Red Dwarf

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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.

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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.



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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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 shows, I can think of only one episode that I particularly like after this one. And it's the next one.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.