Red Dwarf - The Beginning
Nov. 20th, 2012 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daibhidcThat was epic.
I was kind of worried about the title being "The Beginning" - since Red Dwarf started with "The End", did that mean they weren't expecting to make any more? But after this, I'm pretty sure that if they were expecting that, they were wrong.
The first scene with Rimmer's young-adulthood on Io was brilliant. (And it's strangely in keeping with the Red Dwarf ethos that a 23rd century university is represented by everyone dressing like it's the fifties.) At first I thought this was going to be the main plot of the episode, given the title, possibly with a cringe-inducing scene where he happens to meet the lead singer of Smeg and the Heads. But it wasn't. The scene itself was hilarious, especially the bit where the girl next to him tried to warn him. The look on his face as he thought he'd scored a point off her was so first-season Rimmer. Well done, that actor!
And then I thought the plot was going to be Hoagy the Roguey and a duel across time and space. But it's not that, either. These reversals of expectations worked really well. (Another neat trick to catch the viewer wrong-footed; when Cat is incredibly uninterested in a rogue simulant trying to kill Lister, it looks like he's just being the Cat. It's not until Kryten is equally casual that we realise there's something weird going on.)
So the actual plot is an attack by simulants and needing to find a way out of it. And Lister decides, in the face of all the evidence thus far, that Rimmer's Napoleon obsession makes him a military strategist. (Although to be fair, he admits this is purely because he's out of options.)
Mythology gag: The colour-coded "battleplan timetable" (with "Create a brilliant plan" as a note in the corner of the final 15-minute segment) is a nod to the first novel, which describes how Rimmer spends weeks working on his revision timetable, and then with only two days to actually do any revision, realises ... he needs a new timetable.
An interesting bit bit was the Cat suddenly turning out to be incredibly insightful. This actually makes sense, everybody who knows a cat knows that they have an amazing ability to sense things that makes them look like animal geniuses, right up until the next time they walk into a wall for no reason. And the hologram message itself, with its Star Wars gag and revelation tha anyone who knew Mrs Rimmer would consider an odds-on bet, was funny enough that I can forgive the series the fact that this holo-message, which is so important to Rimmer that he has to carry it with him when they abandon ship, has never, ever been mentioned or implied to exist in any way until now.
And then Rimmer, learning the truth about himself, suddenly becomes a better, more balanced person. I wonder how long that's going to last? And the final line, echoing the last line of "The End", which of course was superimposed on a caption that said "The Beginning". Genius!
I've really enjoyed this series. The episodes I've written about here were awesome; the two I skipped were a bit Red Dwarf by numbers, but still very good. One criticism: over the course of the season, I've become more and more convinced that I don't like the new drive room. It's too much like Starbug or Blue Midget's cockpit; apparently when the ship got bigger, the drive room shrunk. A more spacious, less conveniently-designed-for-four-people area makes more sense; this is a ship designed for a much bigger crew than it currently has.
I was kind of worried about the title being "The Beginning" - since Red Dwarf started with "The End", did that mean they weren't expecting to make any more? But after this, I'm pretty sure that if they were expecting that, they were wrong.
The first scene with Rimmer's young-adulthood on Io was brilliant. (And it's strangely in keeping with the Red Dwarf ethos that a 23rd century university is represented by everyone dressing like it's the fifties.) At first I thought this was going to be the main plot of the episode, given the title, possibly with a cringe-inducing scene where he happens to meet the lead singer of Smeg and the Heads. But it wasn't. The scene itself was hilarious, especially the bit where the girl next to him tried to warn him. The look on his face as he thought he'd scored a point off her was so first-season Rimmer. Well done, that actor!
And then I thought the plot was going to be Hoagy the Roguey and a duel across time and space. But it's not that, either. These reversals of expectations worked really well. (Another neat trick to catch the viewer wrong-footed; when Cat is incredibly uninterested in a rogue simulant trying to kill Lister, it looks like he's just being the Cat. It's not until Kryten is equally casual that we realise there's something weird going on.)
So the actual plot is an attack by simulants and needing to find a way out of it. And Lister decides, in the face of all the evidence thus far, that Rimmer's Napoleon obsession makes him a military strategist. (Although to be fair, he admits this is purely because he's out of options.)
Mythology gag: The colour-coded "battleplan timetable" (with "Create a brilliant plan" as a note in the corner of the final 15-minute segment) is a nod to the first novel, which describes how Rimmer spends weeks working on his revision timetable, and then with only two days to actually do any revision, realises ... he needs a new timetable.
An interesting bit bit was the Cat suddenly turning out to be incredibly insightful. This actually makes sense, everybody who knows a cat knows that they have an amazing ability to sense things that makes them look like animal geniuses, right up until the next time they walk into a wall for no reason. And the hologram message itself, with its Star Wars gag and revelation tha anyone who knew Mrs Rimmer would consider an odds-on bet, was funny enough that I can forgive the series the fact that this holo-message, which is so important to Rimmer that he has to carry it with him when they abandon ship, has never, ever been mentioned or implied to exist in any way until now.
And then Rimmer, learning the truth about himself, suddenly becomes a better, more balanced person. I wonder how long that's going to last? And the final line, echoing the last line of "The End", which of course was superimposed on a caption that said "The Beginning". Genius!
I've really enjoyed this series. The episodes I've written about here were awesome; the two I skipped were a bit Red Dwarf by numbers, but still very good. One criticism: over the course of the season, I've become more and more convinced that I don't like the new drive room. It's too much like Starbug or Blue Midget's cockpit; apparently when the ship got bigger, the drive room shrunk. A more spacious, less conveniently-designed-for-four-people area makes more sense; this is a ship designed for a much bigger crew than it currently has.
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Date: 2012-11-20 12:36 pm (UTC)171819 with a firm air date of 2020222324eventually.Joking aside, I hope it comes back soon. I hope they can kiss and make up with Lovett somehow, the antics with Pree early on in the series show we need Holly. And in-universe they've shown that the ship is falling apart slowly without Holly. I kinda hope they can make Hoguey into at least a recurring character, if not incorporate him into the show like S3 did with Kryten, because he was pretty engaging even in the few scenes he was in.
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Date: 2012-11-20 05:27 pm (UTC)The drive room being smaller might be because a) the original fell apart or blew up or turned into blamanche, and what they've got now is how the Dwarfers rebuilt it, and/or b) because they have more sets, and they needed to make one of them smaller to fit them all in. (In S3-5, they only had the bunk room, the drive room (which was different to the drive room in S1-2) a bit of corridor, and the two Starbug compartments. If they needed to go to the medibay or something, they re-dressed one of them.)