S05E03 Terrorform
"You must be the unspeakable one. Just to fill you in, there's been a gigantic administrative cock-up."
This one's really close to being great. The opening scene with Kryten wrecked on the moon is brilliant - establishes some proper tension but is also laugh-out-loud funny. "My short term memory is damaged. This, combined with the damage to my short term memory, has left me disoriented." Plus, "I think it's a taranshula."
The psi-moon makes virtually no sense, even by the show's internal logic, but luckily all the logic issues are blasted through in one Exposition-Bot scene. "Of course, it's a psi-moon!", we learn, and also that Rimmer is inexplicably solid while here. Fine. Total bullshit but it's a great idea, albeit one that's been done before by every work of genre fiction ever to exist.
The costumes and effects are fantastic, the kind of low-budget high-ambition stuff Red Dwarf does a lot of. The shadow people look like shit (and there's even a joke about it), but they're very memorable, and the self-loathing monster's cheap puppet shadow on the wall is somehow more disturbing than any amount of high quality CGI could ever be.
Then we get to the ending scenes. It's another example of the post-series 2 group dynamic that I'm not a fan of - everyone shitting on Rimmer while he meekly sits there looking sad. Again, the original dynamic had Lister and Rimmer pitted against each other as equals, each of them able to give as good as they got, and each very slowly warming up to the other. Now it's everyone ganging up on Rimmer, who never defends himself, and also the friendship the characters had by series 2 is gone, so it's just vitriol with nothing else to it (unless you choose to read Lister very charitably in the final scenes of this episode). The "no" at the end is crap and undermines anything the episode might have been going for.
There'd be a big danger of the ending being too saccharine or cloying without some kind of cynical joke to ground it, I know, but the writers set up the potential for a proper sincere character moment, the type of which we've not really had since the second series, and then they just abandon it. The moments in the first two series, especially series two, where the characters were allowed to express real emotion and sincerity are some of the best - the observation dome scenes from Better Than Life and Thanks for the Memory, for example. In fact, the entirety of Thanks For The Memory (best episode ever). It's pointless to complain, anyway - the show has been drifting away from that for two and a half series at this point, and Rob and Doug clearly have different goals for the show here than they did back then.
It's a good episode overall, anyway, even if I wish the ending had been a lot better than it is. It's another win for the "bring the horror sci-fi to the foreground and let the comedy breathe a little" approach. Like with The Inquisitor, there's a few less jokes than usual, and the ones that are in the script come mainly from the sci-fi.
Misc notes: Starbug has tank treads, which is fucking cool and makes sense (unlike the cloaking device from Backwards). Lister says "set bazookoids to kill", which is either him referencing Star Trek (almost 100% the case), or the show confirming that bazookoids have a stun setting. This has no bearing on anything, but stood out to me for some reason.
Trivia fans: there's another instance of Cat calling someone by their name here. When Kryten suggests leaving Starbug and proceeding on foot, Cat exclaims "out into Rimmer's subconscious?!"
Imagine being one of the actors hired to circle Chris Barrie's nipples with your finger.
