My two favourite space comedies share a birthday! Final Space and Red Dwarf both happened to come out on February 15th, just thirty years apart.
So a very happy birthday to the slobbish space heroes,
the much more competent love interests,
the Cats,
the friendly robots,
and the Deep Space Insanity Avoidance Companions.
GOD this has been in the works for ages. I always say, you wanna know what a character is or why you like ’em, kill ’em. (Or worse.)
Title: The Punchline
Fandom: Red Dwarf
Characters: Lister and Rimmer, also Holly, sort of, mostly
Summary: A massive cosmic joke is finally drawing to an end for Lister and Rimmer.
Read it on AO3, or-
(more…)Turns out there’s just about to be a French-Canadian version of Brooklyn 99! Almost shot-for-shot and all.
I stumbled across tweets about this yesterday, the same day the last episode of Red Dwarf: The First Three Million Years aired and discussed the extremely ill-advised American version of Red Dwarf. You know, the one where they whitewashed everybody Last Airbender-style. (Craig Charles has some thoughts on it. Thankfully it never made it past the pilot stage.) So gah, my very first, pre-actually-watching-it reaction to this was “See America, it’s not so fun when someone else remakes your show, is it?!” But that’s probably unfair, especially since this version is whitewashed too, what with Amy and Rosa no longer being Latina. SO I would frankly prefer no more remakes or adaptions of this kind please, ever again.
-David Tennant is narrating this! What?! Finally the Doctor Who/Red Dwarf crossover we all were waiting for.
-The show is about “two people trapped in a life together” and the sci-fi was never the most important part. I agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY
-Danny John-Jules is rocking the most AMAZING outfit throughout this doc. He looks like the coolest grandfather that ever existed. Or like a stylish gentleman burglar. (a cat burglar obviously.)
-The same guy who made the music for Red Dwarf made the music for Blackadder! Somehow I’ve gone for years loving both shows and never noticed that.
-At one point the idea of giving Kryten a Swedish accent was floated, which would have been bizarre (though I think they could have made it work.)
-I did actually already know this, but Craig Charles mentions it on the show so… Grant & Naylor sent him the Red Dwarf script because they were worried Cat might be a racist caricature. Charles didn’t think so but he did want to play Lister, and the rest is history. So one of the most popular sitcoms ever created only happened the way it did because of one of those much-derided sensitivity checks.
Okay so obviously I am deep in fandom hell when it comes to Red Dwarf now, there’s headcanons, there’s fanfiction, there’s everything! But naturally when that happens I start thinking something along the lines of “why do I like this thing?” And I think I know why I like Red Dwarf so much, beyond the jokes, I mean. It’s because almost all the time it’s constantly extolling kindness as a virtue.
No really.
Much of it revolves around Lister. Lister is that rarity of a sitcom character who’s a really geniunely good person. You wouldn’t expect him to be, considering his situation, but he is.
(alright, there’s the odd 80s-era sexist joke in there, in fact there’s the odd 80s-era sexist joke in there even now, but we’re going to ignore that.)
It’s Lister’s act of kindness in saving an innocent cat that kickstarts the whole plot of Red Dwarf and creates a whole new species in the world. (The Promised Land even points this out, I think.) It’s also Lister’s kindness which turns Kryten into more than a mechanoid and Cat into slightly less of uh, a cat. But most important of all I think is Lister’s relationship with Rimmer.
Lister has absolutely no reason to like Rimmer and he doesn’t. But, especially once he learns why Rimmer is the way he is, he does treat him like a person. Whether or not Lister likes Rimmer is completely irrelevant to whether or not he’s going to talk him out of suicide. And that strikes me as something really quite big and important, that just happens to be wrapped up in a big wacky-space-comedy bow.
Rimmer himself is another matter. There’s an extent to which he’ll always remain an arrogant little shit, because that’s where the comedy comes from, but we’ve seen him learn and grow over the years and the show indicates that a lot of that is Lister’s influence.
RIMMER: The Anubis stone? You can’t use that on him! I need it! It’s the only way for me to remain diamond-light! If I don’t recharge I’ll lose all my superpowers!
LISTER: [putting his hand on Rimmer’s shoulder] Mighty… We’re gonna have to. All great superheroes put the needs of other people before themselves.
RIMMER: Not all superheroes. What about the Fickle Four, who save only those wearing designer clothes? Or Doctor Dodgy, who saves people but first asks them to step behind a curtain and remove their underwear? [Heavy sigh] I knew this was too good to last. [Gesturing to the Anubis Stone] What do I do?
The Promised Land
Red Dwarf is a big ol’ daft sitcom with continuity leaking out all over the place, but its beating heart has always been “SEE? SEE? PEOPLE CAN MAKE EACH OTHER BETTER!” You know… life has thrown you some curveballs, you’re trapped in deep space and everyone you ever knew is dead. Why not be kind?
Why not give some sunlight to someone who you don’t like, but has none?
I completely forgot this was happening! But I didn’t miss it, hooray!
It’s so sweet and funny. I love so much that all the Red Dwarf actors are just normal versions of their outlandish comedy characters.
While browsing the Red Dwarf wiki I found this little tidbit on the page for “Siliconia”:
Oh, I never noticed that, ow my heart. Here’s the scene in question from “Siliconia”-
RIMMER: I like being a mechanoid. I don’t have to become an officer anymore, compete with my brothers. Envy, ambition, that acid ball of resentment I carried around with me the whole time, it’s gone.
LISTER: We have to get your neuroses back!
RIMMER: But sir, I don’t want them back.
LISTER: Then what makes you you?
RIMMER: I don’t want to be me. I want to be a mechanoid, programmed to serve. Sometimes when I was young I’d sit for hours staring at our fish tank feeling envious.
CAT: You wanted to be a fish tank?!
RIMMER: I wanted to be a fish. They had food, a small rock to swim in and out of, they didn’t have a care in the world.
CAT: That’s cos I wasn’t there!
RIMMER: Those little fish, they’d never know what it was like to fail and disappoint. They’d just swim around in circles, not a thought in their heads. And it’s the thinking that causes all the pain.
And way, way back, thirty years ago, during the very first episode of the show-
LISTER: Not until you pass your engineer’s exam. And you won’t do that
because you’ll just go in there and flunk again.
RIMMER: Lister, last time I only failed by the narrowest of narrow
margins.
LISTER: You what? You walked in there, wrote, “I am a fish,” four
hundred times, did a funny little dance, and fainted.
RIMMER: That’s a total lie!
LISTER: No, it’s not! Petersen told me.
RIMMER: (Mocking LISTER) “No, it’s not! Petersen told me.” Lister, if
you must know, what I did was, I wrote a discourse on power circuits
which was simply too radical, too unconventional, too mould- breaking for the examiners to accept.
LISTER: Yeah. You said you were a fish.
The Siliconia speech might not even have been an intended nod to continuity, but dang… Rimmer is only happy when he’s a fish.
Well, today has been rough for many reasons… but hey three bits of good news!
One, there’s going to be another Red Dwarf documentary:
Two, there’s probably going to be a new Crash Bandicoot game:
And three…
Katie Hopkins finally, finally, oh thank god finally will have to take her bile and hatred somewhere else, SHE’S BEEN BANNED FROM TWITTER!
The Radio Times put this interview up yesterday! There’s some great little tidbits in there:
I find that really reassuring, y’know.
And of course, regarding THAT ONE SCENE:
The other night I watched Out of Time, the Red Dwarf season 6 finale, having not actually watched it in waaaaay too long. And oh man I forgot how important an episode for Rimmer it is. “I say fight!” is huge for him! Probably the biggest jump forward in his characterisation pre-the Dave era! And then it’s… sort of forgotten about, but eh.
“Better dead than smeg!” is such a good line. It’s funny, because obviously the word Smeg is always smegging funny. But then you think about what he’s actually saying there, what he’s saying about his future self (who isn’t a million miles away from his past self)… “I’d rather die than be that person, an unequivocal bad guy who enables fascists.”
(And of course in the episode prior to this one Rimmer was trapped for six hundred years with nothing but even worse versions of himself around, probably leaving him a lot of time to muse on his bad qualities. He’s not about to let another incredibly evil version of himself run rampant! Makes sense, right?)
I always so dearly love what can only be called I’ll Never Turn To The Dark Side moments and this is such a good one. I wish it’d gotten more attention and callbacks within the show itself. (I suppose it was technically also setting up for Ace in the next season, if they’d had that planned at that point, I have no idea, but…) It’s just, Rimmer is such a fascinating character because there is honour underneath the smug git surface, it shows up so rarely but he (and Lister too) definitely know it’s there, just so hard to reach. Which is just another of the many, many tragedies of the characters of this dumb space sitcom.