I fucking love Red Dwarf.
Caby always tries to introduce me to a whole bunch of weird British media when I visit, and I never have any clue what I'm in for. I usually like what I see, sometimes really like, but it's not often it grips me so hard that I actively seek it out, totally independent of her, even back home. (In fact, it's only happened twice, and the other one is Top Gear.) Red Dwarf has become our show, though, and it's been honestly a big comfort despite being three million years away from Wales.
I'm not going to give you the Wikipedia rundown of the show, so if you've never heard of it, please watch the Comedy Connections episode on it. It's presented so well that, even without the context of what any of the actual connections are (that's the whole point of the show—to show you how shows came to be by who worked on what with who), you'll come away appreciating just how successful it's been and just how odd of a show it is. It's a half hour, but it's a half hour you'll definitely enjoy.
No, what I'm gonna focus on is how I got into it and what I like about it. You're really gonna want the context of the show to understand everything I'm saying, but you should be able to follow okay if you at least know the gist. And if you don't, go watch the show! It's on the goddamn Internet Archive for all to watch, and it's brilliant.
Yes, This Page Needs a Table of Contents
- My Introduction, Act I: We Start in a CEX
- My Introduction, Act II: Habits Form
- My Introduction, Act III: How to Survive in Deep Space, Pennsylvania
- The Peaks and Nadirs of Red Dwarf's Run (to Me)
- Some of Cammy's Favorite Red Dwarf Episodes
- Back to Earth
My Introduction, Act I: We Start in a CEX
What story doesn't start in a CEX? This one does, anyway. CEX isn't just where I get my games, it's also where Caby's family gets a lot of their movies! Because they have patrician taste, they enjoy a good DVD boxset, and we're always in there checking for shows, either ones we wanna watch or her parents wanna watch (Jonathan Creek!). That's when we came across Red Dwarf, specifically the Just the Shows set—so sadly no extras, but that just means more to discover later. This also means, as of writing, I have not seen any of the relaunch Dave episodes of Red Dwarf, that which appears on the weirdly-named British TV channel (what TV channel isn't called Dave?), only the original eight series.
:index_pointing_at_the_viewer:
Now, Caby has seen Red Dwarf before. I think she watched through them on a site on her 3DS, which is absolutely the Grant Naylor (that's their ship name) intended way to watch. Her parents were also fans of the show back when it ran, and we found them occasionally sneaking peeks at it as we ran through everything we could night after night in the lounge. Me though? I don't think I'd ever heard of it, save for mumblings about how bad the Red Dwarf American pilot was from Caby and a webcomic I read once swiping the name GELF for a species of angular sorta-catlike alien people. (The guy who wrote that was Scottish, so he absolutely knew about Red Dwarf and got it from them.)
My Introduction, Act II: Habits Form
Anyway, I quickly fell in love with it. A lot's been made about how Odd Couple Rimmer and Lister are, but what I found most interesting about it was how that was wrapped in these freaky, trippy sci-fi concepts that are colored and warped by Rimmer and Lister being such bizarre characters. One of the early episodes, "Better Than Life", has Lister, Rimmer, and Cat plunged into an immersive VR game which gives you exactly what you want based on what desires it reads from your brain—problem being, Rimmer is such an insane, self-loathing individual that, once the visage of his dad in-game makes him stumble, awful things happen to everybody instead.
This still looks like someone just shooped Craig Charles into the background. It's actually kino. This may be the image to sum up Lister and Rimmer.
Despite not being that complicated of a show, it never went the way I expected it to or falls into routine. Each series swaps around settings and characters, bringing in a service mechanoid named Kryten (who honestly steals the show as it goes on, and whose actor Robert Llywelyn does a surprisingly believable North American accent, albeit a really stuffy goofy one) or a recast version of Lister's love interest Kristine Kochanski, and for about a quarter of its run, losing Red Dwarf entirely and being confined to the tiny exploration vessel Starbug instead, turning the show more into an adventure show in deep space with planets and strange aliens. Even when they get Red Dwarf back, Rimmer and Lister are in space jail, and that becomes its own thing to explore.
Consider that I'm American, and American comedy just doesn't work like this. They find what works, and they stick to it. You get familiarity, you get the same sets and locales, usually for years and decades and for way too long. You certainly don't get demonstrably bad but somehow likable characters like you do in British comedy, only awkwardly socially dysfunctional ones that often prove irritating, sometimes even with a laugh track. I'd enjoyed British comedy before, especially stuff like Spaced where it's a lampoon of American media anyway, but Red Dwarf was the first one I truly adored. It's not to say everything about Red Dwarf is perfect, but it captured me, and at a really opportune time.
My Introduction, Act III: How to Survive in Deep Space, Pennsylvania
Coming back to the US always sucks, and this time really hit me hard. When I returned from the 2023 trip, I was honestly awestruck that it even happened, and mostly I had this constant buzzing excitement and immediately wanted to go back. After the 2024 trip, I'd started to see us changing as people, getting more distant and our way of fantasizing and where we wanted life to go shifting, and it made me doubt how much of a future we really had together. This trip completely quashed any fears of that, but with it being so lovely, stable, and peaceful, being alone again mostly left me depressed, demotivated, and realizing how far I have left to go in developing into a well-rounded, comfortable person just on my own. (I'm also 26. No one has it figured out by then.)
(This is immediately where I want to say something silly like "and suddenly, I felt a parallel between my struggles with isolation and Lister being the last human alive!", but that's not true, I'm just being goofy.)
Red Dwarf felt like a way to stay connected to the many late nights in the lounge, guinea pigs booping away in the corner, Caby opposite me on another wonky couch as we laughed our way through three or four episodes a night. We actually didn't make it through all eight series before I left, so her and I spent a few months watching through the last two over Discord calls (which worked surprisingly well, even with her awful Internet service). Reading over the fansites and plunging the slightly-broken depths of the official site for trivia, bloopers, which boxsets I'd one day want to hunt down, it was all I wanted to do some days. Red Dwarf wasn't just funny, it was a way to not feel so far away from everything I'd loved back when I was in Wales, and a reminder that it was all still there and I'd indeed be back for breakfast, whenever that might be.
We finally finished up all eight series in late October, two months after I got home. I immediately discovered that a channel I used to watch as a kid (shoutouts to Dena, shoutouts to The Game Den) had done these recap/review/trivia videos on every single episode, and that night, I started the whole run over again. This is guaranteed not to be the last time, by myself or with Caby, with or without commentary. (The next show we're gonna watch together is The Mighty Boosh, another of her favorites. And yes, it seems like every British comedy got the gay couple in the main cast. I'm only slightly joking.)
The Peaks and Nadirs of Red Dwarf's Run (to Me)
(We're getting into the part where, if you don't know the show, you're gonna be lost! Don't let my opinions sway yours if you've never seen the show. I've had that happen many times, unfortunately. That said, if you are a complete smegging gimboid, read further! Let's see what you think of my takes and if you want a nerd fight afterwards.)
It's so interesting and charming looking back at the early series' of Red Dwarf after having seen through to the end. The thing that strikes me first is just how much lower the budget was. It's all blatantly miniatures for the ships out in space, there's fewer characters and they go fewer places. Some of this, they tried to solve retroactively with the Remastered episodes (which were color graded, effects-enhanced, and lightly edited from the original episodes), but really, it wasn't an issue in the first place, it was a charming cheapness, which suits a comedy set on a grimy, lived-in ship stuck in space.
That said, I think I like the middle of the run, especially the late original Dwarf to stranded-on-Starbug series (Series IV through VI), the best. They'd started to recognize their capabilities with the characters and setting (read: how much of it they could make up for comedy), the plots got nuttier, and of course, Kryten came into the mix. I like everyone on board, but Kryten sticks out to me as the most interesting of all the characters due to his nobility and designation to serve mixed with his desire to be a weaselly, conniving human. It's pretty obvious that he does feel things and he is very flawed, but his programming keeps him protective over the cast, and especially Lister, who he becomes bizarrely, but touchingly, attached to when Kochanski enters the picture.
Series VII is where things start to wobble a bit. I mean, consider the circumstances. It was made four years after the previous one, Rob Grant wasn't involved, Chris Barrie was only sorta involved, Doug Naylor had an eye towards a Red Dwarf movie, meaning it was more cinematic and expensive than ever, and Kochanski became a regular and doesn't really slot in properly. She's not all that likable as a character; I feel for her being stuck in such alien circumstances, surrounded by gross men in space, but her and crew never really combust in an interesting way, certainly nowhere near as interesting as Rimmer and everyone. Most of what she's there for is to be both the target of and to invite sexual humor (blink and you'll miss her boob job joke in the first part of "Pete") and to try to flesh out Lister's backstory, given they (retconned in that they) dated briefly before the events of the show. I just think the early series' do that exploration way better (e.g. "Stasis Leak").
Actually, on that note: I know that Clare Grogan wasn't available as Kochanski for the later series, but she just feels so much more like a girl Lister would actually be interested in than Chloe Annett. There was a way that Clare played Kochanski, a little spunkier (suits a Scottish girl in a new wave band, I guess), that to me rings truer for a slobby, street smart scouser to be into than Chloe's more refined, middle class portrayal. Again, you can blame this on the eye towards the movie; Doug Naylor explained that the movie was going to need The Girl if they ever wanted it to get picked up, and Chloe certainly is The Girl more than Clare would've been. Either way, I just wanted Rimmer back.
That's not to say Series VII doesn't have its funny episodes though, especially earlier in the season. I love "Tikka to Ride", where a time paradox results in a much-upgraded Starbug, but a total lack of curry for Lister. He hatches a plan to use the time drive to find curry back on Earth in the past, but accidentally wraps the entire crew up in the Kennedy assassination instead. (Spoilers: Kennedy was the second gunman.) That's the kinda insanity that Red Dwarf dishes out at its finest. It's also hard to ignore "Blue", aka the one where Lister misses Rimmer so much, he dreams about them making out. Caby has no idea how they just ignored that and kept going like nothing ever happened.
Series VIII is divisive and definitely the weakest series. Red Dwarf is rebuilt, crew and all, back to the way it was pre-radiation leak, and the actual surviving Red Dwarf crew are all thrown into Red Dwarf's gay baby jail for crashing Starbug and misusing confidential information. Most of the plots come from either schemes to escape or general hijinks. I actually don't think "Pete" is the worst of the episodes (that'd probably be "Krytie TV"), even if it's got another one of the handful of moments where the entire joke is a character is Welsh. It was a different time. (At least Americans get poked at too with Hollister's entire shtick?) The march to Hollister's office only gets funnier every time it happens for whatever reason, and I do enjoy the goofiness the time wand brings about.
It's actually the last two episodes, the second part of "Pete" and "Only the Good...", that left me in the lurch the hardest. Given how smart the plots generally are, the fact that everything is kicked off by Kryten throwing away the time wand where the t-rex could eat it absolutely took me out of it. My thought is (thanks to Dena tipping me off about this in her episode commentary) that it was meant to be an homage to a scene in Jurassic Park where they throw a flare to distract a t-rex, but pop culture reference or not, Kryten could've zapped the t-rex back into a sparrow at literally any moment and no further nonsense would've been necessary. I get that then there wouldn't have been an episode, but it's so unlike the show to just have this bonkers confusing gaping hole in the middle of a story that I immediately looked online to see what the takes of other smegheads were.
"Only the Good...", meanwhile, leaves the entire run on a cliffhanger, one that they seem to have quietly moved on from with the Dave episodes. A metal-eating virus hazards the whole of Red Dwarf, and while the reborn Hollister and most of the crew escape, Lister, Rimmer, Kryten, and Kochanski have to find a way to stabilize the ship through a mirror universe where they can find the virus' opposite. Pretty straightforward stuff, but given how expensive the CG for "Pete" was, they were left to film the cheapest possible ending instead, leaving it on a cliffhanger where it's uncertain what happens to the ship and crew. (Even less satisfying is that an actual proper ending with them recovering the ship was even filmed, but just wasn't used?) All you get is "The End" and then "THE SMEG IT IS" over a freeze-frame—literal NES game level endings for all that setup.
Needless to say, I wasn't too thrilled about "Only the Good...". Again, there were still funny moments, like the "have a fantastic period" sequence and Cat trying his best to get punched by one of the other prisoners only resulting in that prisoner declaring himself Cat's bitch, but it mostly bewildered me why such a random tossoff episode like "Pete" got a padded two parts while "Only the Good...", the episode where Red Dwarf literally gets eaten by space viruses endangering everybody, got a cliffhanger.
Ultimately, I look at Series VIII like an experiment that didn't quite pay off, reaching for the ever-elusive Dwarf movie in jagged fashion. Caby says it just feels nastier, weirdly more like an American sitcom, stuck in one place with Rimmer's spitefulness rubbed off on everyone, and that feels apt too. It just came at the expense of what was truly thrilling about Red Dwarf, namely the trippy episode concepts and the exploration of space, both inner and outer. That's probably why they just quietly put down Series VIII's timeline altogether for the Dave episodes—everyone else agrees that Red Dwarf is better served in episodic chunks of science fiction bizarreness and homosexual tension.
Some of Cammy's Favorite Red Dwarf Episodes
So as to not finish off the page with griping about a very good show, here's a few favorite episodes, one from each series. It's a little difficult because of how much I enjoyed basically all of it, but I'll give it my best shot. Don't take this as "the first episodes you should watch", watch 'em in order. Otherwise:
"Me2" (Series I, 1988)
You know, as I write this page, I realize just how many of these are Rimmer-focused. Hmm. You ever think to yourself, "goddamn, I'd be so powerful if there were two of me"? (No? Weirdo.) Anyway, Rimmer thinks this, and right as Lister tries to create a Kochanski hologram, he's actually tricked into making another of Rimmer, who then immediately live together. And begin hating each other. The argument scenes where they poke directly at the other's open wounds, knowing full well what hurts them the most, is very violent and very good. Gazpacho soup.
"Better Than Life" (Series II, 1988)
As I said up there, this is where the crew get a big mail shipment, including an immersive new game called Better Than Life that gives you what you most desire carnally. (I notice a lot of my favorite moments revolve around the AR machine, as different games come up in different episodes.) It's such a fantastic Rimmer character study, the way he yearns for his dad's approval, and how even in his dreams, he can't manage it, leading to the entire crew's life getting threatened in the game and eventually his hand getting smashed by a tax collector. Awesome.
"Polymorph" (Series III, 1989)
A polymorph is a shape-changing being that feeds on negativity, thus causing the crew to lose one of the emotions most central to them each. Chris Barrie as a hippie in a "give quiche a chance" shirt is terrific. I'm so glad you can buy those.
"Dimension Jump" (Series IV, 1991)
Come on, everyone loves this episode. Ace Rimmer! What a guy. Another great study into Rimmer being a nutcase, though this episode proves it's entirely by his own hand. Apparently Chris Barrie really wanted to play someone dashing and heroic, given his main roles at the time were Rimmer and Gordon Brittas, both...well, smegheads. He pulls it off! It's always a treat to see Ace Rimmer return, like in Series VII's "Stoke Me a Clipper".
"Terrorform" (Series V, 1992)
Yes, another Rimmer episode. From the moment we read the episode blurb, Caby and I could not get over Rimmer ending up oiled and chained to a wall being tortured on a planet sculpted by the darkest corners of his own mind. That's fucked up, and I'm surprised I didn't write it first. I mean, I wasn't alive then, but. No spoilers on the ending, but they have to make Rimmer feel better about himself to save everyone, which plays out in wonderfully Red Dwarf fashion.
"Gunmen of the Apocalypse" (Series VI, 1993)
Okay, here's a Kryten-focused one instead. Kryten is put under to save Starbug from a computer virus, the battle taking place like a spaghetti western in his head, and when he's unsuccessful on its own, Rimmer, Lister, and Cat all jump in using the AR machine to help him out. Honestly, everyone's wild west form is really fun, especially Cat as the dancing Riviera Kid (what else did you expect Danny John-Jules' special ability to be?), and the final showdown was pretty thrilling and honestly a little unpredictable.
"Tikka to Ride" (Series VII, 1997)
I already discussed it, but this episode, which revolves around an alternate reality US circa the Kennedy assassination getting fucked up by the crew awkwardly going along with Lister's search for more curry, is what I consider Red Dwarf silliness at its finest. I had a hard time getting my mom to grasp the show's overall concept until I mentioned this one to her. Maybe you should watch this one first if you're a yeehaw man.
"Back in the Red" [all parts] (Series VIII, 1999)
It was hard picking any of the Series VIII episodes for this list, but I did say one from each, so I'll say this one. Part two is probably the best of the lot, if only for the bit where Kryten makes several officers sit on toilets at gunpoint through Kochanski's advice. I promise you that last sentence makes sense. If you treat "Back in the Red" like a weird side story, or a very long Red Dwarf special, it's a good watch.
Back to Earth
I could go way, way on. I'm still learning stuff about the behind-the-scenes (so is everybody else), reading fan reviews and analyses of the episodes, building up a little wishlist of books (there's a lot of Red Dwarf books). There is a weird sort of melancholy to it all, hearing about how Red Dwarf succumbed to the scourges of ego and TV production as the budgets got big and the 90s came to a close, especially with more recent releases like Comedy, Chaos, and Cowboys, a rare, very raw look at the notes that got sanitized into 1994's The Making of Red Dwarf. The fact is, though, that's just the flipside to the fascination, the excitement, the world of obscure details that come together into a show with literally nothing like it. What comes down had to have gone up in the first place.
There's a side effect of all this Red Dwarf stuff, to go back to that Comedy Connections video I linked at the start, where I'm now curious about what everyone involved has been up to separate from the show. I know Craig Charles does a funk and soul show on Radio 6 and a couple CD comps of suchlike, which I'm immensely curious about. Robot Wars and Scrapheap Challenge are obviously in a much different vein than Red Dwarf, but listen, I'll kinda watch anything with the Boys from the Dwarf in it. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider looks fun! Chris Barrie was in that. Caby's mom loves goofy dumb action movies, so it might just become a thing for the whole family to watch next time I'm in the country.
Got a real nice boxset with a bunch of extras on the way for Christmas, also. Super exciting.