Red Dwarf's Third Season Gets Off to a Rip Roaring Start With the Trippy "Backwards" and Bottle Episode "Marooned"
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The second season of Red Dwarf ended on an ostensible cliffhanger, with our slacker hero, Dave Lister (Craig Charles), pregnant after a dalliance with his female self.
In the piece's comments section, someone told me not to worry too much about this particular development because the show was not particularly concerned with continuity.
They were right, of course. Why wouldn’t they be? Who would lie about something like that?
Dave must have had either a space abortion or a space miscarriage between Red Dwarf’s second and third seasons because in the appropriately named “Backwards,” he doesn’t have even a modest baby bump.
It would be tempting to say that things have returned to normal, but there is no such thing as normal in this wacky world.
We open with Dave and Cat doing what lonely, sex-starved men have done from the beginning of time: discuss the sexual desirability of fictional characters.
Dave cops to having a crush on Wilma Flintstone, the red-headed spitfire that fat-fingered fool Fred Flintstone lucked into marrying.
Cat is even more into the prehistoric housewife. “Wilma Flintstone is the most desirable woman who has ever lived,” he states definitively.
This is hilarious partly because Wilma Flintstone, in addition to being a total smoke show, has never lived because she is a fictional cartoon character.
When Dave asks his spaceship mate what he thinks of Betty Rubble, he says, “I’d go with Betty, but I’d be thinking about Wilma.”
Their fantasies are for naught because, as Dave says of Wilma with the perfect note of misplaced seriousness and sincerity, “She'd never leave Fred, and we know it."
Yes, that is what is ultimately standing in the way of them having a romantic or sexual relationship with a fictional character who canonically died during a non-existent time when humans and dinosaurs comfortably coexisted.
“Backwards” divides our heroes. While Cat and Dave contemplate Wilma Flintstone’s understated sexiness, the Rimmer hologram is conducting a driving test in outer space for Kryten, the block-headed android who figured prominently in only one episode in the first season but has been promoted to regular here—aboard the smaller ship Stabug 1.
The third season of Red Dwarf opens with a Star Wars-style opening crawl explaining what happened to Dave's pregnancy, why Holly, the ship’s dry-witted sentient computer, is now Hilly, a woman, and how Kryten became part of the gang.
The show prankishly puts all this information into text that flies by so rapidly that it’s impossible to read without freeze-framing.
Alternately, you can harness the awesome power of the internet and find out from Quora that the crawl reads, “Three million years in the future, Dave Lister, the last human being alive, discovers he is pregnant after a liaison with his female self in a parallel universe. His pregnancy concludes with the successful delivery of twin boys, Jim and Bexley. However, because they were conceived in another universe with different physical laws, they suffer from highly accelerated growth rates and are both eighteen years old within three days of being born. In order to save their lives, Lister returns them to the universe of their origin where they are reunited with their father (a woman), and are able to lead comparatively normal lives. Well, as normal as you can be if you've been born in a parallel universe and your father's a woman and your mother's a man and you're eighteen years old three days after your birth. Shortly afterward, Kryten, the service mechanoid who had left the ship after being rescued from his own crashed vessel, the Nova 5, is found in pieces after his space bike crash lands onto an asteroid. Lister rebuilds the 'noid, but he fails to recapture his former personality.
Meanwhile, Holly, the increasingly erratic Red Dwarf computer, performs a head sex change operation on himself. He bases his new face on Hilly, a female computer with whom he'd once fallen madly in love. And now the saga continues.”
Kryten and Rimmer accidentally travel through a time hole and end up in an alternate 1993 where time travels backward.
It’s Benjamin Button time as the hologram and the android acclimate to a world where everything happens in reverse.
In this world, mugging entails a mugger forcing fifty dollars into Dave’s wallet at knifepoint.
Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) and Hologram Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie) take advantage of this anomaly by becoming a successful freak show duo known as “The Sensational Reverse Brothers.” In this mad mirror world, forward is backward, and backward is forward.
Rimmer and Kryten are so taken with their new lives that when Dave and Cat arrive to take them back, they don’t want to go until they lose their sweet new gig after getting into a bar brawl.
It would be more accurate to say that they got fired before getting into a bar brawl since everything here is backward, including the fisticuffs that lead to their termination.
The backward bar brawl is beautiful, a wild explosion of physical comedy with a sci-fi flair.
In its first two seasons, Red Dwarf was boldly minimalist, with just four characters (Dave, Rimmer, Cat, and Holly) and one location, the Red Dwarf.
“Backwards” opens up its world by bringing Kryten permanently into the fold and visiting both the past and the earth.
There’s something special about the minimalism of early Red Dwarf, but I can see where it might be difficult, if not possible, to maintain it going forward.
“Backwards” opened up Red Dwarf’s universe. It contracts again with the aptly named “Marooned.”
The episode opens with Hilly (Hattie Hayridge) giving the crew the bad news that they are about to hit five black holes and must depart immediately. Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer leave in the Starbug.
The ship is hit by a meteor and crash-lands on a snowy, isolated, inhospitable planet. That description makes the episode sound more action-packed than it actually is because the essence of “Marooned,” and the show, in general, is talking and the yin-yang odd couple chemistry of Craig Charles and Chris Barrie.
When I write about an action movie or a superhero epic, it’s almost invariably pejorative if I refer to what I’m reviewing is talky. That’s because those genres thrive on spectacle rather than dialogue.
Science fiction is generally a spectacle-heavy genre that transports us to alien worlds and introduces us to fantastical creatures beyond our imagination.
That’s not Red Dwarf. It belongs to the small but vibrant field of working-class science fiction epitomized by Dark Star and Space Truckers. It’s not about special effects. It’s about characters and relationships and dialogue.
The third season of Red Dwarf finds it moving steadily away from the rigid minimalism and economy of the previous season. Yet, it’s still far less reliant on eye candy or action than most science fiction.
“Marooned” is a bottle episode built on the sturdy foundation of the Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer relationship. It finds the intergalactic odd couple kibbitzing to keep from going insane and succumbing to the dreaded Space Madness.
Since I was diagnosed as being Autistic, I’ve kept a running tally of every character in pop culture who is autism-coded. I can add Arnold Rimmer to the list. I find him painfully relatable in his sadness, his rigidity and fetish for repetition and ritual, and his inability to fit in anywhere.
Like a surprising number of men, Rimmer is obsessed with Ancient Greece. He proudly informs Lister that he has an affinity for all things military because, in a previous life, he was Alexander the Great’s eunuch.
Poor Rimmer. Even in previous incarnations, he was a loser. “Marooned” is a two-hander that finds Charles and Barrie expertly delivering Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s sparkling dialogue while their iconic characters go loopy with hunger and cold and must make greater and greater sacrifices for the sake of survival.
Things get so grim that the pair contemplate offering up their most prized possessions as fodder for the fire: Lister’s guitar or Rimmer’s 19th-century painted wooden soldiers and/or chest.
That sounds much grimmer than it plays because it’s so funny and humane. Arnold Rimmer and Dave Lister are two of the all-time great duos, right up there with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, and “Marooned” is an excellent showcase that highlights the depth and richness of their strange and wonderful bond.
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