Canon-Strike XIV: Red Dwarf

[Neon Ignition]

A road map to the end of the Canon-Strike begins with a shift back to TV, an area that we haven't looked at in some time.

Red Dwarf

Being a comedy, Red Dwarf's dependency on canon was always going to be low and fans will be all too aware that even within that limit it has always played very fast and loose with its own canon, often sidestepping corners it paints itself into. The emphasis is on the comedy but that doesn't mean there isn't a sort of through line. The show turns 35 years old this year and has unintentionally found its central premise, of the last human alive lost in deep space, acting out in real time as the same cast continue decades on. This means that Dave Lister has literally spent his life growing old on the mining ship with the audience growing old watching him.


Episode 01 - The End
This episode marks a double anniversary for the show as the script was written back in 1983, 40 years ago. Sent to spend 18 months in suspended animation due to smuggling a pet cat aboard the ship, Lister spends 3,000,000 years waiting freedom as a nuclear radiation leak wipes out the crew of the ship and Holly sends it into the depths of space due to the danger it represents whilst irradiated. Lister awakes to find himself the last human alive... but not alone.




With a sci-fi concept, what made Red Dwarf resonate enough to endure?

[QualityChimp]

Love these threads!

Red Dwarf is amazing. There are some episodes where they just chuck about amazing sci-fi concepts, purely for laughs that would the main premise of some Hollywood movies. *Cough*Tenet*Backwards*cough*

I have a really vivid memory of being in the junior school's swimming pool changing room and two kids were talking about it and one said there's a talking cat, which obviously I pictured as an anthropomorphic cat, rather than a man with fangs.

As you say, it's weird having a show that we've grown up with and each new series was an event when I was younger.

I tried a rewatch of this a few years back and it was a nightmare. I think I went through Sky, Netflix and dodgy websites to actually watch it!

Finally finished off the last BBC series and everything after that is via Dave and I think the app has stopped on Xbox.
Not sure about PS4.

I'd really like to watch this with my son, but it's yet another one to add to the pile after Marvel, Doctor Who, Star Wars etc.!

[Asura]

I think Red Dwarf works because despite being a sci-fi show, it's really a sitcom in a sci-fi setting.

And it has characters who are surprisingly deep, and become deeper as it goes along. We'll probably carry through, but there are more things to say about this when we get to the episode called Inquisitor.

[Yakumo]

Now this is a coincidence. Been going through these again on BluRay. They still hold up incredibly well. Even though I've seen the shows dozens of times, they still make me laugh.
It's the characters that make it work. They're so likable with a lot of depth. So much so that you could mistake the characters for real people you personally know. This is probably why I didn't like the last special. The supporting cast besides the ferel leader were last.

[Neon Ignition]

If they're able to get another special or series off the ground Dwarf will have the chance to become the longest running British comedy series. The record is Last of the Summer Wine at 37 years. There's an epic difference in episode count so it's more a technicality but we can afford to be cheeky with the prize if we consider that LOTSW didn't air every year either...

I think it was sometime around 1995 when BBC2 started airing the first five series in order as a build up to the launch of the sixth series when I first watched it. I kind of have it in my head that it will be something around Series 3 or 4 that was the first I saw which looking back was a good window to dive in on it. The hype around 6 was huge by the time it aired, at school we were just around the right age to fall for it but the biggest pain was that wait that had to be endured for series 7 afterward... an all together too familiar experience for those into the show.

The first episode does well because it's probably one of the most cleanly focused episodes. There are some good jokes in there but it never wavers from its focus of ensuring that you have the entire shows concept, set up, characterisations and motivations all covered within 20+ minutes so that episodes beyond that don't have to waste time on it.

[Neon Ignition]

Episode 2 - Future Echoes
Accelerating through space for millions of years, Red Dwarf finds itself approaching light speed and as the now half deranged Hollie struggles to bring the ships velocity back under control the crew begin to experience visions of their futures... assuming one of them lives to see theirs.




Did this episode provide an early future echo of the shows potential?

[Travesty]

Red Dwarf is really intresting to me because we never got it in Finland on TV when I was a kid. I remember reading about the show in I think it was SFX Magazine, and at some point I bought a few VHS tapes of Red Dwarf from a movie store, I still have one of the VHS tapes (Series 1 re-mastered episodes 4-6) but I don't remember what happened to the rest. I enjoy the show quite much, but am not a huge fan, just a little bit of a casual fan. I have been thinking of ordering some DVD box sets of the show.

[Neon Ignition]

It would be interesting if the show eventually dovetailed into Future Echoes ending but in many ways that ship has sailed, they could have gone straight into the characters just dealing with the boredom of being stuck with each other so it's interesting that they dove so quickly into sci-fi concepts.

[QualityChimp]

Red Dwarf was, for me, pretty unique at the time in that it was funny AND Sci-Fi.
What else was there like that at the time? Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy?

I definitely came to Red Dwarf later than series 1, so I came into this later. S2 E3 "Thanks For The Memory", to be precise!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Red_Dwarf_episodes

However, I've definitely seen the first series on Beeb and Dave repeats.

First episode is really good, but really unique in having loads of characters, whereas most of the others have no other crew on Red Dwarf.

The best bit has to be Lister wandering around for 3 solid minutes asking where everyone is and dipping his fingers into and then tasting mysterious piles of ash whilst Holly, increasingly frustrated says "They're dead, Dave." in different orders until Dave finally asks what the powder is and Holly explains he's been tasting the remnants of the crew!

[QualityChimp]

Future Echoes is a great episode, but they had to explain away the baby stuff in a text crawl dash later on.
It's almost as if they weren't expecting the show to still be being made 25 years later!

[QualityChimp]

[Neon Ignition]

Episode 03 - Balance of Power
Facing the reality that the crew is forever gone, Lister asks Rimmer to let him swap his hologram with that of Kochanski so that he can see her one last time. When Rimmer refuses, Lister decides to get himself promoted so that he can force Rimmer to comply.




The first character driven episode of the show, did it hold up as strong without a sci-fi high-concept behind it?

[QualityChimp]

I thought this worked really well.

It cut through the idea that it'd be cool to be alone on a spaceship to make you think about how lonely it must be to be alone on a spaceship.

The BBC requested there be a "pure sitcom" episode that relied less on the sci-fi and you can see this plot working in another series like Dad's Army or Blackadder, so this is a good story, but can see why it's less popular than episodes which make use of the sci-fi elements.

[Neon Ignition]

Episode 04 - Waiting for God
When Lister learns how to read the smell based books of the Cat race, he reads their holy book and learns of his own role as their messiah. With their faith having guided them to either their deaths or to be lost in the depths of space he struggles with the moral crisis this presents him. Meanwhile, Rimmer contemplates the potential alien life form he may have just discovered...




Did expanding the Cat mythology please you as much as it would a Quagarr Warrior?

[Neon Ignition]

I remember seeing an extra on the DVD or something where they talked about the actor who played the old Cat at the end and how he struggled with the scenario he had been hired with and I can imagine that is true. He plays it so straight and yet the stuff around him is so ludicrously juvenile with the golden sausage etc.