Red Dwarf: Back To Earth

The dehumidifier has been running in the spare room for almost a week, and every night there’s a full bucket of water to empty. I’m hoping that eventually it slurps less water from the air because the room dries out, but without being able to hermetically seal the spare room, that may be a forlorn hope.

Speaking of things that could be hermetically sealed, this evening, feeling intellectually weak and unable to start on my Spanish homework, we watched Red Dwarf: Return To Earth instead. This is a mini-series of three episodes, made 9 years after the previous series.

My wife looked at me after it was over, and said "hmmph". That was about all, really. Whereas the original series had ramshackle special effects and set design, they remembered to be funny, whereas this got rid of jokes in favour of metaphysical flummery, like a poor photocopy of a script for The Matrix, in which Neo has a night off fighting robots and goes to the cinema to watch The Matrix.

Ahaaaaa. Hilarity ensues.

There’s a long riff on Blade Runner (hairstyles, action sequences,origami) which is quite clever as an idea, but not at all entertaining. It’s as if somebody tried to melt down all the internet comments and half baked ideas and then refine gold out of "wouldn’t it be cool if …" questions. And forgot to include any jokes.

Maybe that was the joke; perhaps the whole thing is a metatextual conceit, a commentary on how fans of programmes clamour for things that will never possibly make them happy, of how studio laugh tracks are actually something I miss, of how depressing it is that everyone from Red Dwarf apart from Kryten seems to have aged horribly, when the reason is that if you compress nine years into the gap between one tv show and another, everything hurts.

Or perhaps I’m just tired and should have gone to bed.