S10E05 Dear Dave
Lister's missing humanity, and tormenting himself by reading an old magazine. "I'm just looking at some old pictures of them. Look, there's them going to work".
Perhaps controversially, I think this is something of a mistake. Part of Series X's success thus far has been due to it having the courage to willfully abandon Red Dwarf's original premise, and switch it for "we're looking for Kochanski while having space adventures". The crew haven't really been trapped in deep space ever since Stasis Leak gave them an easy and reliable way to return to the past, and it's only been compounded many times over since then - the photos in Timeslides, the Timedrive, etc, not to mention the countless trips to populated areas and/or meetings with other sapient life (Backwards, Camille, Dimension Jump, Meltdown, Holoship, almost every episode of Series 6, and so on). Every time the show's tried to harken back to the original premise, where Lister and Rimmer truly were trapped alone in an empty universe, it's felt totally insincere to me, the show trying to have its cake and eat it too.
And this is no exception. Lister just met tons of people not long ago in Lemons, not to mention characters like Edgington and Howard Rimmer. Series X's best decision was to make him a willing, if reluctant, space nomad. Having him be depressed again just feels cheap at this point. If he's missing humanity that much, he can give up looking for Kochanski and use the timedrive to head home. Hell, he can even use the timedrive to go on a short holiday to any period and any place he wants, and then just hop back. Problem solved. The Kochanski excuse has worked very well for Series X so far* and it's a big misstep to try and claim the crew are still here against their will at this point.
*for example. in Lemons, Cat suggests they could stay on Earth and Lister instantly dismisses it by saying "nah, we have to get back to the Dwarf and find Kochanski," and everyone else seems to agree. It gives us a very easy and widely applicable excuse to the eternal "why don't they just stay here/go back to the past/etc" question, and works with Series X's breezier and more lighthearted tone.
I started singing "Nothing Compares 2 U" about half a second before Lister did. I'm on Doug's wavelength. Horrifying.
Enter plot thread #2: Lister goes to chat with one of the AI vending machines to cheer himself up. It's got a rather creepy stalker-y crush on him.
Enter plot thread #3: We cut to Rimmer. Kryten arrives with news: the JMC onboard computer is penalising Rimmer for not reporting for duty in over 3 million years, and he's got 24 hours to present a rebuttal or he'll be demoted to Third Technician, putting him on par with Lister. This whole scene is great, and it's followed by another pretty good scene where Rimmer tries to cheer Lister up in his usual bullheaded way. Scene tapers off into talk about "moves", which is less fun than the first half of the scene.
Lister heads off to talk to another vending machine, one with a French accent. It accuses Lister of flirting and "PUTTING YOUR 'AND ON MY LOGO". Got a laugh out of this scene, not least thanks to the voice actor's delivery of the word "logo". LOH-GOH. There's a weird instinctive "oh god no" reaction whenever the AI vending machines show up - maybe due to Only The Good, maybe due to the Taiwan Tony shit, I don't know - but they've been a thing since the first series and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be brought back as long as Doug can think of some good material for them, ie. not Taiwan Tony.
Enter plot thread #4: Kryten's devised a plan to help Rimmer - bribe the computer by requisitioning all the toilet paper on the ship. Don't really get it, but let's move on.
Cat's "bad news" scene is a laugh. "WHAT? BLACK HOLE. WE'RE BEING SUCKED INTO A BLACK HOLE." Enter plot thread #5: A mail pod's arrived. This plot is exciting on the face of it, since there really should have been more mail pods arriving ever since they were introduced in Better Than Life. There's so many story ideas you could get out of this, and this episode has a fantastic one conceptually - Hayley Summers, someone Lister used to go out with, writes to tell him that she's pregnant, and the baby is either his or some guy called Roy's. The letter competition between Rimmer and Lister is brilliant, it's exactly the kind of pointless shit you'd come up with after years alone in deep space. "It's a parking fine. Still something to read, addressed to me."
The idea here has me really really enthusiastic - there's a lot of emotion for a skilled writer to tap into with this kind of storyline. It makes sense that, after Red Dwarf was declared lost, relatives of the crew might continue to send letters to the ship in the hopes that someone survived, or even just for catharsis. You could get so much out of this - imagine an episode where, I dunno, Lister receives a steady stream of letters from Lise Yates which she continued to write long into her old age, believing that Lister was still alive and would receive them one day. Or perhaps Rimmer's brothers writing to him. Or even something crazy like one of them has a great grandniece/nephew who becomes obsessed with the historic Red Dwarf disaster centuries after it happened, and decides to send some kind of tracker with a message to the ship. Or some kind of anti-JMC activists who uncover the truth that there was a crewmember stuck in stasis when the ship was declared lost, and send some kind of aid package. Endless possibilities, and the pregnancy idea here is an absolutely superb one, and faces Lister with the prospect of having three million years' worth of descendants.
Hayley may have written a follow-up letter detailing the results of the baby's DNA test, so Lister enlists Rimmer's help to sift through the mountain of mail to find it. Meanwhile, the stalker vending machine is pissed at Lister for talking to the French vending machine, and drama ensues.
Kryten's removed all the toilet paper from the ship and given it to the medibot, which refused the bribe or something, I honestly lost the plot a bit here. Anyway, Rimmer's new hope is to prove that he's Lister's caretaker - for this, he'll need to prove that Lister is clinically insane.
Scene where Kryten tries to convince Lister to live in the present rather than hanging onto a world that no longer exists. I definitely appreciate what Doug's trying to do with a lot of this episode, but as mentioned at the start, IMO we're way too late in the game for any "Lister misses Earth" stuff. Nonetheless, the scene, taken in isolation, is a good one. Lister decides to apologise to the stalker vending machine, and grants it its ultimate wish - to be moved around the corner of the corridor. He accidentally knocks it over, and tries to pick it up, and it looks like he's humping it. Rimmer walks over and excitedly notes down "humps vending machines" as proof of Lister's insanity. Meanwhile, Cat has walked three miles with shit stuck up his arse due to the toilet paper shortage. Yep. Lot going on here.
Anyway, Cat's found Hayley's next letter. As he prepares to open it, Lister dreams of what his descendants might have achieved, and is sure that, no matter what, Hayley would have been a fantastic mother. He opens it - "what an absolute slag."
Well. As with Entangled, there's just way too much going on. There's another heroic attempt to tie all the plot threads together into one big conclusion, but it doesn't really work. The best plot here by far is Lister's letter, and everything else feels like it's detracting from that. Not a huge fan of the vending machine stuff. Rimmer's demotion feels like it could have worked nicely as its own episode, if Doug could come up with something better than "Kryten's removed all the toilet paper". Everything just turns into a frantic muddled mess, and the plots aren't really tonally consistent with each other, so we get Lister's hope that he had a descendant mixed together with Cat walking around with shit stuck to his hole.
You can see the outline of a really good episode here as you watch, but it's just zipping between too many different things and no plotline gets the focus it deserves. As with much of Series X, the joke rate is high and the joke hit rate is fairly solid, so at least the episode can be fun even as it's baffling you with vending machine humping.
If I had to really praise the episode for something, I'd praise it for having no sci-fi plot. Considering that we've been stuck in "monster/anomaly/planet of the week" mode for such a long time, it's courageous to have an episode where absolutely nothing happens other than the characters wandering around talking to each other. Even Duct Soup, which appealed for similar reasons, had the ventilation system posing a lethal threat. Here, it's just the crew milling around dealing with relatively low-stakes stuff, very similar to Series 1 (albeit wildly different in tone and themes).
Also, I actually like the "what an absolute slag" punchline, just for the idea that after all the excitement and drama, it all came to nothing. I also like that the joke is clearly on Lister rather than Hayley - she was sound enough to admit her affair up-front in the letters, and Lister was characteristically forgiving and magnanimous right up until the instant his hopes were dashed, at which point he instantly reverted to nasty childish whinging. It's another reversal joke of the kind Doug writes a lot of (character says something firmly and assuredly then contradicts themselves in the very next line) but I thought it was funny, and a reminder that Lister's not always as mature and worldly as he aspires to be.
The JMC computer passing judgement on Rimmer is an interesting plot device. This is the kind of thing Holly would have been good for if the original S1/2 style had contined - while he's mostly benevolent and mate-y, he's also ultimately a sociopathic AI who won't hesitate to torment and fuck with the crew (a la Queeg), and he was built and programmed by JMC, a corporation which is strongly implied to be amoral or even downright evil. Having this big unseen JMC computer is a way to sort of return that unsettling and threatening presence to the show, though again, there's so much happening here that the plot doesn't get the treatment it deserves.
So, overall, plenty to like but it doesn't come together. It almost feels like Doug wasn't anywhere near as interested in the mail plot as I think most viewers will be, so he saw fit to supplement it with a lot of zany goings-on to fill out the runtime.
