Subscribe to RSS FeedWhat the Smeg did they do to ‘Red Dwarf’?
So ‘Red Dwarf’ is back. Kinda. Not really. They say it’s back, but after seeing the first episode of it’s return, I have to disagree with them.
First, a little back-story. ‘Red Dwarf’ was a low budget science fiction comedy out of Britain that aired between 1988 and 1999 surrounding the adventures of Lister, a guy who ends up in stasis for a few million years, and ends up as the last human (so it seems at least) in the universe, along with a hologram of one of his dead crew mates, a humanoid creature evolved from his cat during the time he was in stasis, and an android they find in a dead ship. It was pretty damn funny, and grew a fairly stable cult following, but never REALLY took off, and then it died out in ‘99.
Well now they are bringing it back, for 4 new episodes (at least), and a movie. The first of the new episodes played earlier today, and that is why I’m writing is.
It was SMEGGING HORRIBLE!
I hardly recognized the show at all. Beyond having the same actors (though not everyone is back it seems), it barely resembles what the show was in the past at all. For starters, it had no explanation connecting the old series to the new episodes, and seems to have ignored how the series ended (unless they explain it in the other new episodes to come…though it won’t help much at this point if they do). Also, the humour is…uh…well I don’t know where the humour is, but it’s not in the show, that’s for damn sure.
The whole thing plays out like some nightmarish scheme to ruin people’s love of ‘Red Dwarf’. I’m not sure how to explain it other than “painful”.
Ignored backstory + Tentacles + Random unexplained character = Smeghead writers.
The story makes no sense at all so far, though it is “part 1″, so that may change slightly. Though, even within the episode things make very little sense, and it’s seemed like the plot of the whole first episode was geared towards randomly and arbitrarily having a few things happen (without explanation) to create an opening for the rest of the new episodes.
Long story really really short…there is a dimension jumping creature in the water tank, they fight it, and loose, it leaves anyway, a new hologram shows up and starts giving orders, they build a “dimension cutter” by doing…uh…something involving a testicle they got from the creature, and get ready to send Lister into a new dimension to find a girl to repopulate the universe with. All of which completely ignores the last season of the show in ‘99 without explanation…but I won’t even bother going into that.
I’ll be watching the new episodes as they come over the next few weeks, but what I had high hopes would be a great reconnection with a show I loved, has turned out to be a grotesque massacre of childhood memories.
If you’ve seen it, do you agree with my assessment? Drop me a comment and let me know.
Smeg.
I do agree. Though, I didn’t have high opinions of season 8 either, I would at least hope they’d explain the obscure ending. (They may still – I have an idea of how it might go)
I’ll continue to watch, but merely out of curiosity.
Yeah, season 8 wasn’t the greatest for sure, but it still had….you know…some laughs and such. And I can think of a few ways they could come to an explanation of the ending of season 8 still, but that fact that they didn’t bother doing anything about it in the first returning episode is a bad sign I think.
I mean, they’ve had really weird jumps in storyline between seasons before, and just explained it via a quick “star wars” like scroll text mixed with some jokes, and that was that, everything was peachy. Ignoring it altogether, especially with such a strange ending to season 8, is just sloppy as hell in my opinion.
It is way too early to judge this mini series. In this first episode we learn the following in regards to the ending of Series 8:
1) Rimmer cheats Death
2) Kochanski dies somehow
3) The Red Dwarf crew has dissapeared
4) They’re stranded in deep space again
That still leaves a lot of loose ends, and they’ve only created more with this dimension jumping tentacle creature, mysterious hologram woman, and this machine that will apparently send Lister back to Earth.
But just look back at Episode 1 of Season 8…. Rimmer was back somehow (and back to his old, irritable self), they were in jail, they were apparently back on a fully-staffed Red Dwarf, and so on. They didn’t explain much of anything until the second episode.
I agree that it MIGHT pull itself together, but it’s nothing like the beginning of season 8. They explained things (or started to anyway) in the first few minutes of the first episode of season 8, through a flashback that connects the end of season 7 to the beginning 8. Plus, it was funny, which was not the case (in my opinion) of this new episode.
They could (and even might) have great things ahead in the next couple episodes, but where I was eager to see this first one, I’m far more worried about how much the next one is likely to suck.
After seeing the second episode, it occurs to me that this mini-series is playing out much the way “Back to Reality” did. Could the tentacled creature be the despair squid striking again? Could their return to Earth be another hallucination?
I hope it turns out to be something like that, and very very soon. Not sure how much more of this I can take if it keeps going down the path it’s on. I have less and less hope that they will pull the show out of this…whatever the hell it is they are doing…
One thing I did notice in the second episode, it’s mentioned several times that the “Back to Earth” story is “Series 10″ and some things are said to have happened in “Series 9″, like the death of Kochanski…but THIS is Series 9, so it seems like they purposefully skipped a chunk of time and may well backtrack into things making a bit more sense…maybe. I’m really worried about where this is going with the whole “meta-fiction” thing though…