About a month ago I was bored and flipping through Netflix and came upon Red Dwarf. I literally knew nothing about it except that I remembered in the back of my head that it was supposed to be a “good show” based upon the random opinion of the internet. So what the hell, I gave it a try.
I’m now halfway through season 7 (so, ya know, no spoilers past that point please). It’s pretty entertaining.
First, I finally get the feel that MST3K was going for. That really became evident early on and I had no clue that the modeling was really based on it.
But more than that, the theme song really applies. There are many episodes where I think “wow, they really thought this whole concept through,” and just as many where I sing “just repeat to yourself ‘it’s just a show, I should really just relax.’”
It’s especially funny when core concepts change from season to season with barely a word of explanation. Starbug? Oh yeah, we’ve always had that ship the entire time. Totally. Holodecks? Of course. Why not?
Frankly I think the show makes the most sense if you assume that each season (and frankly each show) begins in a similar but alternate universe as the preceding season/episode. It’s the only way to account for the fundemental lack of a consistent theme throughout the show’s history. It’s either that or you throw your hands up and say “well fuck, they’re just making it all up as they go along.” I prefer to think that the show is consistent, you’re just not seeing the same group of people throughout the show.
Anyway; it’s hit and miss but I’ve been enjoying it.
This is a generally accepted theory - perhaps not for every season, and certainly not for every episode, but most people assume the various temporal nonsense the Boys have gotten caught in alters their history pretty often. A common theory, for instance, is that the Inquisitor erased Series 6 Kochanski (or rather, her main-universe equivalent), because she always aspired to more than she had, thus Claire Grogan!Kochanski for the first few seasons, and the Boys erasing the Inquisitor undid that.
You’re currently in the midst of the generally acknowledged low-point for the series (I like series 6 a lot better than most people do, but I can’t argue with the criticisms of series 7, though it does have some good points).
The glory days are series 3-6, when it got into it’s swing. However, when one creator, Doug Grant left at the end of Series 5, it dropped in quality quickly…
I always reckoned it was Grant who wrote the jokes, Naylor who wrote the scifi. A lot of the jokes are repeated season 6 onwards, though personally liked season 8.
I actually read the book first, not knowing there was a TV show out there. One of my favorite books ever. Always go back to it atleast once every couple of years.
I discovered the show years later (and the other books too) and man, the first thing that I realized was that Lister and Rimmer were spot on for what I had imagined those characters to be like. Casting nailed them… then again, I’m not sure if the books came AFTER the show, so it’s possible that they used the actors as templates.
But man, I remember being blown away, I felt like the producers had read my mind
The show itself was hit or miss for me. I agree that seasons 3-5 were probably the best. I’d rather go back to re-read the book than watch any of the other seasons.
If you are referring to the fact that, at one point, entire seasons take place on Starbug, it had been mentioned before - in “Backwards”, for example.
There’s one other concept that, although they never come out and say it on the show, is widely accepted to be true:
Except for the “cat race” (Homo Felinus), all life forms found throughout the universe are descendants of Earth humans (with the occasional genetic engineering along the way).
Isn’t a lot of the disjointed nature of the show kind of an artifact of the relatively ad-hoc British television scheduling?
As in, British shows don’t run like US ones where you have a “series”, meaning a recurring show, and a “season” meaning a year’s set of around 20-22 episodes. Instead each show gets multiple “series”, meaning a run of a variable number of episodes- as few as 5-6, and as many as 15 or so, and “series” don’t run as consistently as US shows do- you might get a “series” of 5-6 episodes, and then wait a couple of years and get 6-7, then 9 months might go by and you get a Xmas special, etc…
So I imagine that with that sort of production environment, it’s a lot easier to just pick up in medias res than to try and backtrack for continuity’s sake.
All life forms are Earth-derived, but even discounting the Mechanoids, Simulants, and other AIs as ‘life forms’, I don’t think I’d call any of the extant life-forms as human descendants (ignoring the Rimmerfolk, who are genetically identical to third-millennium humans) - while most of the GELFs no doubt have human DNA (indicated by the sentience or near-sentience of the majority of them) best evidence suggests that they were designed from scratch, IMO. And stuff like the Despair Squid are certainly not human-derived.
Not the seasons with just Starbug (which reading up on it, it appears was a combination of rushed production schedule and limited budget. At least for season 6. Not sure what the deal was for season 7 that was four IRL years later and included for the first time computer animation. And this is a long parenthetical so I’m ending it now.)
Season 1, they make reference to the limited space because the officer’s deck was still being decontaminated. But by season 2? They had a mess hall/disco area. And observation deck. Season 3? Starbug and docking bay. How? Magic? Alternate universe? Show runners who didn’t care about consistency? All of the above?
I’m not sure why you consider that an inconsistency.
In season 1, most of the ship is off-limits, because it’s still too irradiated.
A year later, more of the ship is safe.
A year later, even more.
Eventually, the whole thing (or close enough thereto for the Boys’ purposes) is cleaned up.
Realistic? No, not really, but this is a series where a mutated flu virus can create physical manifestations of the sufferer’s mental state. Inconsistent? Not at all.
The completely (or mostly completely) altered designs of various parts of the ship over the course of the series are an inconsistency…getting access to more of the ship as time goes on is not.
(Also, shift all my season references in my earlier post up one…apparently I mentally combined series 4 and 5 into one. v_v)
One of the more amusing changes, to my eye, is from season 1 to season 2. After the first series, they got back a note that there wasn’t enough color - everything was grey. Which was true. So if you look at series 2, you’ll notice that they just crammed in colorful things everywhere they could fit them, no matter how little sense they made. Hence the giant inflatable banana in the bunkroom, and Lister’s sudden fondness for Hawaiian shirts. It’s one of those things that, once you start to see, you can’t stop seeing.
Well I’ve noticed the clothing style changes from season to season as Lister went through gray to Hawaiian to biker/punk to brown. And Rimmer went from official uniform to several random mono-colored uniforms along with an accompanying random “H” attached to his forehead. And Cat went from a rainbow assortment of zoot suits to…well, that one stayed pretty consistent.
