Books Television Movies Favourites Rants Contact
An awful accident kills off the entire crew of the Red Dwarf, a really, really big mining ship, with the exception of Lister, a lowly maintenance technician whose been placed in stasis as punishment for refusing to surrender his pet cat - pets are strictly illegal on board the ship. Three million years later, the radiation has been cleared to safe levels and the ship's computer pulls Lister out of stasis. Lister, not terribly bright (though he grows a few brain cells as the series goes on), and overly concerned with beer and curry, is presented initially as the hero of the show.
We start with a fairly small cast: Dave Lister, possibly the last human alive; Arnold J. Rimmer, a hologram of his dead bunk mate (and former superior officer); Cat, the humanoid descendent of Lister's pregnant pet; and Holly, the not quite entirely there, supposedly super-intelligent ship's computer. Later, they'll add Kryten, a robot butler originally rescued from a shipwreck during the first season.
It's a comedy, I should mention, if that's not obvious, and it's really funny. In many ways, the show is a spoof of television and movie SF and it plays with many of the same themes: time travel, alternate dimensions, bizarre aliens, definitions of life, astronomical disasters, interspecies love, alien diseases - the whole range. And it does it all without taking anything seriously.
The special effects are better than is typical for a British show, but technology gets better all of the time, I suppose. It has it's own bouncy, happy little theme song. As mentioned, it's hilarious - the writing is solid and has fun with just about everything and everyone.
While I've only seen the first six seasons (and these are British TV seasons, remember, so generally only a half dozen episodes per season, although they did a few more for seven and eight, I think), and three episodes of the seventh, Red Dwarf makes my list of favourites for genre TV. Probably up there just after the original Star Trek series, actually. Rumours abound of a movie, even on the official web site (the link for which I don't happen to have handy). Seriously thinking about adding an episode guide here.
Oh, and I'm almost certain that the idea for the holographic Doctor on ST: Voyager was ripped off from Red Dwarf. Yes, he's not as annoying as Rimmer, but he's not supposed to be. Hey, just because it's Paramount, doesn't mean that they don't steal ideas - it's how the world works. But Red Dwarf did it first.
<end>
Books Television Movies Favourites Rants Contact
Page last updated: 23 Apr 2003.