S05E06 Back To Reality
"How were we supposed to know that, you Brummie git?"
Starts out with another horror bit, played fairly straight with minimal comedy. The Esperanto setup reminds me a lot of the plot to the Star Trek TNG episode "Night Terrors", made about a year before this. Oddly, Red Dwarf's version might be slightly scarier, especially with the rotting corpses suspended from the ceiling.
The scene where the "Brummie git" berates the crew for fucking up their playthrough of Red Dwarf is the highlight of the episode. I love how steeped in early 90s videogame logic it is - shit like expecting you to know that the Esperanto's lasers can kill the squid, or that Rimmer's swimming certificate has a secret message. It's an on-point pisstake of the Sierra adventure games of the era. Love how the scene ends with the new set of players coming in and physically shoving the crew out of the way to assume their personalities (and score higher than 4%), something really existentially unpleasant about that.
"Billy Doyle. There's a name from the wrong side of the tracks. Billy 'Grannykiller' Doyle."
This isn't my favourite episode of Red Dwarf, and I'm not sure it's even in the top 10, but I see why it often ranks so high in fan polls. The science fiction is clever, the episode revolves around using what we already know about the characters to tailor their suicide-inducing hallucinations to each of them, and the epsiode is just really well put-together as a piece of TV. The cyberpunk fascist dystopia is believably nightmarish and has a strong atmosphere of dread, which is incredible considering it essentially consists entirely of a room, an alleyway set and a parking garage.
The comedy payoff of the car-chase is outstanding, still has me laughing every time. MOTORCYCLES, AND IT LOOKS LIKE THEY'RE CARRYING PERSONAL ROCKET LAUNCHERS. Great moment of catharsis and a genius way to introduce the big plot twist in a way that's funny above all else.
That concludes Series 5. It feels like a new show, in a lot of ways. We generally seem to group Red Dwarf like this:
1. Series 1/2
2. Series 3-6
3. Series 7/8
4. Dave Era
But I'd argue that the show has more distinct incarnations than that. Series 1 and 2 fit together well, but Series 3 doesn't really feel the same as 2 or 4. Series 5, on the other hand, is tonally and thematically very different to everything before it.
I'm not sure I could take more than one series of this kind of thing, but for what it is, these are five great episodes of dark sci-fi/horror, plus Holoship which sticks out a little on its own but is a good enough episode regardless.
