Polite Dissent

Hopefully you recognized the source of the title of the previous post. If not, keep reading…

Red Dwarf tells the tale of Dave Lister. In the not-too distant future, Dave is the lowest ranking employee aboard the enormous mining ship Red Dwarf. He breaks the ship’s rules by bringing a stray cat on board, and a pregnant cat at that. The captain orders him to hand the cat over, but Lister refuses and as a result he is placed in suspended animation for punishment. While he was frozen in time, there was a radiation leak on the ship that killed everyone and left the ship dangerously radioactive. The ship’s computer steered the Red Dwarf deep into space until the radiation faded enough that it was safe to wake up Lister. It took 3 million years for the radiation to die down, so Lister may very well be the last human alive, and is still 3 million years away from Earth. To keep him company, the ship has created a hologram of his much hated supervisor Rimmer. In the three million years it took to steer the ship into deep space, the offspring of his pregnant cat have evolved into a bipedal sapient species, and one of these “cats” accompanies Lister and Rimmer on their adventures. They also manage to acquire an obsequious android named Cryten later on.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Red Dwarf the first time I watched it; the humor can be very subtle one moment and over-the-top crude the next. The more I watched it, the more I understood the characters and the better it got. The show does a good job of addressing most of the common science fiction cliches: aliens, time travel, crazy computers, alternate dimensions, etc. It is a very well plotted show, and ideas that are hinted at in the first one or two episodes come to fruition several seasons later.

There are many brilliant moments including the “total immersive” video game Real Life, the good and bad luck viruses (and the maniacal penguin puppet Mr. Fribble) and of course Kristine Kochanski.

The show is available on DVD now (or at least the first four seasons). Here’s a good site for Red Dwarf information (and it’s where I borrowed most of the images)