Red Dwarf rewatch

[Replies From View]

I like Twentica.  The only thing that annoys me is that when he's beamed back to Starbug Rimmer doesn't looked dishevelled after several hours of being roughed up.


It's tonally closer to series 6 than we've been for a while, and it looks great - somehow less cheap than series 10.  The model shot of Starbug's crash is really good - probably the best since series 6 as well.  Joke-wise there's some great stuff throughout, and a lot of the character stuff lands.  Yeah the pacing is a bit off, but it's because a lot is crammed into half an hour.  And it's a relief that we are now back to episodes that don't have really obvious B and C plots that are magically reincorporated in the final two minutes of the story to resolve everything.



Oh and Rimmer using 'whom' incorrectly is an irritation, but the joke is that he's not as clever as he thinks he is and he's over-reaching, so that's okay.

[Mobbd]

But overall, it's a total mess dramatically and not very funny, with a lot of agonisingly cringeworthy jokes. Bad start to the series, but I expected as such, so let's forge ahead.

Oh and Rimmer using 'whom' incorrectly is an irritation, but the joke is that he's not as clever as he thinks he is and he's over-reaching, so that's okay.

Oh dear. I remember thinking of Twentica as being an incredible step up from Series X, leaving the horrific memories of VIII long in the past. I fear Lemming is right though. Their review, combined with all the chat here about versions of Kochanski and "Finding Kochanski" is leaving me for the first time wishing that Red Dwarf would just fuck off and die.

It's not easy for me to say this. I really am a big fan and there was a time (circa 2000 or so) when I had every piece of merch including different versions of the same thing and all that.

Hard to believe I'm saying this, but the only way I can see myself wanting more Red Dwarf is... total reboot. Netfllix series based on Infinity and BTL with a new cast and new writers, eventually drifting onto its own course when it runs out of book to be based on.

I'm just so tired of giving shite a pass.

[JamesTC]

Bah, you're no better than 18 of 241.

Twentica is a great action packed opener. While Give & Take is by far the better episode, it makes perfect sense to open the new run with the huge set piece episode.

If Doug didn't write it shorty after watching Star Trek VIII then I'd be very surprised.

[McDead]

Expanoids, not Extranoids. Sorry, lemming.


I like this episode a lot less than anything in series X. Red Dwarf is at its worse when it's ultra glossy, imo. More chatting in corridors and bunk rooms, please!

[Captain Z]

Enjoyed Kevin Eldonoid in this one.

[Replies From View]

Rewatching the We're Smegged documentary, it's alarming how many of the issues of series 10 stemmed from a lack of time from a writing point of view, and panicking because he had to write and direct at the same time in a rush.  When your main thing in life is the writing of Red Dwarf, how can you not have a back up of story ideas built up over the last 12 years (the amount of time since the last full series)?  It's just unfathomable to me that he would need money as an incentive to even sit down and start writing six episodes, rather than already have an archive of story outlines and scraps of dialogue in a drawer waiting to be put into use.  It's the one thing going on your gravestone, mate.  Do it in your spare time, and then when you're paid to 'write' them you can use that time doing something else.

[Replies From View]

Also, is it me or is Production Designer Michael Ralph's head lodged dangerously far up his own arse?  He immediately describes painting the walls of the sleeping quarters red with the self-reverence of someone who's composed and staged their own ten hour opera, and he only gets worse from there.

[BeardFaceMan]

Rewatching the We're Smegged documentary, it's alarming how many of the issues of series 10 stemmed from a lack of time from a writing point of view, and panicking because he had to write and direct at the same time in a rush.  When your main thing in life is the writing of Red Dwarf, how can you not have a back up of story ideas built up over the last 12 years (the amount of time since the last full series)?  It's just unfathomable to me that he would need money as an incentive to even sit down and start writing six episodes, rather than already have an archive of story outlines and scraps of dialogue in a drawer waiting to be put into use.  It's the one thing going on your gravestone, mate.  Do it in your spare time, and then when you're paid to 'write' them you can use that time doing something else.

Yeah I just had a go at watching that doc and fuck me, what is wrong with Doug? He didn't want to start writing until all the cast had signed on? Again, it's all he has going on, you'd think he would be doing it anyway and then he'd have a script ready for the cast to read when they did sign on. I'm sorry, but how anyone can watch this and say he's not a bad writer is beyond me. Was he really just rewriting a movie script for a decade and not thinking about anything else at all?

[St_Eddie]

I really like series XI and XII on the whole.  I'd say that they're easily the best of the Dave era (not saying much I know, but still...).  It's a shame then that 'Twentica' is such a damp squib to start XI off on.  The model shot of Starbug crashing in the sand is lovely though, as is the 20's street set and I love the actress playing Harmony's performance.  Other than that, it's a middling episode at best.

Also, is it me or is Production Designer Michael Ralph's head lodged dangerously far up his own arse?  He immediately describes painting the walls of the sleeping quarters red with the self-reverence of someone who's composed and staged their own ten hour opera, and he only gets worse from there.

Possibly.  I know this much; I hate the hideous red bunkroom set ("the ship is called Red Dwarf and it is red.  Ooohhh, I know!  Let's make the interior red too!").  Made all the worse for the fact that it's been in service throughout series X, XI, XII and 'The Promised Land'.  I loved it when the aesthetic of the show would change from series to series.  Design a new bunkroom set, for fuck's sake... and preferably make it not look like shit this time.  Ta.

[St_Eddie]

Here's what the current bunkroom looks like...

I just had a quick play around in Photoshop and something like this would work so much better for me...

[JamesTC]

Classic comedy gurn.

[St_Eddie]

Upon the original broadcast, I was convinced that the guy behind Kevin Eldon was James Buckley (Jay from The Inbetweeners) until I read the credits.  Oddly enough, Buckley does actually turn up in an episode of series XI!

[Lemming]

S11E02 Samsara

Really good opening scene with Lister and Rimmer playing "Mineopoly". My favourite parts of the Dave-era are the moments where it feels like the characters are semi-logical extensions of their Series 2 counterparts. Here, in this opening scene, Lister and Rimmer really do feel recognisable in that way. Years of being stuck together have mellowed them both out towards each other, so they're still taking the piss out of each other, but with almost no bite behind it anymore, almost as if they're doing it just out of routine because they both find it amusing. Absolutely love it. As a bonus, the scene is consistently funny, and cleverly sets up the main plot without the viewer even realising (via Rimmer's dice rolls).

Big news: Kryten's found an escape pod, containing two humans! Him and Cat receive a distress call, but it suddenly cuts out, so they bring the pod in for a closer look. Meanwhile, another great Lister-Rimmer scene is going on where Rimmer complains about everything.

Kryten's opened the escape pod, but found only two piles of ash.

RIMMER: They're dead!

CAT: Hey, the medical reports aren't in yet, we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

They've been vaporised. The escape pod's log tells us that these people were Green and Barker, from the SS Samsara, which has crashed on an ocean moon. The gang decide to go diving to check out the ship.

Really effective underwater sequence where Blue Midget descends to the Samsara. Awesome set design for the Samsara, too. The crew come aboard and then we get a flashback to Green and Barker, ~3 millon years ago on board the Samsara.  It's brave to show flashbacks to people we've never met before, giving the episode several relatively lengthy scenes in which the main cast don't feature at all. It's the kind of storytelling device I don't think we've ever seen before in Red Dwarf, and it works, IMO.

The Samsara crew's corpses are strewn about the place in various odd positions, including several corpses in an orgy and the Captain being strangled. The psi-scanner confrims that the crew were instantly fried to death.

Another flashback, in which we learn that Green and Barker - who were having an affair together - found that several of the ship's appliances were malfunctioning for them.

Back in the present, Cat steals money from a SPACE ORPHAN FUND, and wins at a slot machine. Lister returns the winnings, and then gets sucked into a trash compactor by his dreadlocks. Not even kidding when I say this is the hardest I've laughed at Red Dwarf in a good few episodes. Straightforward slapstick but holy shit. Only made better when Cat gets knifed in the foot.

The power cuts out, leaving Lister and Cat stranded in one of the ship's rooms together, while Rimmer and Kryten try to reach them. More of the pairing up technique that Doug used to (IMO) great success in Series 10.

Rimmer and Kryten reach the Karma Drive room. This is, Kryten tells us, based on the same technology as the justice field, from Justice. The Karma Drive can be programmed with any moral values, and then deal out punishments and rewards accordingly, the idea behind this being that it could keep crews in line during long-haul space trips. This is why Green and Barker were getting served shitty food and generally fucked about by the ship - they were punished for their affair.

Samsara begins sinking into the mud on the ocean floor. Rimmer and Kryten realise that the Karma Drive's settings were inverted - immoral behaviour was rewarded while moral behaviour was punished. Rimmer and Kryten restore the ship's power by being nasty to each other, and are able to reach Lister. Kryten kicks the shit out of him while explaining the situation, which is conveyed to us through a final flashback. Barker, a computer scientist, hacked into the Karma Drive to reverse the settings. She'd hoped to do this for just one night to get a break from being constantly punished, but, apparently, it resulted in the deaths of the entire crew. Whoops.

Kryten pieces it together and realises that Green and Barker were killed in the escape pod (after 3 million years of cryosleep) because they tried to warn the Red Dwarf crew about the Karma Drive - a moral act - so it killed them.

Strong episode overall. I like the very lowkey, no-stakes nature of the plot. The only real jeopardy is in the Samsara sinking into the mud, but even that isn't an immediate threat. We get a great Rimmer and Lister scene, some good Lister and Cat scenes, and some decent Rimmer and Kryten bits to fill the episode out. You can see by the relatively concise synopsis I've written that not much actually happens in this episode, the runtime is chiefly dedicated to the crew talking to each other, especially Cat and Lister. It's a welcome change of pace after Twentica's frantic adventure story.

One possible problem, though - why did the crew get vaporised? Their corpses suggest they were acting in a way that the Karma Drive would consider unethical, and therefore they should have been rewarded. Unless it picks up on intent, I guess, in which case it might recognise that their actions were done out of a desire to save themselves and each other, and were therefore moral. But that's me making shit up, the episode doesn't really explain it. Unless it wasn't the Karma Drive - the "quantum motherboard" overloaded, apparently, but surely the indication is that that's connected to the Karma Drive somehow? Or was everyone just too busy being immoral that they couldn't fix this unrelated engineering fault? Who knows.

[rue the polywhirl]

I feel like the first two episodes of Series XI were better made than almost everything in series X but for one reason or another they seem to struggle more for laughs. Twentica invests a bit too much in the prohibition era costume and sets and almost nothing in memorable quips. My first laugh of the episode 20 odd minutes in -

Lister:       You're such a clichéd race, aren't you?
Expanoid: You and I are not so different

There's loads of nice touches and details like Rimmer's jazz hands when he and Lister are trying to blend in as dancers on stage during the police raid and a different scene where Lister is spotted drinking from an Erlenmeyer flask but there is so little that was substantively humourous. It felt like I was watching a really dry, hour-long feature movie. I found it a bit disheartening how much effort the flapper actress was putting in relative to the actual laugh content of her dialogue and of the rest of the show.

Samsara wasn't nearly as much of a slog but again my first laugh was about 20 odd minutes when Kryten starts continually punching Lister right near the very end, and then with the reveal everything starts clicking into gear and the dialogue and interchange become a lot amusing. A really average episode elevated thanks to the final 5 minutes.

[Ornlu]

Series 10 locked & loaded

- Series 1: The End; Future Echoes; Balance of Power; Waiting for God; Confidence and Paranoia; Me2
- Series 2: Kryten; Better Than Life; Thanks for the Memory; Stasis Leak; Queeg; Parallel Universe
- Series 3: Backwards; Marooned; Polymorph; Bodyswap; Timeslides; The Last Day
- Series 4: Camille; DNA; Justice; White Hole; Dimension Jump; Meltdown
- Series 5: Holoship; The Inquisitor; Terrorform; Quarantine; Demons & Angels; Back To Reality
- Series 6: Psirens; Legion; Gunmen of the Apocalypse; Emohawk: Polymorph 2; Rimmerworld; Out of Time
- Series 1-6 Overview
- Series 7: Tikka To Ride; Stoke Me A Clipper; Ouroboros; Duct Soup; Blue; Beyond A Joke; Epideme; Nanarchy
- Thoughts on Series 1-7
- Series 8: Back In The Red (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3); Cassandra; Krytie TV; Pete (Part 1; Part 2); Only The Good...
- Series 9: Back to Earth (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3)
- Series 10: Trojan; Fathers & Suns; Lemons; Entangled; Dear Dave; The Beginning

[Lemming]

Thanks again Ornlu!

There's loads of nice touches and details like Rimmer's jazz hands when he and Lister are trying to blend in as dancers on stage during the police raid and a different scene where Lister is spotted drinking from an Erlenmeyer flask but there is so little that was substantively humourous. It felt like I was watching a really dry, hour-long feature movie. I found it a bit disheartening how much effort the flapper actress was putting in relative to the actual laugh content of her dialogue and of the rest of the show.

I felt the same way, especially about the flapper. Fantastic performance given to some weak material, which is a total shame.

Samsara was definitely not going for laughs 100% of the time, though I found the opening scenes funny, plus Lister and Cat getting mauled by the trash compactor thing, and there were a couple laughs in the scenes where Cat and Lister were trapped. But it felt sort of Series-5-esque, in that it was prepared to let the comedy take a backseat at times for the sake of the plot, which I appreciated after Series X's quickfire nonstop gags model. 

[Replies From View]

The actress who played Pree was in Twentica - did you spot her?

[Replies From View]

Main problem I have with Samsara is the fact that Kryten figures it all out.  Like the way he figures out that Cassandra is lying, it feels like the resolution needs him (or someone) to explain what happened, but the process of reaching the solution isn't entirely organic.

[St_Eddie]

The Samsara crew's corpses are strewn about the place in various odd positions, including several corpses in an orgy

Taken from the scrapped series VIII episode.

Main problem I have with Samsara is the fact that Kryten figures it all out.  Like the way he figures out that Cassandra is lying, it feels like the resolution needs him (or someone) to explain what happened, but the process of reaching the solution isn't entirely organic.

Agreed.  It's extremely lazy and contrived writing; "Kryten figured it out apropos of nothing because we're 25 minutes into a 30 minute plot and need to the story to resolve".

[DrGreggles]

The actress who played Pree was in Twentica - did you spot her?

My main memory of s10 was quite fancying her, which might say a lot about my opinion of s10. And of me...

[JamesTC]

Feel like shit, just want Pree to predict some sex for me.

[DrGreggles]

And, if she doesn't, you'll feel even worse.

[JamesTC]

"I predicted you were going to wank yourself all evening, so I have completed that task for you"
"Thanks Pree"

[neveragain]

Re: Samsara, anyone else find the acting from Green and Barker a bit sub-par(a)?
Love the narrative structure of the episode though.

[JamesTC]

I can't criticise Tiny Andrew Collins Dan Tetsell.

[St_Eddie]

Re: Samsara, anyone else find the acting from Green and Barker a bit sub-par(a)?
Love the narrative structure of the episode though.

Their acting is a bit subpar, but I like that they both look like regular, plump people.  Makes a nice change from the inordinately pretty people you usually see in romantic roles in film and TV.  Also the bloke reminds me of Mike Stoklasa, which is a bonus.

[Replies From View]

Maybe it's not "subpar" - it could just be how plump people act.  The only frame of reference for acting that we have is what inordinately pretty people do.

[Lemming]

Agreed about the Kryten exposition thing. It's an even stranger writing choice to make since there wasn't any need for the crew to learn what had happened on board the Samsara - the viewer already knows thanks to the flashbacks, but leaving it a mystery to the characters could have been fairly effective dramatically.

[St_Eddie]

It doesn't really matter but my suggested recolouring of the series X bunkroom was too pink and it was bothering me.  This is more what I had in mind...

Original

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First attempt at recolouring

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Final

[frajer]

Agreed about the Kryten exposition thing. It's an even stranger writing choice to make since there wasn't any need for the crew to learn what had happened on board the Samsara - the viewer already knows thanks to the flashbacks, but leaving it a mystery to the characters could have been fairly effective dramatically.

I don't normally mind Kryten's "best guess, sir" moments but this one did stick out like a sore thumb as being rather ridiculous that he could piece together the exact scenario from the most minor of info.

Sherlock Kryten finds a messed-up karma drive on a derelict spaceship with dozens dead and deduces two randos in an escape pod were having an affair. He's come a long way from being a bog bot.