My Journey Through the Cult Science Fiction Show Red Dwarf Continues with the Bleak "Thanks For the Memory" and Convoluted "Stasis Leak"
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In the comments for the last Red Dwarf piece, someone very astutely noted that the show is innately comitragic and that the episodes focused on Dave Lister are comic while those focused on his long-dead holographic compatriot Arnold Rimmer are tragic.
That’s certainly true of “Thanks for the Memory.” It’s yet another achingly sad exploration of Rimmer’s unbearable loneliness.
Conceptually, it’s one of the most ambitious episodes, with a central plot device that suggests Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in reverse. In Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s science fiction masterpiece, a procedure is performed that erases a complicated, messy romance from someone’s memory. In “Thanks For the Memory”, however, the memory of a messy, failed romance is inserted inside someone’s brain.
Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the result is funny and wildly inventive but also poignant and sad in a distinctively Red Dwarf fashion.
Before memories can be implanted, the fellas enjoy a swinging soiree on a planet with a hospitable atmosphere. It’s a “Death Day” celebration for Arnold Rimmer’s hologram. As the name suggests, a Death Day is like a birthday except that it chronicles the momentous day that someone perishes rather than the day that they were born. In the grand scheme of things, it’s more important.
The boys are rocking out in outer space while soused. I stopped drinking about four months back for the sake of my health and finances and also so that I can shoe-horn references to it into as many articles as possible.
I’m realizing now that one of the reasons that I drank was because pop culture is full of pro-alcohol propaganda. We’re deluged with images of our favorite characters getting hopelessly blotto and having the time of their lives.
This, of course, has a basis in reality. People don’t drink because it’s addictive and expensive and can play havoc with your life, career, and finances. They drink because it’s a communal experience and a nice bonding activity. People drink because it’s fun until it isn’t fun anymore.
That was part of the problem with me. I wasn’t a social drinker. I was an anti-social drinker. Drinking didn’t make me disagreeable to be around because it didn’t really affect me, and also, I was never around anyone other than my family.
Drinking alcohol is so synonymous with partying that the word is useful shorthand for boozing it up. If you tell your coworkers you’re going to party after work, they’ll assume you’re talking about having some beers rather than playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
The luckless residents of the Red Dwarf get too inebriated and end up making unforced errors/easily avoided mistakes. Though he begs him not to, a drunken, depressed, and all too candid Rimmer tells Dave that he’s only had sex once, for twelve minutes.
Being a soft touch, Dave Lister then decides to do something very nice and generous, if ethically dodgy, for someone he here clearly sees as a friend as well as an antagonist and a colossal pain in the ass.
Dave Lister decides to futz around and implant in Arnold Rimmer all of the memories of one of his romantic relationships, an eight-month fling with a beautiful black woman that ended because he was young and consequently selfish and kind of a dick.
I’m realizing now that I’m into Red Dwarf’s second season. I’ve probably never mentioned that Dave Lister and Cat are black and Arnold Rimmer is white because it’s never mattered beyond Arnold Rimmer being very white.
That is impressive. Red Dwarf is truly color-blind, the rare crappy dystopia where race doesn’t seem important or particularly relevant.
So it’s not important, or even mentioned, that Dave Lister is essentially gifting his frenemy an idyllic interracial fling with a gorgeous black woman who honestly seems out of Dave Lister’s league.
Then again, Dave is a very charming and likable young man. He has a very appealing personality and isn’t bad-looking either. There’s a lovely little monologue where Rimmer compares his crewmate to a sloppy but delicious sandwich: all the ingredients are wrong, but the combination ends up feeling right.
Dave may be a slob, lazy, and a directionless goof, but people like him. They think he’s a good guy. They want to party with him, but Rimmer sees himself as a sandwich with all the right ingredients, but which somehow turns out wrong. He’s hard-working, ambitious, driven, and unpleasant to be around.
Though he often seems willfully oblivious, Rimmer has an awareness about himself that’s ultimately rather touching. He’s all too aware of his myriad failings, which is one of the reasons he insists on having memories of the romance removed once he realizes that they’re second-hand and inauthentic.
Even by the standards of a Rimmer-focused episode, “Thanks for the Memory” is dark but also very funny and artful in fleshing out the backstories and personalities of Rimmer and Dave.
The following episode, “Stasis Leak,” opens three million years ago, with Dave Lister being dressed down for covertly slipping Arnold Rimmer, a powerful hallucinogen known as a “Freaky Fungus.”
This leads to a psychedelic freakout that Rimmer refers to as a “voyage to trip out the city” that he’s still coming down from throughout the episode.
That seems appropriate since “Stasis Leak” is the trippiest and most surreal episode so far. It finds Red Dwarf playing with the powerful black magic of time travel.
Time travel is tricky because it often feels convoluted and confusing, even when done well. That proves true here. Once a movie or television show surpasses a certain level of complexity, my frazzled autistic brain shuts down and stubbornly refuses to understand what I’m seeing.
Like all good Gen-Xers, I hold Back to the Future in the highest regard, partly because it’s the rare time travel science fiction movie that makes sense and is not incredibly confusing.
I will consequently willingly concede that after a certain point, I did not entirely follow the plot after Dave, Rimmer, and Cat find an entryway to the distant past after Dave finds some highly useful information while reading Rimmer’s diary.
Dave and Rimmer both use time travel to their advantage. The holographic version of Rimmer tries to save his life by warning him of the danger of what’s to come. This is complicated by his still being under the influence of mushrooms, which make everything feel surreal and dream-like.
Dave, meanwhile, tries to finagle his way into the heart and marital bed of his crush, Kristine Kochanski (Clare Grogan), only to find himself competing for her with a version of himself from a different time period.
The episode ends by giving into confusion completely by introducing, or re-introducing, one iteration of Dave and Rimmer after another.
It’s one of the busiest, most cluttered episodes and one of the most superficial and least satisfying. It’s still funny and smart, but it lacks the emotional element and innate melancholy that define the show at its best.
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