In Its Third and Fourth Episodes the Cult British Science-Fiction Sitcom Red Dwarf is a Masterful Combination of Droll and Asurd
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My children are on vacation, but camp hasn't started yet for them, so I need to steal time to work on this website and my various literary, podcast and dental endeavors.
It can be difficult to focus when you have so little time to work and so many distractions, particularly when history was made less than an hour ago.
I’m writing this in the aftermath of Donald Trump being convicted of 34 FELONIES! 34 felonies! Holy fucking shit. What a wild, terrible ride this man’s time as a politician has been!
Trump’s awful ubiquity has aged us all decades. It’s taken years off our lives. But sometimes something very wonderful happens like Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and being found guilty of 34 felonies in relation to the hush money he paid on the woman he cheated on his wife with shortly after the birth of his youngest son.
The only downside to the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-Commander in Chief becoming the first president to be convicted of dozens of felonies is that it will probably only help his chances of getting elected.
It will take more than 34 felonies to disillusion Trump’s worshipful cult. It's crazy, is what it is, but I am not here to talk about Donald Trump being found guilty of 34 felonies.
I'm here to discuss the third and fourth episode of the cult British science fiction comedy Red Dwarf. I was introduced to this show last month and was duly impressed by its sharp wit and bold darkness.
Red Dwarf has a brazenly bleak premise for a sitcom. It begins on a ship in the near future, then jumps ahead three million years to a dystopian distant future where everyone on the ship died ages ago with the exception of lovable slacker hero David Lister (Craig Charles), Cat (Danny John-Jules), a soulful and snazzily dressed mutant humanoid descendent of Dave’s pet feline who is a cross between Morris Day and Morris the Cat, the hologram of Dave’s coworker Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), an anal uptight outer space Dwight Shrute, and finally Holly (Norman Lovett), the ship’s sentient computer.
"Balance of Power," the third episode of Red Dwarf, has a brief flashback to a future that unsurprisingly looks a lot like the late 1980s but otherwise takes place exclusively on a ship that is sparsely occupied because everyone else is long dead.
We open with Dave chafing under the strict, arbitrary leadership of his hologram tormentor. This is the first thing I've seen Charles in. I could not be more impressed. He's extraordinarily likable and has such great comic timing and such an irresistible delivery that he gets big laughs out of lines that aren't even jokes.
Early in the episode, for example, Dave expresses his frustrated desire to let loose and have a little fun in the hellscape that he finds himself in by telling his hologram coworker, “I want to BOO-GY on DOWN!” by which he means that he wants to “generally slob around, have a few laffs!”
Watching Red Dwarf is reconnecting me to the Anglophile that I was in high school and college when my dream job involved interviewing Blur and Elastica for Melody Maker or New Music Express.
The humor of Red Dwarf is extremely British. Yet I was not terribly surprised to discover that in 1992, there was an NBC pilot for an American adaptation of Red Dwarf starring Craig Bierko (who was also up for the role Matthew Perry ended up playing in Friends) as Dave and Whit Stillman regular Chris Eigeman as Rimmer that did not get a great response.
So a second pilot was cobbled together from footage from the first pilot and the British show, with Deep State Nine star Terry Farrell as a sexy female Cat. That didn't fare any better, so the closest we’ve come to an American Red Dwarf is Futurama.
The humor of Red Dwarf is verbal, but it’s also physical. Rimmer may be a hologram, but he has body parts from various other former coworkers. Rimmer was not popular with his colleagues, some of whom execute posthumous revenge by pummeling him when he tries to use their limbs.
Dave is frustrated that he was paired with the hologram of someone he disliked and was no damn fun at all instead of someone like Kristine Kochanski, a cute coworker he had a crush on. Dave asks Rimmer to let him spend just four hours with Kristine’s hologram but the long-dead joykill is worried that Dave would not want to switch back after the allotted time is done.
Our hero wants to get an advantage over Rimmer by passing an exam. This worries Rimmer so he adopts the form of Kristine Kochanski to try to convince Dave of her disinterest.
Rimmer has trouble acting like a human being. He is particularly ill-suited to pretending to be a woman, so it does not take Dave long to see through his ruse.
"Balance of Power" is very funny, but it is also unmistakably melancholy. When Dave sits in the ship’s empty disco and thinks back to when he had friends, a life, and a future that didn’t seem hopelessly bleak, it’s hard not to feel for him and his unfortunate lot.
Red Dwarf is boldly minimalist, but it doesn't need more than a handful of characters to build a lonely world brought to life in part through impressive miniature work that gives the sense that the ship is hurtling through space, not on a soundstage somewhere in England.
As I write this, there is a blog post marinating in my mind about how Jerry Seinfeld, as part of his weird commitment to saying and doing bizarrely embarrassing shit, went on Bari Weiss’ podcast and whined about how we need a return to traditional masculinity, more virile alpha males like Sean Connery, Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell (seriously) and a cultural hierarchy.
When I think about a rich white dude with some crazy fragile masculinity yearning publicly for a return of a great cultural hierarchy, my mind invariably assumes that he’s talking not so subtly about a world where rich, macho white dudes are at the very top, and everyone else is way below, except for Muhammad Ali, because he was good at talking and punching people, and talking very colorfully about the people he had punched or was going to punch.
Also, Ali was an icon of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Ali was pretty fucking cool. We could use more Muhammad Alis but not more Sean Connerys. The man was a great actor but a less-than-great human being.
“Waiting for God,” the fourth episode of Red Dwarf, is fundamentally concerned with the very different places Dave Lister occupies in the hierarchy of his hologram jerk dead coworker Rimmer and Cat, the humanoid cat mutant descended from Dave’s cat.
To Rimmer, Dave is the only person on the ship to whom he can feel superior and someone who occupies the bottom rung even when the world has gone mad and everyone is dead.
To the evolved and un-evolved Cat, Lister is nothing less than the great God his people have worshiped and fought wars over since time immemorial.
History here functions like a wonky game of intergalactic telephone, so things inevitably get scrambled somewhere in the timeline. This leads Rimmer to believe that the United States was discovered by Colombo, the “bloke in the dirty Mack,” and Dave Lister, a working stiff, has been memorialized as the great, all-powerful God Cloister.
Rimmer, however, takes unseemly delight in being able to look down at another person. He has the personality of an insufferable know-it-all without actually being particularly smart or competent.
He’s emptily ambitious despite being dead and occupying a future that doesn’t seem better than death. There’s something both funny and sad about Rimmer’s posthumous, pointless pursuit of advancement.
The ship is visited by an alien pod. This causes excitement on Rimmer’s part, who hopes that the pod will open to reveal a beautiful, six-breasted woman. However, the climactic reveal of the pod’s content proves intensely anti-climactic, in keeping with the show’s subversive depiction of a science fiction future that’s grubby, sad, and blue-collar rather than shiny or perfect.
Red Dwarf embraces science-fiction of ideas. These include a sentient toaster whose uselessness engenders an existential crisis. I haven’t read The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I imagine its tone is similar: very smart, very British, very droll, and gleefully absurd.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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