How do I begin to describe Red Dwarf? I started watching old episodes of Red Dwarf as they aired on PBS when I was a teenager. Even though some of the more adult humor escaped me back then, I still thought it was hilarious. Sometimes it was not just the jokes or the sight gags but the sheer absurdity of it. Take for instance, the episode Thanks for the Memory; This was a classic episode where Lister, feeling sorry for Rimmer who's never loved or been loved, gives Rimmer eight months of his memory during which he dated a wonderful woman named Lise Yates. When Rimmer wakes up the next morning, having just been given this memory, he is a completely different person. Lister is pleased to see the change in Rimmer but soon begins to regret his decision to break up with Lise when Rimmer begins to recall how wonderful she was.
There are many inconsistencies that Rimmer cannot account for in his memory of Lise Yates. He began the year at cadet school but suddenly for no reason moved and started drinking and smoking too much. The contrast in characters makes his explanation of the sudden and unexplained change in his life brilliant. Things escalate when Rimmer finds letters which Lisa wrote to Lister while they were together and compares dates. Naturally his assumption is that she must have been cheating on him with Lister. Finally Lister has to tell Rimmer the truth. Since Rimmer cannot swallow the resulting heartbreak, they erase everyone's memories of the event and bury the black box which records everything that happens. The missing time causes them all to wonder what happened for the last three days, the episode actually begins with them searching for the missing black box to account for the lost time.
I think the character of Rimmer is both brilliant and cleverly played. There is inside us all that self loathing beast which is doubt. We all think maybe our life would have been better had we been given better circumstances. It always seems as if nothing ever goes right for Rimmer, perhaps this is because of a self destructive attitude which we see in the episode "Better Than Life" where the crew play a total immersion video game that makes your fantasies become real to you. Rimmer finds himself in debt with a wife and six children to support because his brain cannot accept good things happening to him. Even his friends cannot help him out because the quicksand of his disturbed mind quickly sucks them in as well.
Throughout the first few series Rimmer is a hologram, a complete and accurate copy of his personality but made up entirely of light so that he cannot touch anything. The story is that Lister, who was put into stasis a few weeks before a major accident which killed the entire crew of the Red Dwarf (a massive mining ship), is revived 3,000,000 years later to find that his only companions are a life form which evolved from his cat and a hologram of his bunkmate and superior officer Rimmer. Rimmer and Lister seem to find news ways of insulting one another in each episode but in a few of them seem to understand each other.
Lister is slovenly, takes no pride in his appearance, loves curry and anything spicy enough to singe your taste buds into oblivion. The one thing Lister does pride himself on is his morals. He will always help a friend who is in trouble even if it's Rimmer. It is he that persuades the android Kryten to break his protocol and rebel against his programming which tells him to obey all humans. Kryten doesn't become a regular character until series three even though he is introduced at the beginning of series two. There are several sight gags involving Kryten, most of them involving his infamous groinal socket. In the episode polymorph, Kryten's guilt chip is first mentioned. It makes for a hilarious exchange when Kryten unknowingly refers to Rimmer's mother as an old trout then tries to apologize only to dig himself a deeper and deeper hole. My favorite line is when Kryten finally decides to let well enough alone and says "I've no fish to embarrass you further, I'd better let myself trout" Then realizes moments after what he has said and feels immediately guilty.
As we see in the episode Polymorph, without his guilt chip, Kryten is a very different android. Kryten is also always quoting the space corps directives which Rimmer thinks he knows but always quotes the wrong one. Cat is forever superficial to which extent we discover in the episode "Body Swap" when they think the only chance to save the ship is to have Lister exchange his mind for a high ranking crew member to shut down the auto destruct. Cat tells Lister, "If you won't do it for me, please do it for the sake of my suits" and in the episode "future echoes" where he tries to take three rackfuls of suits into stasis with him, when told there is only enough room for three suits Cat asks "if I cut off this arm can I take a fourth?" His vanity, is naturally the negative emotion which the polymorph drains him of. The contrast between the bum Cat becomes after being drained of his vanity and normal Cat is hilarious. Lister, the first one attacked by the Polymorph, is drained of his anger and consequently becomes a "Billy bad ass" don't care about my own safety "Let's get out there and Twat it" gimboid. Rimmer, the last one to be attacked, is drained of his anger and becomes a sort of beatnik type complete with mustache, goatee, horn rimmed glasses and pipe. His tee-shirt says "Give Quiche a Chance" and his suggestion on how to deal with the deadly alien killing machine is to "hit it with a major leaflet campaign"!!!!
To really appreciate the episode Polymorph you have to be familiar with the characters somewhat to see what a contrast missing that one emotion makes in their personality. I think this episode is my favorite of Series 3 which did contain some of the funniest episodes. The only thing funnier than the episode "Polymorph" is the bar room tidy in "Backwards" Imagine a world where everything happened exactly the opposite as it does in this world. People walk backwards they drive backwards they talk backwards and yes they even fight backwards. At the beginning of the fight, which is actually the end of the fight, Lister gets his black eye sucked off by a punch. Then his ribs get uncracked and he is sucked backwards through a window which quickly repairs itself and pulled up off a table which repairs itself.
There's no way I can address all of my favorite Red Dwarf episodes without making this very long but I think you get the basic idea. Maybe this article has made you want to go out and check out Red Dwarf for yourself. Maybe you already love Red Dwarf and have been nodding your head to everything I've said. Maybe you don't like Red Dwarf, (although I can't imagine why you would have read this far along if you don't) and this hasn't changed your opinion at all. Whatever the case, I enjoy sharing my joys and likes with others. Red Dwarf Rocks!
