Alright, probably good to go now. Here we go:
S06E01 Psirens
The entire concept for this one is a complete "what the fucking hell is this" sort of affair. So, there are aliens GELFs who need to eat people's brains to survive. This is taking place 3 million years into deep space where, as we keep hearing, there is only one human left alive, Lister. But maybe not, because there's a video message from a guy who gets killed by Psirens. This is pretty monumental, isn't it? After all this time, it turns out that not only do humans still exist, but they're spacefaring, and a ship full of them passed near where we currently are fairly recently. Totally unremarked upon by the crew.
Do people pass through here often? If not, how have the Psirens survived this long without a constant food source?
When you get past the usual logic disasters, the Psirens are very similar to the Polymorph, with a bit of Camille sprinkled in. It's already been done. To the episode's credit, it does get a couple of good new jokes out of the shapeshifting alien concept - mostly with the scene where Lister and the Psiren both try to prove they're the real Lister.
The starting scene is pretty odd, it's almost like it's been made for people who've never seen any of the show before and need to catch up fast. We get a weird scene during which Kryten esesntially reintroduces Lister to the audience, and Rimmer then gets his own little intro sequence where he's booted from Starbug's computer. Cat gets a couple of introductory lines too, including one from Kryten about how his "superior senses" or something qualify him to be Starbug's pilot. Wonder what the intention was with all this. We also learn that Red Dwarf, the ship, is gone. Getting rid of Red Dwarf and stranding the crew on Starbug is an idea that's potentially exciting in theory, but I don't recall it ever really being used as much of a storytelling device. Almost every episode of Series 6 could just as easily take place aboard the main ship.
The explanation of what happened to Red Dwarf is fucking weird as well. Rimmer says that Lister forgot where he parked it - an explanation that's pretty funny and that I'm sure everyone would go along with - but then Kryten has a strange bit about how Red Dwarf was "stolen from us" by an unknown party, and that Starbug is finally closing in on them after 200 years. What? Does this even come up again? If the answer to this question is very obvious, forgive me, I haven't seen Series 6 in a long time, but I don't remember this plot thread going anywhere.
Virtually no mention of Holly. The explanation given is that Holly is aboard Red Dwarf and has thus been taken, but this is complete bullshit because we've seen Holly transfer to Starbug several times (Backwards, to name one off the top of my head).
People have mentioned in this thread how Series VI feels more one-liner oriented, and it's true. Almost every single line is either a joke or a convoluted setup to a joke. I don't like it at all honestly, it makes everything feel very unnatural and the characters have little room to just exist on the screen in the way they did in earlier series, since everything they say is either awkward exposition, awkward joke setup, or a punchline. Unfunny catchphrases galore, too - "smug mode/lie mode", "we're deader than ____", etc. A lot of lines are just interchangeable between characters at this point. You could swap like half the dialogue from one character to any other character and the episode would run along pretty much unaffected, with the possible exception of Kryten's omniscient exposition lines. Having said that, though, even some of the magic-all-knowing-exposition talk was given to Lister and Rimmer this time around.
Another thing I noticed is that the crew are weirdly hyper-competent. It's offset by the occasional joke where someone fucks up in a big way, but just watch the scene from the end of the debriefing to the point where they find the video message from the guy. Cat and Lister are expert pilots, Rimmer is a competent navigator and acts as a first officer and technician ("we're not going another step until we find out what brought those ships down", then expertly operating the scouter drone), and Kryten knows literally everything about everything. Plus, Lister acts like a Starfleet science officer half the time, explaining to everyone what Psirens are and how they work. It's a far cry from the earliest episodes where they were trapped aboard a huge, empty ship full of industrial machinery and incomprehensible computers that they had basically no idea how to operate, and had to rely entirely on the whims of Holly.
So overall, the episode didn't impress me too much. As with a lot of Series 6 episodes, I remembered the overall plot pretty clearly and a few select lines ("tune into Sanity FM" is a great one), so I already knew more or less everything in advance. Still it's not up to much. The Psiren's shapeshifting abilities aren't used in clever or funny ways (the only exception being when the final Psiren appeared as the doctor who created Kryten), mostly just LOL SEX jokes and an excuse to get Clare Grogan in for 5 seconds to remind you that this is still theoretically meant to be the same show it started out as. It's impossible to get interested in the Psirens as a concept in the way you could with better concepts like the Inquisitor or the Justice ship or whatever, because the Psirens don't make sense, they shouldn't exist, and there's nothing to them beyond being hostile insect things that want to kill you. The one-liner model does produce some good jokes but on the whole it feels sort of suffocating, and seems to produce as many cringeworthy dud jokes as it does shit-hot ones.
