speaking slide rules". Few people would have known what a modem was in 1988 when this was first shown, although I owned one myself. I used it to transfer Pascal programs to a Teesside Poly minicomputer over the telephone system.

There's also a reference to sending photos to be processed in a lab, even though this is supposed to be set in the late 21st century. Until Lister emerges from stasis, when it's set three million years in the future.

Famously, Clare Grogan is in this one. She was also in Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Hogmanay Fishing the other night, thirty-five years older of course.

I really like this first series. It has a simple, low-budget, sitcom charm and this very first instalment is a good one.

I:2 Future Echoes

Lister seems to be adapting nonchalantly to life as the only human aboard Red Dwarf.

The idea of the cat being the last of his species aboard the ship at the exact same time Lister is recovered from stasis is a bit problematic, to me - especially since the cat people don't seem even to have tidied up the ship, let alone made changes to it. But it's best not to scrutinise a sci-fi sitcom too carefully.

Having said that, the plot in this one is based on the idea of strange echoes from the future interacting with the present and it's quite imaginative. We learn that Lister will eventually have two baby sons. Is that ever resolved in a later series? I can't remember.

The dialogue between Rimmer and Lister is priceless and these early episodes are much more about that than the later stories.

Hadn't seen this one for many years.

I:3 Balance of Power

Lister tires of Rimmer's petty authoritarianism which, interestingly, has survived his reincarnation. He's clearly in charge of the ship, though that may have more to do with the fact that he knows where the cigarettes are hidden than his status as the more senior technician of the two (and, as Lister points out, "the man who changed the bog rolls was higher than us").

We find that Holly specifically chose Rimmer to bring back in hologrammatic form to keep Lister sane. The ship can only support one hologram. But Lister wants to go on a date with the hologram of Kochanski..

Clare Grogan's in this one again (in a flashback of course).

I:4 Waiting for God

Damn, Chris Barrie looked young in 1988.

I don't think there's a single episode of Red Dwarf in which Lister is more slobby than this one. His shirt is extravagantly covered in grubby marks and stains. The intention, I think, is to juxtapose the real Lister with his role as the most holy deity of the cat people. For this is the one in which we learn that Lister is their god - and so he should be, since he was the owner and saviour of the original pregnant cat from which they evolved.

The cat is a lot dumber and more random than in the later series.

Holly has some belting one-liners in this one.

There's that odd scene I'd forgotten about, in which we meet one of the priests of the cat people just before he dies, in the cargo hold. It's all very surreal.

I:5 Confidence and Paranoia

The one where Lister contracts a disease from going in the officers' quarters before it's been decontaminated. Because his disease has had a few million years to mutate, his hallucinations manifest themselves in physical form. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense but it's best not to submit a sci-fi comedy to excessive scrutiny.

Must have seen this a couple of times, but I only vaguely remembered it.

Craig Ferguson is in it, playing a physical manifestation of Lister's confidence. Despite that, it's not a bad one.

There are a few exterior views of the ship. The first few series were remastered with enhanced effects and CGI but I think the iPlayer, which is where I'm watching these for convenience despite owning the DVDs, has the originals. I prefer that anyway. The rubbish models are just part of the charm.

There's a nice setup for the next episode right at the end.

I:6 Me Squared

Rimmer has had a second hologram of himself made. He can't wait to share a cabin with himself.

Lister is overjoyed to have their old quarters to himself. The Rimmers are delighted to be moving into new quarters together. Predictably though, they start to fight - presumably because deep down, Rimmer hates himself.

Good one to finish off Red Dwarf I, which was first broadcast in early 1988. It's interesting to see how well developed Rimmer's character is, this early on - the small-mindedness, the resentment, the lingering sense of failure.

II:1 Kryten

And on to Red Dwarf II!

The one in which the boys from Red Dwarf meet Kryten, after answering a distress call from another spacecraft, crashed on an asteroid.

Holly is rendered differently in this second series. Not heavily pixellated. More like a photorealistic human head against a dark background, which of course makes more sense for a computer manufactured in the late 21st century. When the remasters were done in the late '90s, they got Norman Lovett in to redo some of the Holly footage from the first series, without the pixellation.

This is the one that contains Holly's memorable remarks about dog's milk. Brilliant.

Kryten in this episode was played by David Ross. He was intended as a one-off character for this episode only. He returns in the third series played by Robert Llewellyn, with a different personality, as a regular member of the cast.

Why Rimmer's excited to be meeting the three women reported to be aboard the crashed spacecraft when he's not capable of interacting physically with people or objects, I'm unsure.

Some very witty dialogue in this one and members of the studio audience - presumably composed of fans of the first series - squeal with delight in places. Am I misremembering or do some of the later series dispense with audience reaction? Anyway we'll come to that in a couple of weeks.

Very good start for the second series.

II:2 Better than Life

A post pod arrives from Earth, having tracked the Red Dwarf for three million years. It includes a "total immersion video game" called Better than Life. And a letter to Rimmer from his mother, to tell him that his dad has died.

Despite the fact that Rimmer already knew his dad was dead - it's three million years since his mum wrote the letter - he takes it badly.

Rimmer, Lister and the cat have a go at Better than Life - it's next level virtual reality, with their brains connected via electrodes. Actually come to think of it even the term "virtual reality" hadn't been invented when this episode was first shown.

Some of the special effects are unbelievably crap, but they're all just part of the fun.

Of course, the dark recesses of Rimmer's psyche get the better of him in the game.

This is a brilliant one. It gets some fantastic laughs out of the various personalities of the cast members, as exaggerated and explored in their time in the game. Very good premise to get off the ship as well, the virtual reality sequences (so to speak) are set on Earth.

II:3 Thanks For the Memory

The boys from the Dwarf visit a planet with a breathable atmosphere for a quick barbecue. I don't quite get how Lister, who used to maintain the ship's soup dispensers is able to pilot a shuttlecraft to and from Red Dwarf while it's in orbit, but hey.

They wake up the next morning, but it's four days later. Lister's foot is in plaster. Four days have been torn from his diary. And his jigsaw puzzle has been completed.

Similar in a way to the last episode in that Rimmer's psyche spoils what is, in a sense, a sort of virtual reality experience. He has false memories implanted, perhaps an idea nicked from The Running Man which was made about a year before this.

At one point Rimmer refers to the year 2044, in the context of life before the drive plate accident and the three million years Lister spends in stasis. That must have seemed a lot more futuristic in 1988 than it does now.

Quite an imaginative one.

II:4 Stasis Leak

Begins with a flashback of Rimmer reporting Lister to Captain Hollister for spiking his breakfast with hallucinogenics. A couple of the other crew from before the drive plate accident also feature.

A stasis leak has opened a portal to the past, three weeks before the crew were wiped out. This gives Rimmer and Lister an idea, but of course there's a conflict of interests.

Clever one, this. Based on an idea that would work well in straight sci-fi, but it morphs into a very funny farce.

I think I must only have only seen this one once, I barely remembered it. There's a scene from Lister's future (in which Clare Grogan makes a welcome return appearance); I'm not sure it ever gets resolved in a later episode. I'll find out in a few weeks.

Morwenna Banks makes a brief appearance.

It occurred to me that Red Dwarf uses a theme that's common to some of the great British sitcoms - two people who have nothing in common trapped in a relationship because they rely on each other, or just by circumstances. Steptoe and Son, The Likely Lads, One Foot In the Grave, Rising Damp, Till Death Us Do Part. If you think about it, Rimmer and Lister are a sort of 21st century Bob and Terry. Or 30,000th century, depending how you look at it.

II:5 Queeg

The cat is listening to music with headphones on in the first scene, and he has a CD jewel case in his left hand. I like these little anachronistic anomalies in sci-fi, like the CRT screens in Star Trek. Or Red Dwarf, come to that.

Holly's increasingly unreliable performance as ship's computer suggests that he's gone a bit computer-senile. So the ship's backup computer takes over.

I'd been looking forward to this one. This is, assuredly, one of the all-time great Red Dwarf episodes. Definitely top ten.

The term Artificial Intelligence is used a few times. It's never been more prominent in the public consciousness than it has this last year or so, but it was a thing even in the '80s. Actually the term was first coined in the '50s.

How have I watched 11 of these already?

II:6 Parallel Universe

Opens with the cat performing Tongue Tied (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_Tied_(Red_Dwarf_song)), accompanied by Rimmer and Lister dancing in red dinner suits - the excuse being that it's one of the cat's dreams.

Later we see Rimmer on an exercise bike. Given that he can't interact with physical objects, I didn't quite understand this. But he's wearing a very natty and compact Cinelli cycling helmet.

Anyway - in this one, Holly invents a special hyperdrive that's supposed to be able to transport the ship to any point in space simultaneously. I mean - I know it's a comedy, but this was a bit of a stretch.

But at least it doesn't work. Instead it propels them into a parallel universe, where they meet female versions of themselves.

I'd remembered this as a sub-par one in which the joke about the opposite sex versions of the main cast is stretched too far but actually it's laugh-out-loud funny. The female Rimmer works as a brilliant parody of male chauvinism. And of Rimmer. Genius.

III:1 Backwards

And we're back with a third series. Red Dwarf III is quite a different proposition from the first two series. It has a bigger budget. Holly is now female (played by Hattie Hayridge). Rimmer has a different uniform. The ship's interior looks different. The cat is a bit more coherent and human. And Kryten has returned, with a different personality and a slightly different look.

Most of this is explained with some introductory text scrolling Star Wars style into the distance set against the blackness of space. However it goes past very fast, so I think you'd have had to have been recording it on your VCR in November 1989 to stand a chance of reading it, assisted by careful use of the pause button. I used much the same technique on the iPlayer.

The Red Dwarf boys travel through a time hole to Earth. But it's an Earth where time runs backwards. I remembered this one well.

I wasn't able to watch this series when it was first shown, because I had to pick up my girlfriend from her Institute of Personnel Management course at Leicester Uni on Tuesday nights. Fortunately it was repeated a year later.

III:2 Marooned

Another absolute classic. Lister and Rimmer are marooned on a freezing moon in Starbug (Or "Starbug 1", actually there are supposed to be two of them). It's mostly a two-hander between the two, set on Starbug. The dialogue is brilliant and there's a genius gag about Lister's Les Paul copy.

What a joy to see this again.

A couple of anomalies: Rimmer tells Lister how he lost his virginity, even though he's already told him in one of the Red Dwarf II episodes and it's a different story this time.

And Lister asserts that "everyone remembers where they were when Cliff Richard was shot". Considering the last human isn't supposed to be have been born yet, Sir Cliff clearly makes it to a very ripe old age. He's 83 at the moment.

III:3 Polymorph

Opens with a warning that it's unsuitable for people of a nervous disposition.

A polymorph manages to make it aboard the ship. A what? A non-human lifeform that can change shape into any object, and thrives on the negative emotions of its prey.

There's some absolutely superb, farcical physical comedy in this one. It gets shrieks of laughter from the audience, and rightly so. But it's very clever as well.

The polymorph creature borrows heavily from Alien, to brilliant effect.

This is next level from the first two series; we're hitting Peak Dwarf now.

This is the first episode of the third series to be set mainly on Red Dwarf, but it's a very different look from the first two series. Darker and more industrial. A bit claustrophobic. To be fair I think it's set mainly in the cargo bay, but I don't think we see the grey, minimalist sets from the first two series again - until one of the later series possibly, when they bring the old crew back. I wasn't fond of that idea. But we'll get to that.

III:4 Bodyswap

In my opinion, this episode contains the single funniest gag of any Red Dwarf episode. It involves the ship's auto-destruct mechanism. Absolutely brilliant.

But the main theme of this one is Rimmer's idea to swap his own mind into Lister's body, ostensibly so he can get it fit and healthy for him, by eating and exercising properly and cutting out the booze and ciggies. Lister's concerned that he's putting on weight (and actually Craig Charles had filled out a bit by this time), so he agrees to it.

Naturally, Rimmer abuses this arrangement.

Fun to see Barrie and Charles impersonating each other's characters, with the assistance of a bit of vocal dubbing of course. They both do it very believably.

Mainly set in Red Dwarf again, and once again the industrial look is preferred - looks like it was filmed in some gloomy interior of a power station or a chemical works, or something. All metal walkways and pipes.

Superb.

III:5 Timeslides

Lister is depressed; tired of life as the last human, maroooned on a huge mining vessel.

Meanwhile, Kryten is developing some snaps in the photo lab. This yields some surprising results: the slides he's developed have become portals to the scenes depicted in them, so that when they're projected, the boys can jump through the screen into the past!

This is because the developing fluid has mutated. It's a stretch, isn't it? But what didn't seem so much of a stretch when I first saw this was the idea that film processing would still be a thing in the late 21st century.

Anyway - Lister manages to take advantage of this, so he can alter the timeline and avoid being marooned in a huge spacecraft, three million years in the future. And naturally, Rimmer manages to mess it up for him.

Ruby Wax appears briefly. Koo Stark has a speaking part! I'd forgotten about that.

There's some incidental music with the lyrics:

He's got a Swatch watch and a Filofax
So he can correlate his facts

Don't think you can get much more late '80s than that.

Really a very good one. Watching these in quick succession has confirmed for me that Red Dwarf really hits its stride in the third series.

Red Dwarf is one of my, and my wife's, favourite TV shows of all time. (I have the box set on DVD; 2 of the series came with a Scutter  and a Starbug model - which are displayed prominently on a shelf here). I've seen every episode so many times - brilliant stuff.

III:6 The Last Day

The crew receive a notification from Kryten's manufacturers: he's about to be shut down and replaced. There's even a video message, featuring a representative (from "Diva-Droid International").

This raises an interesting question. Kryten was was not part of the original crew, so presumably he - and Diva-Droid International - have their origins three million years in the future. The man who presents the message seems to be human, so - is Lister the last human, or not?

Furthermore, humanity doesn't seem to have advanced (or indeed evolved) much over three million years. Sure, there are sentient androids, but even aboard Red Dwarf three million years previously there were conscious holograms and an advanced AI ship's computer.

Anyway it's not a bad one, not a great one. It certainly has some good gags and funny moments. The would-be replacement android definitely owes something to Terminator.

IV:1 Camille

And so, Red Dwarf IV begins. I'd say that IV and V are peak Red Dwarf. This was first shown in February 1991. At the time I'd moved out of the house in Markfield I'd bought with my first partner Sara, and I was lodging with one of the mechanical engineers at the Rolls-Royce site where I worked. I was about to buy my own place in Derby.

I'd go out with my work pals on a Thursday night to a pub in Derby called the Blessington, so I used to set my VCR, which I'd set up with a little telly in my room and watch Red Dwarf when I got back. I saved all the episodes for posterity of course, so I've probably seen this one at least five times - it's a bit of a classic. So I wasn't particularly looking forward to watching it again, but actually I really enjoyed it.

The crew answer a distress call and rescue a lifeform from a crashed spaceship, but the lifeform appears different to each one of them. Ends with a nice pastiche to Casablanca, which is one of those films I've never got round to watching. I must do that.

Robert Llewellyn's performance as Kryten in this one is brilliant, especially when Lister is trying to teach him to break his programming and call Rimmer a "smeghead".

One thing that annoys me about this episode is that Kryen pronounces ASCII as "A S C 2".

IV:2 DNA

Another absolute classic. The crew detect and board another spacecraft, with the remains of a hideously mutated human aboard. It contains a DNA modifier device, capable of altering organic life at the molecular level.

Lister gets turned into a chicken after the cat fiddles with the controls. Fortunately, it's only temporary. Then Kryten is transformed into a human.

The dialogue between Kryten and Lister while the former android is attempting to adjust to life as a human is absolutely priceless. I don't think Red Dwarf ever gets any better than this. There's prolific squealing in the audience. And Llewellyn's timing and delivery are pure gold.

Later, as an unexpected consequence of a test, Lister's curry gets transformed into a vindaloo monster. The ensuing scenes are strongly reminiscent of the Polymorph episode from Red Dwarf III. But the script acknowledges this.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in Red Dwarf. Lister is implied to be from the 23rd century in this episode, though in one of the first series episodes it's claimed he's from the late 21st century. Actually the scenes in which he visits his younger self in Timeslides look a lot like the 1980s.

Also, in this episode, while telling one of his anecdotes, Lister states that "Kochanski had just finished with me and I was feeling pony". It's already well established that he never asked her out.

Curious, considering the same two writers are involved throughout (until Red Dwarf VII, when there's  only one of them).

Anyway, nitpicks aside - this is brilliant telly.

IV:3 Justice

Red Dwarf takes an escape pod from a prison ship on board. But does it contain one of the prison officers, or a criminal psychopathic simulant? (clue - it's not a prison officer). The boys attempt to return it to the prison ship.

I think this would be a run of the mill one except for three things. The idea of the "justice zone" on the prison ship which is clever as well as nicely surrealist. Rimmer's appeal scene (the prison ship computer immediately gives him a very long custodial sentence for second degree murder, because he's responsible for the drive plate accident that killed the Red Dwarf crew) -in which Kryten delivers a brilliantly funny case for the defence. And a mainly visual joke about Lister having space mumps, which has nothing to do with the plot but is very funny nonetheless.

I actually don't mind the inconsistencies in Red Dwarf because it is after all a half hour comedy, but this episode does highlight an interesting one. If Rimmer's main duties, while alive, were maintaining the ship's vending machines, how could he be responsible for a job that, if not done properly, could kill the entire crew?

Another one that arises from this episode is that in the first series, we're told that Lister is the lowest ranking of 169 crew members. In this one, we're told that Rimmer's failure to do the drive plate properly killed 1,167 crew members.

Still - a good one.

Nicholas Ball, best known for playing the title role of Hazell at the end of the '70s (I never watched it) and for once being married to Pamela Stephenson, plays the simulant.

IV:4 White Hole

Of all the fourth series episodes listed on the iPlayer's Red Dwarf IV page, this was the only one I couldn't remember from the title or brief synopsis. Yet it contains one of the entire canon's most memorable characters - Talkie Toaster, seen briefly in the first series (though redesigned for this episode).

This one is really an amalgam of two ideas, the first being Kryten's idea to massively boost Holly's intelligence to overcome her computer senility, the second being the existence of a white hole, spewing time and matter into the Universe - causing time to run in random pockets, and the laws of causality no longer to apply.

I think this is the first episode in which we hear one of the Space Corps directives.

The episode concludes with a memorable scene in which Lister, on Holly's advice, plays pool with planets using a nuclear device fired from Starbug (presumably intended for mining). He successfully knocks a planet into the white hole with a trick shot, thereby blocking it up.

Why there's a virtual pool cue interface connected to a nuclear projectile launcher in Starbug is not explained.

IV:5 Dimension Jump

This has always been my absolute favourite Red Dwarf episode. In another, alternate universe there exists an Arnold Rimmer who's an elite test pilot in the Space Corps. He's dynamic, resourceful, selfless, brave. And effortlessly charismatic.

Imagine his surprise when he tests a new spacecraft, capable of breaking the speed of reality - and crosses the boundary into a parallel universe, only to find another Arnold Rimmer there, very different from himself.

Just brilliant.

IV:6 Meltdown

I never much liked this one. I watched it on my VCR on returning home from the pub the night it was first shown. I'd drunk too much and it sort of washed over me. I thought it was poor. Doesn't the idea of setting a timer on a VCR to record a TV programme onto a VHS tape seem improbably crude now? It seemed like the height of technological sophistication at the time.

Anyway I watched it again a few years ago and thought it was alright. And I watched it for the third time tonight and I must admit, it's decent. It's not one of the best Dwarf IV episodes, but it's not bad.

Possibly my biggest complaint about it is that it really symbolises how far we've come from the original concept, a likeable slob and a pompous git being marooned together on a huge spacecraft. In this one, Kryten finds a matter transporter device in one of the research labs. It can "home in on atmosphere-bearing planets within a range of 500,000 light years". Just too much.

The boys use it to visit a planet with a wax droid theme park, where the wax droids - copies of famous people from Earth's history, inexplicably - have broken their programming and split into two factions; one side composed of intellectuals and celebrities like Einstein, Queen Victoria, Pythagoras, Ghandi, Stan Laurel and Elvis Presley; the other warmongers and dictators like Hitler, Goebbels, Rasputin and Caligula.

The Elvis impersonator they hired for the job does raise a few laughs. And I must admit Chris Barrie is brilliant in this. He really squeezes every ounce of ridiculous egotistical, self-aggrandasing vanity out of Rimmer, who makes the situation far worse.

But why would a wax droid theme park three million years in the future on a distant planet be mainly concerned with Earth's history leading up to the 20th century?

V:1 Holoship

And so, the next series begins .. this one was first shown in early 1992. I remember it well, but I don't think I ever watched it again, until this evening.

The boys encounter a Holoship - a vessel made of light, crewed by cerebrally superior (and condescending) holograms. They transfer Rimmer aboard. He applies to join the crew, despite being massively intellectually inferior.

Jane Horrocks plays Rimmer's hologrammatic love interest. I shared a tube carriage with her about four years after this was shown, though I didn't say hello. Don Warrington, the posh black student in Rising Damp twenty years earlier also appears. I saw him once as well come to think of it, in Newcastle. He gave me a slightly suspicious look when I recognised him.

Anyway - it's a good one without a doubt but the gags feel a little bit thinner now. Looking at the list of episodes there's at least one brilliant one in the fifth series. But I think Red Dwarf IV was the peak. We'll see.

Another nitpick - The captain of the holoship recognises Rimmer as "one of the old Class 1 holograms". But Rimmer's from three million years in his past.

V:2 Inquisitor

OK. Well, this is still a comedy, no doubt about that. But there's arguably more sci-fi in it than comedy. Quite a convoluted time paradox story and honestly, I think the complexity of the plot (no, really) gets in the way of the laughs.

Based on a good idea, though. A self-repairing simulant who lives for millions of years eventually invents a time machine, then roams all eternity visiting every soul in history. Then he judges them, and if they're found not to have lived worthwhile lives - he erases them from history, and replaces them with someone who never had a chance at life. Perhaps a sperm that swam too slowly.

It's noticeable that there are more scenes on Starbug in the last couple of series, clearly the two writers liked the setting. In a couple of series' time, the big ship will be dispensed with, and the whole thing will be set on the little one.

Not bad.

V:3 Terrorform

Rimmer becomes trapped on a psi-moon, an artificial world which terraforms itself to conform to his psyche. His various nightmares and neuroses turn into physical monsters and he's terrorised by his own self-loathing.

Another one that I didn't remember at all from the title or synopsis. But I certainly remembered the scene in which Kryten's hand goes looking for help and Lister believes he's being menaced by a tarantula. Brilliant.

V:4 Quarantine

Another one of the all-time greats. The boys investigate an abandoned viral research lab on any icy planet, or moon. There they find its only occupant, a Dr Langstrom. She's a hologrommatic virology researcher of some repute, and unfortunately she's contracted a holo-virus herself. She's now not only barking mad, as she happily admits herself, but homicidal and endowed with scary superpowers like telekinesis and "hex vision", which allows her to fire bolts of lethal energy from her eyes.

Unfortunately Rimmer catches it, and becomes a lethal danger to the other three.

Chris Barrie's performance as a psychopathic loony hologram owes something to Donald Pleasance, I think. Brilliant. And very funny.

I also loved the scene in which the cat, Lister and Kryten are locked up in quarantine together, and get on each other's nerves. Even Kryten becomes irritable and cantankerous, especially with Lister.

The daftest idea in this one is the "luck virus", which gives anyone infected by it incredible good luck for a short period of time. The boys find a small quantity of this at the research lab, and Kryten injects Lister with some of it to help them overcome Rimmer. Very silly, but I can accept it as surreal humour.

V:5 Demons and Angels

Kryten invents a "triplicator" by adapting the matter paddle from Meltdown, so that supplies can be replicated. Unfortunately, it creates one "good" copy, with all the best qualities of the object they test it on (a strawberry) and one "bad" copy. One of the new strawberries is succulent; "divine" as Lister puts it. The other one is rancid, riddled with maggots.

But when Kryten tries to reverse the process, it blows up the Red Dwarf and creates two copies .. one a dirty derelict manned by twisted, malignant and depraved versions of the four main characters, the other bright, elegant, sparkling clean and tidy, where they encounter holy and virtuous versions of themselves.

Better than I remembered. Very good. I especially loved the dark and depraved Rimmer character. An absolute pervert.

V:6 Back to Reality

I remembered this as being a really good one, but not one of the all-time handful of classics. But it is. Clever and laugh-out-loud funny.

The boys visit an ocean planet that's been the subject of an experiment to speed up evolution. There, beneath the waves (Starbug has amphibious capabilities it seems) they discover a creature called a "despair squid" - that incapacitates its prey by spraying hallucinogenic venom, designed to make them suicidal.

Then the four wake up, to find that the past four years on Red Dwarf have merely been an immersive video game. As they slowly readjust to real life and their memories return, they find themselves in a dystopian world. Worse, each finds that he is really something he hates. They are a senior official in the fascist police state, a smelly delinquent, a dork with no dress sense and massive teeth, and a homicidal police officer.

It's all a hallucination of course!

Just brilliant, and the icing on the cake is a superb cameo by Timothy Spall as the mocking Brummie employee of the immersive game corporation who welcomes them back to reality.

I was quite impressed also by the guy who plays a secret police operative, as well. Very sinister, yet charismatic. Lenny Von Dohlen, I've just read. Sadly he died in 2022.

Right up there with Dimension Jump.

VI:1 Psirens

First broadcast in October 1993 and set two hundred years after the events of the previous episode, during which time Lister and the cat have been suspended in "deep sleep" aboard Starbug, and Rimmer has been switched off. It's implied that Kryten has been pottering around Starbug on his own for the last two centuries.

Red Dwarf has been stolen. Clearly, Grant and Naylor, the writers, preferred Starbug as a a setting - which was pretty obvious from Red Dwarf V. However, Starbug seems to be a lot bigger than it was in the first few series - it now has an engine room, for example. And an upper deck.

Anyway in this one, while on the trail of Red Dwarf, the boys are lured into an asteroid belt populated by 'psirens' - hideous giant insectoid creatures capable of altering their appearance telepathically. They lure their prey into a trap, strip out their vessels, and suck out their brains with metal straws.

Clare Grogan returns as Kochanski, or the illusion of Kochanski. Anita Dobson and Jenny Agutter also appear.

This episode has one of the most hilariously gross scenes in the entire Dwarf canon, when one of the psirens appears to Lister as the girl he lusted after as a teenager - "Pete Tranter's sister". He knows she's a psiren, but he can't help himself. So we see him snogging a gross insectoid creature with bug eyes.

Phil Manzanera's hands also appear. There's a scene in which we see Lister playing guitar. I'd thought that they'd merely overdubbed Phil's playing while Craig Charles mimed playing it, but if you look closer Phil's actually behind him, with his arms pushed under Craig's armpits. Is it ethical for a white man to portray a mixed race person's hands? I suppose it would be worse if he'd browned them up.

(https://i.ibb.co/dWy4Fw5/manzanerahands.png)

There are some seriously funny one-liners in this. I loved the line about Starbug having "crashed more times than a ZX-81" though I suppose that one hasn't aged brilliantly for younger viewers.

No Holly in this series, of course - since she's the Red Dwarf's ship's computer. But Hattie Hayridge wasn't a patch on Norman Lovett.

VI:2 Legion

I well remembered this one. While chasing Red Dwarf in Starbug, the boys are captured by a "guidance beam" which forces them down onto a secret military research base / space station, now abandoned except for a creature called Legion, who - it later transpires - is the product of the research there, and feeds off the combined minds and personalities of those present on the base.

It's described as having been created in the 23rd century. Again, the series is supposed to be set three million years in the future, so this doesn't make a lot of sense. But hey.

Rimmer has a line about "professionalism" that reminded me of an interview with him that I read a long time ago. Just found it:

https://www.ganymede.tv/forums/topic/starburst-chris-barriered-dwarf-vi-interview-1994/

"I remember one instance that was probably in week two or three, where earlier in the week I had voiced my opinion that, somewhere along the line, we were lacking in a degree of professionalism. In the script, one of Rimmer's lines in the Starbug cockpit was, 'Can we have a bit of professionalism, gentlemen?' That's a classic case, and that in my opinion is rather a sly to the point of being nasty, unnecessary kind of thing to put in. It's lazy writing at best."

In the same interview he says:

"I think the entire cast will agree that we can return occasionally to the days of series two and three, like Marooned, for example, where we had long, interesting and funny dialogue about our characters and how they came about. People might say, 'Oh, that's revisiting the past', but I still think that clever writing could explore them more, and get some very humorous material from that".

And I do agree with that. By this time, the series had come a long way from the original, dialogue / situation based idea of two very different misfits being marooned together on a huge spaceship. By the sixth series it was more fast-paced, like an action / adventure comedy.

Also, as Barrie points out in that (surprisingly frank and critical) interview, they were definitely leaning on a formula. The same old "Space Corps directive" joke where Rimmer gets the number wrong and Kryten corrects him comes out in this one again, for example.

VI:3 Gunmen of the Apocalypse

I never much liked this one the first time I saw it. Then I saw it again about ten years later and liked it a bit more. I watched it for the third time this evening and thought it was really good.

In a confrontation with rogue simulants, Starbug is infected with a malicious computer virus which disables the navigation systems when it's on a collision course with a volcanic moon. Kryten connects himself to the ship systems to analyse and overcome the virus by creating a "dove" program.

This plays out in his mechanoid mind as a sort of dream based on an old Western, where the baddies are the virus and Kryten is the sheriff. The others connect themselves using virtual reality headsets.

Rodney's father-in-law from Only Fools and Horses plays one of the simulants, and one of the western characters. Jennifer Calvert, who was in Brookside a very long time ago, also appears as a VR character in a highly entertaining scene when Lister is playing an immersive game at the beginning of the episode. He calls her "moral garbage on legs". I always remembered that as "social garbage on legs". This was an expression that I subsequently used often myself, most frequently about a girl I dated called Julie. Turns out it was almost original.

VI:4 Emohawk: Polymorph II

Starbug receives unwelcome attention from a "Space Corps enforcement probe". To evade it, the boys head into the GELF Zone, a region of space inhabited by fearsome tribes. On a moon there, they barter with the Kinatawowi, a primitive race who look something like a cross between large primates and pigs, for a new oxygen generation unit - the old one having been damaged beyond repair in their encounter with the probe.

Unfortunately the chief of the Kinatawowi demands that Lister marry his daughter in return for the new oxygen unit.

Later, a polymorph (see III:3) attacks the four aboard Starbug. The polymorph succeeds in draining the cat and Rimmer of their usual personality traits, turning them into Duane Dibbley and Ace Rimmer, respectively. Of course this makes very little sense and feels like a gratuitous excuse to bring two funny characters back.

I think it's fair to say the writers are running short of ideas by this time, reusing elements from previous scripts.

We see spacious sleeping quarters aboard Starbug, and Kryten refers to "all three decks of the engine room".

VI:5 Rimmerworld

I only vaguely remembered this one, I think I've only seen it once. Rimmer is suffering from a stress-related nervous disorder, which is slightly superfluous to the plot but it does allow us to see that Starbug has something like a sick bay. I continue to find this annoying, this dramatic reinvention of what was conceived as a scout ship with a bit of space behind the cockpit as a much larger vessel.

But anyway, meanwhile, Starbug is running low on supplies and Lister and the cat are living on asteroidal lichen stew and cultured fungus.

So they decide to scavenge a dead simulant ship - I think it's supposed to be the same one they attacked in Gunmen of the Apocalypse.  Unfortunately it's highly structurally unstable, and the boys have to make their escape quickly after a confrontation with a surviving simulant causes a "shipquake".

Rimmer is the first to leave (of course) in an escape pod, while the others manage to teleport back to Starbug. But the escape pod is headed for a habitable planet on the other side of a wormhole .. which means that, due to time dilation, six centuries will have passed for Rimmer in the few hours that it will take the rest to get there in Starbug. I couldn't really make sense of this, but it is, after all, a half-hour sitcom.

Rimmer uses equipment on the escape pod - an "eco accelerator" to terraform the desert world where he arrives and in no time it's a lush, verdant world. He also attempts to create a female clone of himself (somehow using hologrammatic DNA, I suppose). In fact he creates an exact male copy. But he continues his experiments..

So when the other three arrive there, several hours or centuries later, depending how you look at it, they find a dystopian world, populated and ruled by clones of Rimmer.

Heavy on the sci-fi this one and of course it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I don't really mind that. It's not bad.

VI:6 Out of Time

I remembered that I wasn't overly fond of this one, but it's decent. Morale is low aboard Starbug. Then they travel through a number of "unreality bubbles" deployed as a defence measure around a 28th century Space Corps test ship, which cause hallucinations, or distorted reality. This has hilarious consequences, but they plough on regardless.

Aboard the derelict test ship they find, and recover a time travel device. They test it by travelling back to the 15th century. Then they look out of the windows and they're still in deep space. This gets a huge laugh from the audience, but I've never got that joke. Why wouldn't they be? Why would you look outside and see the Battle of Bosworth or Joan of Arc being burned alive just because you've travelled in time?

Anyway - not long afterwards they meet themselves, from 15 years in the future. Unfortunately their future selves are self-serving, immoral freeloaders who wallow in ostentatious luxury by hanging round with the likes of Louis XVI and "the Hitlers".

This episode was first shown in November 1993 and needless to say the future versions of the Rimmer and the cat don't look a lot like Chris Barrie or Danny John-Jules did in 2008 (future Lister is portrayed as a brain in a jar). But of course in this timeline, they've lived lives of opulent excess.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger with "TO BE CONTINUED".

This is the last of the classic Grant / Naylor 36 episodes. Rob Grant ended their collaboration after this series, citing "creative differences" although supposedly, they fell out. As recently as 2021, Naylor started a High Court action against Grant over the rights to the show.

Although I never watched most of the Dave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_(TV_channel)) shows, I can think of only one episode that I particularly like after this one. And it's the next one.

VII:1 Tikka to Ride

Well I only had to wait a day this time but back in the '90s, I had to wait over three years for the seventh series of Red Dwarf. The last episode of VI was shown in November 1993; this one was first shown in January 1997.

The look and feel is a bit different, and not really in a good way. The videotape was "filmised" and the direction is a bit more cinematic. The studio audience is no longer present, the laughter track being recorded at a screening. Consequently the energy is different; a bit more subdued.

Anyway - this is a pretty good one all the same. It picks up exactly where Out of Time left off, with the "future selves" having erased themselves by attacking and destroying present-day Starbug in a confrontation. So the whole timeline has been altered, and yet the Lister we see in this episode is fully aware of the events of the last episode. Yet again it makes no sense but you've just got to roll with it.

The boys recover the time drive again from the Space Corps test ship (I couldn't make any sense of this but I didn't try very hard) so that they can return to Earth to stock up on curry. It seems to me that this single plot device destroys the whole premise of the show; the idea that Lister and the rest are marooned three million years into deep space.

But anyway, unfortunately they arrive in Dallas in 1963, where they manage, inadvertently, to interfere with Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of Kennedy. It turns out that Kennedy's survival has dire consequences for Earth's subsequent history.

Some of the gags are a bit forced but I must admit, it's a clever one. There are some surprisingly dark moments. And there are some spectacularly funny moments, especially after Lister replaces Kryten's head with Spare Head 2 and removes its guilt chip.

But there's some real nonsense in it as well. Starbug now has a "supply deck B" and due to "dimensional anomalies" caused by the timeline shennanigans, the cargo deck is said to have increased in size by 200%. It's just stupid and it adds nothing to the plot.

Michael Shannon, who plays JFK, died in November 2023.

Unfortunately I think it's pretty slim pickings from here on. I'm pretty sure I watched all of this series and the next, but I barely remember any of them. I've only ever seen a couple of the Dave era ones, and in all honesty they weren't great either.

VII:2 Stoke Me a Clipper

I remembered the basic idea of this one, that of Ace Rimmer returning from another dimension, mortally wounded, to persuade Rimmer to become the next Ace. It starts with an absolutely (but deliberately) preposterous action sequence, which I think is a parody of the Bond films. Ken Morley, better known as Reg Holdsworth from Coronation Street, plays a (WW2) German officer.

There's also a(n over)long artificial reality sequence in which Lister returns to mediaeval England to do a bit of jousting, to win a fair lady. Brian Cox (not the popular science presenter, the wanker one) and the lovely Sarah Alexander appear in this. It's got nothing to do with the plot. Just feels like an excuse for a bit of location / period costume nonsense.

The basic idea is that Ace has returned, mortally wounded, to recruit Rimmer to be the next Ace Rimmer. This is a very long-standing tradition, supposedly. As one Ace dies, he recruits and trains his successor from a new dimension. Personally I see this as overuse of the Ace Rimmer character, and really, in suggesting that he has it in him to become a courageous, dynamic, selfless figure instead of the bitter, pompous cowardly fool he's supposed to be, an abuse of the Rimmer character as well. It's just too much, just too far removed from the original Red Dwarf concept.

But the reason this was done was that Chris Barrie wanted out. The Brittas Empire was a success by this time and, as the interview I linked in this thread a week ago demonstrates, he was a bit disenchanted with Red Dwarf.  Hence he only appears in the first two episodes of the seventh series.

To me Chris Barrie was comfortably the most talented performer of the four and it surprises me that he didn't go on to do a lot more, so this was a great shame. But - he'll be back!

Probably the best thing about this one is watching Barrie playing Rimmer trying to be like Ace. Funny. But on the whole I can't say I'm a big fan of this episode.

We learn in this one that Starbug has an "artificial reality suite", and there's an interior scene elsewhere on the ship that shows it to be massive. It even has a docking bay, where we see Ace's dimension-jumping craft arrive.

VII:3 Ouroboros

Well I enjoyed this one more than I expected to. I did watch it when it was first broadcast. But there's a lot not to like.

In this one, a tear in the very fabric of spacetime opens a gateway between two alternative realities. Lister meets a version of himself in the hyperspace no-man's land between the two realities. And he meets Kochanski. In this other reality, she's the one who goes into stasis, and Lister (rather than Rimmer) is the hologram.

When this portal closes, Kochanski is trapped in the usual Red Dwarf universe. In other words, it's a way to bring Kochanski back into the cast, presumably as some sort of replacement for Rimmer.

Two big problems with this, for me. Firstly: it's just part of Red Dwarf folklore that Kochanski is Lister's unattainable dream, forever lost three million years in the past. Bringing her back as a regular feature is something akin to sacrilege.

Secondly: Kochanski is now played by Chloe Annett, not Clare Grogan. No doubt she's a better actress than Clare but her personality is different. Worse, she's just not particularly funny. I mean - I don't think her lines are that brilliant, but she doesn't have the comic timing, or the charm, or the charisma. To be fair I don't think Clare Grogan did either (apart from charm in bucketloads) but she wasn't a regular cast member either, she just had a few cameos.

Also in this episode, we see a retcon of Lister's back story - specifically the fact that he was found as a baby in a cardboard box under a pool table. It's quite clever, I must admit.

Chris Barrie does appear briefly in this, in a flashback scene set on Red Dwarf before the drive plate accident (three million years in the past, in other words). This annoyed me, because Rimmer's uniform is very different from the first series and the Red Dwarf set is, as well.

This episode does have one redeeming feature. Kryten is jealous of Kochanski and Robert Llewellyn puts in a brilliant, hilarious performance to portray this, especially in the scenes where he's being bitchy and childish with her. Bravo.

But generally - the gags in this one feel weak. It even drags a little. The cinematic treatment with the single camera work does it no favours. I'm afraid this is where the rot really sets in.

VII:4 Duct Soup

I must have seen this before but I didn't remember it. It was a bit of a slog, to be honest. Dull.

The basic plot is that Starbug's power generator goes down, and the four have to climb through the ventilation ducts to reach the generator room. Meanwhile Kryten is still insecure and jealous, and Kochanski is grumpy and irritable while trying to adjust to life aboard Starbug.

Kryten gets a few laughs out of his mechanoid insecurity, but Kochanski being a grumpy cow is just boring. I couldn't help thinking that Rimmer's innate, pompous cuntiness would have made the same situation work much better.

There's a bit of dialogue in which Lister refutes a suggestion that he's gay and tells an anecdote about an old crewmate called "Bent Bob". Probably wouldn't get into a BBC script these days.

The best laugh is the cat and Lister watching Kochanski's underwear going round in the spin dryer for entertainment. They pull up a couple of crates and watch attentively like a TV programme.

Again, Starbug is implied to be massive. There are two miles of ventilation ducts, big enough for people to crouch in. Seems to me that Doug Naylor, who wrote this episode himself of course, wanted it both ways. He wanted the more intimate and claustrophobic setting of Starbug in the first instance but clearly he liked the idea of the stories being set on a huge ship. So he had his cake and ate it.

The jokes mostly feel weak, there's barely a plot to speak of, the dialogue doesn't make up for it, the payoff is boring, the Kochanski character doesn't really work.

VII:5 Blue

The Starbug crew attempt (but fail) to return Kochanski to her own dimension by navigating to another tear in the fabric of spacetime, ultimately being thwarted by getting caught up in a comet.

Kryten continues to be highly irritated by and resentful of Kochanski's presence.

Lister finds that - somehow - he's missing Rimmer. So Kryten devises an Artificial Reality presentation called The Rimmer Experience, which all of the crew take part in.

This is nowhere near a return to form, but much better than the last one. I don't recall ever having seen it, I must have given up on Red Dwarf VII by this time, though I definitely watched at least a few of Red Dwarf VIII.

I do recall The Rimmer Experience very vividly, but I think I saw it as a clip on Red Dwarf Night (https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/664ef8c355ba411ab2bbfc89a76daeda). I must say it is very funny, especially in the musical number at the end.

Rimmer also features in two flashback sequences, and one of Lister's dreams as well as The Rimmer Experience. I don't know if Chris Barrie appears in any of the remaining three episodes of this series.

I was slightly irritated that Rimmer wasn't wearing the original uniform for one of the flashbacks set in what Lister calls "the early days".

It's really not that bad. Some of the jokes don't land but it doesn't drag like the last one.

VII:6 Beyond a Joke

The four have ransacked an old, abandoned space cruiser called SS Centauri. Among the items found there are a copy of Jane Austen World, an artifical reality game which adds little to the plot but provides an excuse for a few minutes of period costume scenes set on Earth.

Kryten's head explodes - literally - when Lister asks for ketchup with his lobster. The others hope to repair him using equipment from the Centauri, but find instead a rogue simulant and another 4000 series mechanoid called "Able" - in effect one of Kryten's "brothers" (and also played by Robert Llewellyn of course). Unfortunately the simulant is extremely hostile, and the mechanoid is mentally incapacitated from a mechanoid narcotic called "outrozone".

Probably would have been funnier without Kochanski. This one is packed with one-liners that seem forced, and are barely amusing. But the other cast members get a bit more out of them than she does. There's not much sympathetic about her, she's just grumpy with a superior attitude.

The funniest scene is the one in which Kryten enters the VR game with a tank borrowed from a WW2 game and blows up the gazebo where the others are having afternoon tea with artificial reality characters, because he's angry and resentful (again).

The resolution of the conflict with the simulant is just stupid.

The Centauri is supposedly from the 23rd or 24th century. Everything else in the Red Dwarf universe seems to be from next few hundred years. But it's meant to be set three million years in the future, ie about 30,000 centuries from now.

The simulant is played by Don Henderson, who sadly died a few months after it was first shown in 1997.

The script for this one was largely written by Robert Llewellyn. It's not great.

VII:7 Epideme

The four find an old supply ship buried in a glacier planetoid. There are a lot of frozen moons / planetoids in the Red Dwarf universe. They find a frozen body, and it turns out to be a supply officer called Caroline who was transferred off Red Dwarf before the accident that killed all the crew (three million years previously, of course).

It has life signs - but later, when it thaws, we find that it's Caroline's corpse, animated by a man-made intelligent virus. Then the corpse attacks Lister, and he gets infected himself. It will kill him in 48 hours, unless he can persuade it not to.

To my great surprise, this turned out to be really very good. The guy who plays the voice of the virus does brilliantly well (they speak to it using a universal translator) - it has a fantastically over-the-top personality. Even Kochanski delivers a funny moment, when she punches Lister out in a moment of anger.

Kryten's jealousy also provokes a few laughs again, although I do still have misgivings about his character being derailed.

There are some hilariously gross moments when the corpse attacks Lister and bits come off it. Bravo, BBC make up department, it looks absolutely gross. Also when bits of Lister's arm get removed with a laser bone saw. Really gross, but hilarious.

This one was written by someone called Paul Alexander, then knocked into shape to ensure conformity to the Red Dwarf universe by Doug Naylor. Until I started watching these I hadn't realised that they'd got other writers in for the episodes made after Rob Grant left.

One thing that slightly annoyed me - they were trying to sell the series to US TV at the time (this is the reason there are eight shows in this series rather than the usual six) and there are a couple of gags that seem to have been tailored to an American audience, for example Lister refers to being "deader than Saturday night in Salt Lake City". Much more in character (and funnier) if he'd said "deader than a Wednesday night in Warrington". Or something.

VII:8 Nanarchy

Quite a silly one, this. We're asked to believe that Kryten's self-repair systems use nanobots, capable of reconstructing things at the atomic level. Further, we're asked to accept that they abandoned his body around the time of Back to Reality.

The four return to the same region of space (going into deep sleep for a century or two again, it's a very long way) from Back to Reality to find the nanobots, in the hope that they can reconstruct Lister's arm. We then find that they constructed a miniature version of Red Dwarf for themselves out of the original ship, then transformed the rest of it into a planetoid for safe keeping.

Kryten persuades them to reconstruct Lister's arm, which they do. But they also reconstruct Red Dwarf.

This is a poor one. It has a really confused, muddy plot, too far-fetched even for a sitcom and it's not very funny. However it does move the story arc forwards, in that the four are reunited with Red Dwarf. And the original (Norman Lovett) Holly! They find him on the planetoid - either reconstructed or removed from the original ship - it's not really clear. Either way he appears on a little screen a bit like a watch.

VIII:1 Back in the Red: Part 1

Broadcast nearly two years after the previous episode, the first of the eighth series picks up where the last of the seventh left off - with Lister, the cat, Kochanski and Kryten about to enter a nanobot-rebuilt version of Red Dwarf. I was amused that Kochanski's hair is longer, and subtly highlighted.

Unfortunately the ship is many times bigger than the original, so that Starbug is something like the size of a fly, to scale. I think that this was done purely as a joke at the end of the last series. Naylor, who wrote the script for this one, gets out of it with the conceit that it's an anomaly of the nanobot rebuilding process, and that it will shrink to the correct size after an initial overlarge period. As is so often the case it makes no sense, but it does allow for a brilliant visual gag when Starbug flies up a rat's bum in one of the air ducts. It's genuinely hilarious.

We find that the nanobots have resurrected not merely the ship, but its entire crew with memories intact. They'd all have to come to life at the precise same moment, wouldn't they? The mechanics of this are not explained. But they, or at least the senior officers, are aware that they're three million years further into deep space than they should be.

Of course there's a problem in that there are now two Listers, and the script hints at this with an enigmatic scene between, presumably, the nanobot-recreated Lister and a non-hologrammatic Rimmer. But this doesn't get resolved in this first episode.

The special effects are noticeably improved in this series. But the production values are back to the old non-cinematic, studio audience method. It works a lot better.

There's an especially funny scene when Kryten is interviewed by the ship's psychiatrist.

So: a reboot of sorts, then. Right back to the beginning with the old sets and JMC uniforms. Unfortunately my recollections of this series are not positive. But I must say, this first episode was pretty good. There are some weak gags for sure, but there are some belters as well. And it's a joy to have Chris Barrie back as Rimmer.

VIII:2 Back in the Red: Part 2

The story of the return of Kochanski, Lister and the cat to Red Dwarf - or the nanobot recreation of it, accompanied by Kryten - continues.

Lister persuades Rimmer to help him and the others escape, having been put in the brig for taking a Starbug and crashing it. It's not clear why Lister couldn't just ask the Red Dwarf authorities to count the remaining Starbugs, because the one he crashed wasn't one of theirs. But perhaps the nanobots thought of that, and recreated the Dwarf with one Starbug fewer.

Rimmer gets his hands on some of the sexual magnetism virus (presumably lying around Starbug, or its wreckage since the events of Quarantine) and this does lead to some hilarious results when he's invited to a Captain's supper with some of the other officers).

Kryten is classified as a woman android because he doesn't have a penis. Could you get that script detail past the BBC now? And he's restored to factory settings, losing all of the personality and deprogramming he's acquired on his travels with the others. But not for long.

Quite honestly the very idea of droid-self-repair nanobots creating a massive spaceship with live humans really tests my patience. Kryten's nanobots could, at any time, have created human beings, spaceships, weapons, all manner of supplies.

Also - why isn't Dave happy? He's no longer the only human in the universe. Sure, he has to spend a couple of years in the can. But he's surrounded by people. Including women. Why would you want to escape from that, just to avoid going in the brig for a bit?

Anyway - I did mostly enjoy this one. Chris Barrie really elevates it. His scene in the captain's office is brilliant. It gets a vigorous round of applause from the studio audience, and deservedly so. I've always remembered the ridiculous, drawn out salute he does.

Barrie's gift for comedy just underlines how futile it was to try to replace Rimmer with the Kochanski character, and again in this one she does feel very superfluous. There's nothing interesting or funny about her.

I'm still confused about where the nanobot-created Lister is. I think the nanobot-created Kochanski should be somewhere on the ship as well.

I enjoyed it but if I'm remembering correctly, my patience will wear thin with this series quite soon.

VIII:3 Back in the Red: Part 3

A bit trying, this one. The gags are weak. The plot doesn't resolve particularly satisfyingly. And the old Artificial Reality plot device is overused.

Lister, the cat, Kochanski and Kryten attempt to escape the ship in a Blue Midget (the smaller scout ship variant) but it turns out they've been placed in Artificial Reality by Captain Hollister so their behaviour can be observed (and their innocence or guilt determined). Ultimately they get sentenced to two years in the ship's prison.

It feels like a poor idea overindulged. I'd say the events of these first three episodes should probably have been a two-parter.

There's a very irritating scene in which the cat encourages a Blue Midget to dance (it's every bit as stupid as it sounds) although I have to admit, the studio audience liked it.

VIII:4 Cassandra

I'm tired now of the series being set on a highly-populated Red Dwarf where everyone's still alive. I don't like the dystopian atmosphere that was nothing like the old pre-disaster Red Dwarf.

But that's OK, because this one is something like a Red Dwarf VIII episode that wants to be a Red Dwarf V episode. It's mostly set off the ship, away from rest of the ship's complement.

Lister has volunteered for the Canaries, in the belief that it's a singing troupe and in the hope that it will get him extra privileges on the prison deck. However, it's actually a sort of ragtag convict army used as cannon fodder for dangerous missions. He's volunteered Rimmer and the others as well.

And on their first away mission, if I can adopt a bit of Star Trek dialect there, they encounter a ship's computer called Cassandra on an abandoned spaceship (there are just so many abandoned spaceships in the Red Dwarf universe, aren't there?). Cassandra has a special talent. She can foretell the future.

Don't remember seeing this one before. It's not brilliant but there's some funny dialogue between Rimmer and Lister, it's a clever idea and it does have a highly amusing payoff.

VIII:5 Krytie TV

Kryten has been placed in the women's wing of the prison deck because, as discussed a few episodes back, he doesn't have a penis. Meanwhile, Lister has been given leave to appeal.

Some of the male prisoners kidnap and reprogram him to over his usual sense of ethics and propriety. Why? Because this allows him to to stream video from the women's showers (hence 'Krytie TV'). Later, he pranks Lister into the being the victim on a prank TV show.

I watched this one back in 1999 and disliked it, but it's actually not that bad. Not great. I maintain that VIII is a poor series and this isn't really an exception to that but it does have its moments. There's some funny dialogue between Lister and Rimmer in the classic mould. And it does have a funny payoff, again a classic Red Dwarf joke.

VIII:6 Pete: Part 1

Lister and Rimmer have played a prank on one of the prison deck officers, and as punishment they're forced to take part in a basketball game against a team of prison guards. But they spike the guards' half-time drinks with a virility enhancement drug stolen from the medilab. I have to say, I wouldn't have thought playing basketball with an erection would be all that difficult, but in the Red Dwarf universe it seems to be.

It's just an excuse for an overlong knob gag that has little to do with the rest of the plot.

Later, while on one of the Canaries' away missions, Kryten, the cat and Kochanski discover a device that can manipulate time. It can make people perfectly still, frozen in time (although one of the actors attempting to depict this blinks, which made me laugh). They plan to use it to make their sentence on the prison deck pass in seconds.

Lister and Rimmer get thrown in the "hole", a sort of dungeon, after using a programmable virus to help them with their potato peeling duties. There, they meet a fellow prisoner with a pet bird called Pete.

Incautious use of the time manipulation device causes Pete to de-evolve into a dinosaur.

There are some really good jokes in this. Some of the dialogue between Rimmer and Lister, again, is priceless. There's a brilliant gag involving one of the skutters. And I was glad to see that the cultural references are decidedly British - okes about Little Chef waitresses and QPR playing away, for example.

On the whole though it's an ungainly mess of ideas thrown together without a particular focus. Did this really need to be a two-parter? I'd never seen this before, must have given up after the last one.

 VIII:7 Pete: Part 2

Why on Earth this ridiculous, badly thought out, meandering pile of smeg was considered worthy of a two-part treatment, I can't even imagine. The ideas are just dumb - a dinosaur being enticed to eat a massive curry, for example. The jokes are mostly weak, and overextended. The sci-fi ideas that the plot, if I can even call it that, depends on make little sense, even allowing that this is a half-hour comedy.

There is a good joke about Kryten manufacturing a penis for himself that subsequently escapes. It later attempts to burst out of the cat's clothing like a chest-burster from Alien. Very funny scenes but they have nothing to do with the rest of the "plot".

Actually the scenes with the "Canaries" are based on the Space Marines from Aliens, I think.

There's not much to like about the eighth series. I don't like the basic idea of every episode being set on a Red Dwarf with a complete crew. Apart from the uniforms it looks like a totally different ship anyway. And even ignoring my dislike of the premise / setting, the ideas are really poor and badly assembled.

This particular episode, ie Pete: Part 2 ranked dead last in a poll of Red Dwarf fans conducted by the Ganymede & Titan (https://www.ganymede.tv/forum/) fan site years ago. Certainly I haven't seen a worse one so far.

VIII:8 Only the Good...

And so we come to the series's final instalment of the 20th century and the final BBC production.

Again, I'd never seen this one. The story starts with a metal-eating, super-corrosive virus arriving on Red Dwarf. However, the plot involving this doesn't actually start until about 20 minutes in (until the last eight minutes, in other words). Until then, the episode is taken up with subplots involving: firstly, Rimmer cheating a chocolate dispensing machine, secondly Lister pranking Kryten by getting him to behave inappropriately around Kochanski on the occasion of her period, and thirdly, Kryten's revenge on Lister.

Kryten and Kochanski's solution to this is to create a portal to a mirror universe, where the virus will be an antidote to the virus in their own universe, and bring some back. Kryten fires up a device, a light beam shoots out through a prism into a mirror - job done. Easy as that. No explanation of what the device is, or where he's got it. Apparently there's a mirror universe machine aboard Red Dwarf.

Rimmer steps through into the mirror universe and finds that he's Captain of Red Dwarf there.

Despite the idea being very weak and nonsensical, and despite the fact that most of the episode has little or nothing to do with the essential plot - which is pretty typical for Red Dwarf VIII - this one is, against all my expectations, pretty good. The dialogue is consistently funny. The jokes are mostly gold. Especially the chocolate machine's grudge against Rimmer. I loved it.

We end on a cliffhanger, and I'm not sure it ever gets resolved .. because the powers-that-be at the BBC had noticed that the ratings started to tank after the first couple of episodes. In particular, it didn't escape their attention that a large proportion of the folks who'd watched Pete: Part 1 didn't bother with Pete: Part 2. They declined to commission a ninth series.

But Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the cat would return on Dave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_(TV_channel)), ten years later. Or in my case - tomorrow.

Back to Earth: Part 1

It's April 2009 and here comes a revival of Red Dwarf on a non-terrestrial channel called Dave - in the form of a three-parter called Back to Earth.

I'd thought that I'd seen all three of these but I didn't remember a moment of this. I wonder if I only actually saw parts two and three, which I do remember at least vaguely.

Although Dave showed this in three weekly parts it's presented as a single, 70-minute piece on the iPlayer. However, I watched only the first part today (it's pretty easy to work out where the join was). I don't think I have the attention span for the whole 70 minutes.

Lister, the cat, Rimmer (in hologrammatic form again) and Kryten are once again alone on Red Dwarf. This despite the fact that Red Dwarf was destroyed at the end of the last series. Nor is any explanation provided as to why Rimmer has died again, nor why the rest of the crew are dead, or missing.

We learn that Kochanski is dead. Lister visits a little memorial for her, and takes flowers. And it's here that we find that Craig Charles' acting chops improved quite a bit over the previous ten years.

In this first instalment, the boys discover that there's a massive, dimension-migrating octopus in the water tank on G Deck.

Soon afterwards, another hologram of one of the crew materialises. She announces that she's the science officer, and she's going have Rimmer's hologram deactivated so she can take his place. Holly is offline, so it's not clear how this is possible. As well as being spectacularly clever, she's rather authoritarian, and fabulously hot (played by Sophie Winkleman, no less).

Using the Octopus creature's DNA, she manages to create a dimension-travelling device from a mining laser. It shoots out a beam and a sort of worm-hole appears - very, very similar to the mirror universe device from the last episode of Red Dwarf VIII. An awful lot of ideas get recycled in Red Dwarf, but at least there's a bit of justification for its existence this time. It doesn't just get pulled out of a cupboard.

The production values are very impressive. It was recorded in HD, it's beautifully directed and photographed, the CGI and special effects are superb. It has that cinematic feel that they went for in Red Dwarf VII. But there's no studio audience, no laughter and it's sorely lacking the traditional sitcom sense of fun. It feels low key. I didn't laugh. I enjoyed it to a degree but I was amused at best.

It's a bit jarring to see everyone ten years older but then again it's set nine (why not ten?) years after the last episode. Ironically (given that he's a hologram) Rimmer looks to have aged more than the other three.

Holly does not appear.

This wasn't well-received by fans. I don't think it's bad exactly, but it's definitely what I'd call "lukewarm". After watching the last of the three parts 15 years ago, I took to Twitter to express my point of view - I've just checked my old tweets and apparently I did watch all three - and I described it as Last of the Summer Smeg.

Back to Earth: Part 2

The boys travel through the portal into the dimension created by the stern science officer hologram. On the other side, they find themselves in an early 21st century Earth. They browse an electronics shop and find some Red Dwarf DVDs. One of them, in a display case, is an as-yet unreleased title called Back to Earth. Lister reads out the summary on the back:

"Back to Earth takes place after series ten. Kochanski is dead and the crew are hurled through a portal and discover they are just characters from a TV series"

Very meta, eh?

Lister reads on and discovers that they all die at the end. So they set off in search of their creator (Doug Naylor presumably), to plead for their lives.

Again I didn't remember a minute of this - except for a gag involving Rimmer and the science officer, who turns up briefly in the mirror universe. And yet - to my very pleasant surprise, I liked it. A lot. Clearly it doesn't have the energy of yer typical Red Dwarf episode, but if you accept it as something different - a more slow-paced, reflective, 70 minute special, it's actually quite enjoyable. It's very imaginative and clever and it's very funny as well, in a more low-key, slow paced kinda way.

Obviously it's highly fourth-wall-nudging, but I just went with it and it was a lot of fun. It even pokes fun at Red Dwarf fandom. It's a sort of love letter to the fans. It's all about the rapport between Doug Naylor, the performers and their audience. Really looking forward to watching the last instalment again!

Here's a nice touch - the Back to Earth DVD case Lister finds at Currys or Dixons or wherever looks pretty much exactly the same as the real thing. I checked Amazon.

Back to Earth: Part 2

The boys arrive on the set of Coronation Street in search of the actor Craig Charles, whom they find learning his lines in the Rovers Return. From there, they travel to the home of their creator. He's only surprised they didn't find him sooner. They explain that they want more life.

But nothing lasts forever. Unless they can find a way to cheat their own, scripted destiny. Given that the script of this story is to a large degree its own subject it all gets very recursively self-referential and confusing, a bit like holding a mirror up to another mirror and peering at infinity. But it's very different, pretty clever and ultimately I ended up really liking the whole thing.

The payoff uses a very familiar Red Dwarf trope, in fact it's a deliberate nod to one of the classic Red Dwarf V episodes. So much so that this could almost be considered a sequel.

Again there are some strong laughs, especially when Rimmer, Kryten and the cat attempt a Northern dialect to speak to a girl on the Coronation Street set.

Chloe Annett appears briefly in a cameo as Kochanski. She looks a bit different, but not nine years older. And Craig Charles acts his heart out in a way he never could have twenty years earlier. He does full justice to a really poignant, melancholy scene. Did he take acting lessons, or was it all the practice on Corrie?

After all these years of thinking that all three parts were a bit rubbish, I've come to see Back to Earth in a new light. I've seen it for what it really is – a big, affectionate, one-off novelty. The whole point of it, I think, is to exist outside the usual Red Dwarf universe.

It's almost like an elaborate Comic Relief skit. Rik Mayall would never break character as Alan B'Stard to channel his Young Ones persona in The New Statesman, but in a 1988 Comic Relief sketch, he does. A Dalek would never audition for Eurovision in Doctor Who.. etc.

So although obviously it's a properly produced, 70 minute feature rather than a quick sketch, I think the same principle applies. Breaking the rules for a bit of fun for the fans.

X:1 Trojan

Three and a half years later, here comes a new series on Dave. It's the classic format - the usual four are alone on Red Dwarf and there's a studio audience.

I don't think it was filmed in front of an audience. I think the audience reaction was probably recorded from a screening, like Red Dwarf VII. It doesn't have the vibe of a live performance. But it doesn't have the low-key cinematic feel, either.

The basic plot involves the boys answering a distress call. The sender turns out to be the hologram of one of Rimmer's brothers (and unfortunately the script does violate some of Rimmer's established backstory). Its not a brilliant idea but it's not bad. Some of the jokes don't land, some of them do. There's a ridiculous, surreal subplot about Lister ordering something from a shopping channel and being kept on hold on the phone that totally breaks the basic paradigm of the series. That annoyed me.

The Red Dwarf set is very different. Rimmer and Lister's cabin has a sort of steampunk decor. Interestingly the set where we first see the four is very reminiscent of the cockpit of Starbug. Perhaps Doug Naylor was trying to have the best of both worlds; to have the series set on Red Dwarf but evocative of series VI and VII, whre it's set mostly on Starbug.

There's a Red Dwarf onboard computer that's active, but its not Holly. Holly is not present. Oddly, the computer actually issues a memo, or an official letter, in the form of a letter, in a paper envelope. Yet this was made in 2012 (and of course it's set in the future). I liked Holly. I liked the idea of a laconic ship's mainframe that was a bit senile. If they couldn't get Norman Lovett they should have got someone else to play the part, and written a personality change into the script (like they did when Hattie Hayridge took over).

Well, it's not bad. It doesn't have the energy or the immediacy or the ideas of the classic Red Dwarf but who would expect that, 24 years after the first series was shown? It does at least have a few good jokes.

I was only vaguely aware of Red Dwarf X and I only watched one of them. Or possibly that was one of the Red Dwarf XI episodes.

There's still no explanation as to why the four are back on Red Dwarf, or what happened to the nanobot-generated crew. Perhaps it's supposed to be a reboot.

X:2 Fathers and Suns

The boys pick up and install a new ship's computer, harvested from a derelict. I was pleased that Holly got a mention. "We've so missed Holly", Kryten says, to which Rimmer rejoinders that "we just don't get the same quality of cockup these days". Almost needless to say though, the new computer turns out to be a bit of a psycho. But she's very clever as well - she has a predictive mode (inspired by predictive text on phones I think, the script hints at this) in which she can guess what people are about to say, rendering their conversations redundant. I really liked this; imaginative and funny in classic Red Dwarf style.

Meanwhile it's Father's Day, and as usual Lister is sending himself a card - because he is, as established in Ouroboros, by a quirk of time paradox, his own dad. But when Rimmer points out that he's been an inadequate father to himself, he decides to do something about it. He gets hammered and records some fatherly video messages for himself while he's intoxicated, so he won't remember them the next day.

The conversation between disappointed, authoritarian father and petulant son when he plays them back is pure genius. Clever and hilarious. Inspired.

(http://bikediary.uk/images/taiwant_tony.webp)

There's a subplot involving the Red Dwarf's vending machines as well. They are sentient of course, and can talk. I was particularly fond of Taiwan Tony (pictured), voiced in a ridiculous asian caricature. Reading some of the reviews online I see that this annoyed a few people, but I loved it.

Against all expectations, this one is brilliant. Best one since the sixth series, no question.

X:3 Lemons

This is the one episode made after Back to Earth that I'd seen before, and I only saw part of it. The Dwarfers find a "rejuvenation shower" flat pack in deep space. It's intended to restore its users to their youth, but they assemble it incorrectly and instead it sends all four of them back to 23AD on Earth.

There, they happen to meet Jesus (after walking 4,000 miles to India to find some lemons to make a battery out of).

It's a shame the rejuvenation shower doesnt work, because I'm not sure the jokes about Lister's dirty socks work quite so well now that he's in his late 40s.

Nonetheless - once again, this is really good. The jokes are funny, the idea to use Jesus in the plot works really well (though I'm not sure why he has a Geordie accent). It's sharp and clever and has some proper big laughs. What a pleasant surprise Red Dwarf X has been, so far.

Indira Joshi (from The Kumars) is in this one.

X:4 Entangled

Well, after two surprisingly, really good ones, this one is, like the first one, a bit crap. The plot is bizarre but unengaging, involving Lister losing a game of cards with some "biologically engineered garbage gobblers" that are really a rerun of the Kinitawowi from Emohawk in Red Dwarf VI. To ensure he pays his debt (he's gambled away Starbug and Rimmer) they've attached a groin exploder to him.

Because the cat and Kryten have become quantum-entangled somehow, they manage to find the co-ordinates of a science institution where they then find the key to unlocking it - in the form of a scientist called Irene Edgington, who has been held in stasis there. It's nonsensical and not particularly funny. But anyway, due to one of Irene's experiments going wrong, she's de-evolved into a chimp.

Oddly this episode seems to be well reviewed but it fell flat for me. It reuses a lot of old Red Dwarf ideas but I wouldn't mind that if it was interesting or funny. The one idea I liked really was that the science institution space station had been manned by people chosen for their capacity to get things wrong - because some of the most important breakthroughs in the history of science have come from mistakes.

X:5 Dear Dave

Another one that recycles old ideas, but it's not bad. Red Dwarf receives a mail pod from Earth (containing a large amount of paper envelopes. I love the way that Red Dwarf mixes incongruous old-fashioned ways with the future). See also: Better Than Life.

One of said envelopes contains a letter to Lister from an old girlfriend, which makes him a bit wistful, and raises the possibility that he might have become a father, three million years earlier.

Lots of laughs and good jokes in this one but it's a bit of a low-key idea, a million miles from all those series IV or V episodes where they have to escape some crisis.

However - there's a really funny subplot about Lister's relations with two of the food dispensers. One of them, with a very sultry and feminine French accent gets defensive when she thinks he's hitting on her. The other one is jealous about it. I just love the sentient food dispensers. There's another subplot about Rimmer possibly being demoted by the ship's computer and Kryten trying to bribe the medi-computer to get him an excuse. But it's not very interesting.

It's one of those episodes where nothing much happens but I quite liked it.

X:6 The Beginning

The Dwarfers are threatened by a Simulant Death Ship, after a rogue droid brings a map stolen from them aboard Red Dwarf. This is actually a really, really good one - it has a proper plot focus, it has some inspired, hilarious ideas and it has a general vibe and feel close to classic Red Dwarf.

It also makes excellent use of Rimmer's back story.

The plot hints at the unexplained question about what happened to the ship and the rest of the crew following the conclusion of Red Dwarf VIIII, but it doesn't actually answer it.

There's a scene in which we see young Rimmer attending a lecture at Io Polytechnic - a very 20th century looking lecture theatre setting, despite being set on one of Jupiter's moons. Back in the late '80s around the time of the first series Chris Barrie could have played young Rimmer himself, but since he was 52 when this was made, someone else portrays the juvenile Arnold.

Normally I'm not a fan of other actors playing a younger version of a character when we know what they would have looked like. There's a scene in Space Cowboys where a younger actor portrays the Clint Eastwood character in a flashback scene, and since everyone knows what Clint looked like in his 20s, it doesn't work. However the lad who plays Rimmer in this episode gets Rimmer's manner and personality spot on.

I wonder if this episode was titled The Beginning with the thought in mind that it might be the Very Last Red Dwarf Episode of All? The very first one was called The End. I honestly think this one stands comparison to some of the better classic period episodes so it would have been a fitting way to bow out.

In any case, it wasn't the last one. Red Dwarf would return four years later. Or from my point of view, tomorrow.

XI:1 Twentica

It's September 2016 already and here comes Red Dwarf XI on Dave. Lister looks a bit podgier. Rimmer looks a bit older. The cat looks pretty much the same. I think Kryten might have put on a few pounds.

This one is set initially on Starbug, reminiscent of Red Dwarf VI. But we do end up on Red Dwarf at the episode's conclusion.

The Dwarfers encounter a race of simulants called Expanoids. Or Exponoids. They are an unapologetic homage to the Borg and actually the basic plot idea is stolen from Star Trek: First Contact. The four Dwarfers travel to Earth's past, to a timeline which has been altered by the Expanoids (or Exponoids) so that any and all technology is banned.

It's a solid episode really. It does have some good jokes. It does also have some weak jokes, and some obvious jokes with punchlines you can see coming half a light year off.

But it's an imaginative and coherent idea. Not bad at all.

XI:2 Samsara

Similar to the first one in that it's a coherent, decent idea. Quite clever. But the jokes are a bit weak.

Lots of old Red Dwarf tropes in this one. The Dwarfers find an escape pod. They have a look round an old spaceship with a dead crew. And in one respect this episode reruns Marooned, with Lister and the cat being stuck with each other in one of the chambers on the ship. But I found the dialogue unfunny to the point of being painful.

On the other hand there's a nice scene that recalls the halcyon days of the first couple of series, with Rimmer and Lister arguing in their bunks. Why Lister and Rimmer choose to bunk together in the same cabin on an empty ship designed for 100+ crew when they get on each other's nerves so much is beyond me, but it does make for excellent comedy.

On the whole - nice ideas. A concept worthy of a Red Dwarf IV episode. Lister and Rimmer in advanced middle age take a bit of getting used to. By this time Craig Charles has a slightly gruff, phlegmy voice reminiscent of a northern stand-up comic from the '70s although to be fair he sounds fine on 6 Music. Maybe he was drinking a lot at the time. But I'm glad they kept Red Dwarf going well into the 21st century.

XI:3 Give and Take

Probably the best half-hour episode since the sixth series, possibly the fifth.

The boys find an abandoned space station. The crew are all dead. I don't know how many times Red Dwarf has used this premise now but in this case I don't really care, because a rich vein of comedy and ideas is mined here. To be fair since it's three million years in the future, you sort of expect people to be dead.

Anyway they hope to find some technology and supplies as usual but instead they find a robot whom they believe to be a highly advanced medicomputer, but is really a snack dispenser. And a deranged, psychotic droid who removes Lister's kidneys. A hint of proper sci-fi horror.

Lister attempts to persuade the cat, the most selfish creature he knows, to give him one of his.

The plot is clever, involving a time loop. Yes, yet again, but it's all tied together beautifully. It's very funny. I especially loved Rimmer's interaction with a talking lift (I love the way the vending machines, lifts and other mundane appliances have personalities in the later episodes). And it's nice to see the cat being woven into the plot instead of just being around for dumb one-liners.

There's a joke about FIFA which would have been topical in 2016 but hasn't aged brilliantly, seven years later. Why it might work three million years from now I'm not sure.

The space station scenes seemed to have been filmed in an old industrial setting, maybe a power station including a huge control room. Really effective. I checked, It was a power station, and the control room where some of the scenes were shot is only just being demolished now:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-64718777

.. it was also used for scenes in Rollerball in 1975.

Very, very good.

XI:4 Officer Rimmer

Another really, really good one! I thought the Dave episodes were going to be a chore; instead they've been a delight.

The Starbug navicomp detects an unmanned exploration vessel, called Nautilus. It's drifting into an asteroid storm, so its ship's computer begins creating crew members to take charge using a "bio printer". This is absolutely hilarious; a huge appliance that looks like an ink-jet printer, out of which humans appear, legs-first. The printer spits out a slightly deformed Space Corps officer called Captain Herring.

After a massive stroke of fortune, the captain decides to promote Rimmer to an officer. Rimmer's behaviour as an officer is as self-aggrandising, self-centered and pompous as you might imagine. And he uses the bio printer to create a few dozen other Rimmers, from his own DNA.

This is right up there with peak Red Dwarf. Some really original, hilarious ideas in this one and Rimmer especially is a joy.

Of course there are a few ideas being recycled here - multiple Rimmers especially (see Rimmerworld and Me²).

I will say though that it's not clear why a bio-printed Space Corps captain might have the authority to promote someone to an officer, and in any case Rimmer is supposed to be a second technician in the Jupiter Mining Corps, not the Space Corps. More importantly it's three million years in the future, and why would any rank apply in those circumstances anyway?

Nitpicks aside: very clever, very sharp, very funny.

XI:5 Krysis

Kryten's having a mid-life crisis. Mechanoids are designed to last about six million years, and he's about half-way through.

In an attempt to help him feel better, Lister comes up with the idea of searching for another ship similar to the Nova 5 (where Kryten was originally found, see Kryten from Red Dwarf III).

When they find one (the Nova 3), with an older model mechanoid (a Series 3000) that's survived its crew, the hope is that meeting an inferior equivalent will help Kryten feel a bit better about himself. Unfortunately the Series 3000 turns out to be considerably more sophisticated and accomplished than Kryten.

Later, the boys get to speak to Consciousness of The Universe itself.

In the Red Dwarf VI episode Out of Time, Series 3000 droids are said to look like humans (this one looks like a lot like Kryten). So there's yet another inconsistency in the canon.

Again it's clever. It's imaginative. It's funny. It's coherent (although the plot isn't brilliantly thought out. It would have been better if they'd come across the Nova 3 by chance). I don't think it's the best Red Dwarf XI episode but it's a good one.

XI:6 Can of Worms

The Dwarfers acquire a personality altering device. Rimmer, initially keen to have his personality enhanced, declines once it transpires that it uses lasers and needles. I had a real problem with this - how could that possibly work on a hologram?

Later, we find that the cat is a virgin. This does have a bearing on the rest of the plot.

The boys attempt to rescue a prisoner from a ship captained by a droid about to enter a black hole. She's a cat! Felis Sapiens, the same super-evolved humanoid species as the cat. Or is she?

No, she's a polymorph (see various earlier Red Dwarf episodes, notably Polymorph and Emohawk:Polymorph II). So Lister has his emotions removed temporarily by the personality altering machine, so he can go after it. His subsequent persona is very reminiscent of his behaviour after his fear is removed by a polymorph in, er Polymorph.

This one isn't bad at all. There are some clever ideas and some real funny moments. The woman who plays the female cat is adorable - she gets all the mannerisms and behaviour spot on.

But - the plot is a bit cluttered. It does have some flaws. The cat's behaviour when he overcomes the infant polymorphs he's given birth to (yep). It's not really in his character, and it's a weak solution to the main problem of the plot. Similarly, Lister manages to overcome the droid very cleverly. But he's supposed to be a second-class technician, not Space Corps special forces.

That was the last instalment of Red Dwarf XI. It's not at all bad, but it's not one of the best of this series.

XII:1 Cured

The fans didn't have to wait long for Red Dwarf XII, which was filmed shortly after XI.

This first one was originally shown in October 2017. The boys find a research centre where a cure for evil has been tested on clones of Hitler, Vlad the Impaler and others - created from DNA generated from their descendents. Then they get drugged, and placed in elaborate, tortuous traps.

They guy who plays a young Hitler is brilliant - effete and slightly creepy with a cod-German accent. Really a very funny performance.

The conclusion is a bit abrupt, and easy.

It's a typical sort of Red Dwarf idea. It's not bad really but I didn't find it particularly funny, apart from Adolf.

A bit of a disappointing start to the new series.

XII:2 Siliconia

Wow. One of the best Red Dwarf episodes ever!

The boys venture out in Starbug to retrieve Lister's Les Paul, which - having been flushed into space a year earlier - has been picked up on the ship's tracking system. But just as they're about to retrieve it, they're captured by MILF - the Mechanoid Intergalactic Liberation Front.

So Kryten is "liberated" and the other three are transformed into mechanoids. I must say, Chris Barrie's impersonation of Kryten (in effect) once Rimmer has been mechanoidised is spot on. Very funny. Danny John Jules gets it right as well. Craig Charles - not so much.

I wonder if the grabber emerging from the lower section of Starbug to grab Lister's Les Paul is an homage to Gerry Anderson? I'm sure there are similar scenes involving Thunderbird 2 in Thunderbirds.

It's a coherent, clever plot idea. The dialogue is sharp. It's very, very funny. There are some nostalgic nods to classic Red Dwarf. I'd say it's up there with the top quarter of the old BBC episodes.

Whatever it was that Red Dwarf lost when Rob Grant bailed out, it had definitely got back by the last couple of series.

Wonderful.

XII:3 Timewave

I approached this one carefully - perhaps even with a degree of trepidation - because it has a poor reputation in the fan community.

But I didn't think it was that bad. Certainly it's not a particularly good one, but it's not a stinker.

The boys visit a moon rich in Helium-7, so that it can be claimed for the JMC (this seems to be Rimmer's idea mainly, as he hopes it'll make him rich one day). But they have to leave abruptly due to an incoming solar storm.

Shortly afterwards, they experience a "timewave" - the consequence of a nearby imploding black hole - and detect another ship that's been washed up by it, from the 24th century. The other ship (the Enconimum) is on a collision course with the moon so they board it. It turns out that criticism has been made illegal there.

The consequence of this appears to be that the crew are massively camp - the anti-crit police, led by Johnny Vegas no less - wear ridiculous pink uniforms and the ship's captain is in some sort of weird panto dress. The guy who plays him does put in a very energetic, flamboyant performance I must admit but it's just bizarre more than anything else.

Well - it's not particularly funny. Some of the plot ideas seem a bit pointless or throwaway. It's not massively incoherent. I don't hate it as much as some folks seem to. But I'm very lukewarm about it.

One thing that annoyed me was that early on, Rimmer refers to an "unknown galaxy in the outer reaches of the solar system", which makes as much sense as "an unknown continent in the corner of my bathroom". I suspect he mangled his lines and they didn't bother to fix it.

That notion of Lister being the Last Human certainly takes a few hits in the later episodes, doesn't it? And why does everyone / everything they encounter three million years from now seem to be from the 23rd or 24th centuries?

XII:4 Mechocracy

The various vending machines, lifts and other equipment aboard Red Dwarf go on strike, because - as becomes obvious when the Dwarfers have to evacuate the ship in a hurry, and they intend to leave them behind - no-one is looking out for their interests.

The solution to this is to hold an election for one of the crew to represent them. A sort of "president" to promote their interests. Rimmer and Kryten compete for the role.

So - the episode turns into a full on parody / satire of election campaigns, complete with attack ads, election posters and a smear campaign. There are even gags about abortion and immigration policy, using thinly veiled metaphors of course.

While I've really enjoyed the vending machines / lifts / etc with personalities in these later episodes, this one just goes a bit too far for me. It's almost like kids' telly. It's too whimsical. However - it is actually very funny. And there's a wonderful nod to the past when Talkie Toaster (see Camille) gets involved, with Craig Charles performing an homage to a Red Dwarf scene from the early '90s. I do believe they used the very same voice actor, as well (David Ross).

There's also a subplot about the cat needing specs that's a bit meh.

A bit too daft. But enjoyable.

XII:5 M-Corp

This gets off to a superb start with some wonderfully funny moments and pin-sharp dialogue, but - it collapses into a plot that doesn't seem to make much sense.

The boys perform a software update on the ship's systems and suddenly find that the Jupiter Mining Corporation is owned by a massive corporate entity called M-Corp. It further transpires that M-Corp purchased Earth in the 26th century.

The M-Corp systems start to take over the ship. New stuff arrives, beamed aboard automatically Star-Trek-style. Then Lister becomes unable to see objects that aren't owned by M-Corp, and trapped in some sort of virtual world.

How all this is happening three million years into the future is not explained. And later, we're expected to believe that Lister's brain has been compromised by malicious software, which I just found stupid.

The solution to all this is facile and makes no sense but by then I'd stopped caring. And finally, due to a highly unfortunate plot device we're supposed to accept that from this point on, Lister's memories after the age of 23 are based on CCTV footage.

There is a beautiful, heartwarming homage to the very first Red Dwarf episode at the end but it's not enough to rescue what is possibly the worst Dave era episode. I only qualify that because I haven't seen the last two yet.

XII:6 Skipper

And so we come to the finale of the last, or at least the most recent, series of Red Dwarf. Just the 2020 90 minute special left now.

The cat and Lister find Captain Hollister's old personnel files, in which he derides Rimmer as never being likely to amount to anything. Later, a disruption in the spacetime continuum causes consequences from alternate universes, connected to decisions not taken in the present universe to occur. So when they decide not to do something, it happens. It sounds bizarre but it's a useful vehicle for some classic Red Dwarf comedy in the time-honoured manner.

However this plot element fizzles out to be replaced by a tenuously related idea, in which Rimmer decides to dimension-jump into alternate universes, in search of a world where he isn't a complete loser and failure. Again some absolutely brilliant comedy ensues from this, and delightfully, in one of them, Rimmer finds himself back on Red Dwarf before the drive plate accident - in his old uniform, and with the crew still alive. Why exactly he's a hologram in this universe is not explained, because he isn't in one of the others. Even more nostalgically, Norman Lovett returns to play Holly. But while I can accept Rimmer looking nearly 30 years older, Holly doesn't quite look right. Maybe they should have used a heavily pixellated Holly like they did in the first series. Maybe they could even have reused the old footage and made the words fit using AI. Or something.

The various different Listers in the other universe, very different in character from the familiar Lister, are brilliantly done.

One thing that bothered me, though. It's implied that Rimmer is necessarily a failure in every possible universe, but we know that's not true. There's at least one in which he's modest, highly accomplished, dashing, charismatic, selfless and brave. What a guy. But it seems that Ace Rimmer has been discreetly airbrushed from the Dave canon.

It's not perfect, but overall it's a joy.

The Promised Land

In April 2020, two years and five months after the last episode of XII was first shown, Red Dwarf returned for a 90 minute feature-length piece - the most recent instalment to date, and possibly the last ever.

I did have a suspicion that stretching an idea to 90 minutes might be a bit ambitious, but the story Doug Naylor came up with here completely justifies the feature length treatment.

The crew find a Holly backup disk in the hold (this is a brilliant visual gag - it's a 6 foot floppy disk). But of course, having been restarted from his original startup file, Holly doesn't recognise Kryten or the cat, he's aware that Lister is supposed to be in stasis. Rimmer is a hologram of course.

So, on the basis that the ship has essentially been abandoned, Holly decides to follow his programming and decommission it. So the Dwarfers flee in Starbug.

Not long afterwards, they meet a three members of Felis Sapiens (the same species as the cat) aboard a derelict. As established long ago in the first series, they worship Lister as their god.

I think my only real problem with this one is that the cat barely reacts to this. It's the first time he's seen other members of his own species for decades, and two of them are women! But it doesn't seem to register.

Overall - it's a joy, and a fitting end to the whole shebang. It's clever, imaginative, engaging and very funny. And there's even a bit of pathos, and some sentimental, touching dialogue between Lister and Rimmer when the hologram has a bit of an existential crisis.

It strikes a nice balance between a sitcom, with audience reaction present - and a feature film, with an appropriate cinematic soundtrack. It's the best of both worlds.

And here endeth my one episode per-day Dwarfathon that I embarked upon on January 1st. It's been a blast.