Red Dwarf, Season 1

Revisiting the first season of this seminal British sci-fi sitcom after almost twenty years, I found it to have aged well. Sure, the effects and sets are cheap and cheesy, but I found the stories to be as entertaining and funny as I remembered.

The opening and closing credits are as powerful as ever. The first shot you see is of a space-suited man painting a wall red, which pans out to show that he's painting the hull of a colossal space ship, the Red Dwarf.

The composer of the score does an great job with the majestic music adding to your sense of the utter insignificance of the human in the face of the colossal architecture of the ship. The closing credits feature a catchy and irreverent pop tune (with a hint of despair to it) about how cold and lonely it is in space, and how preferable it would be to lie on a beach in the sun.

Red Dwarf is about ordinary people. They're not driven to explore space and better the human race. For them, it's just a job, and not a very good one. The characters are the lowest of the low, lower than redshirts, barely even antiheroes. They're not smart, or brave, and they scrape through their adventures by luck. Red Dwarf was a real tonic for the sanctimonious Star Trek: the Next Generation.

The Red Dwarf is a mining vessel, five miles long, of the Jupiter Mining Corporation. All the ship's crew have been killed in an accident, except for one man and his non-human companions. They're lost in space, three million years in the future, and even if they do get back to Earth there'll be nothing left of their lives.

The main characters are:

Dave Lister: a slobby, obnoxious, but amiable third technician who was just working on the ship until he could save enough for his plan of moving to Fiji with console operator Kristine Kochanski. When the ship's crew were killed, he'd been enclosed in a stasis chamber as punishment for concealing a cat on the ship.

Arnold J. Rimmer: second technician and Lister's superior. He's officious, universally disliked, an ambitious failure, and the complete opposite of Lister. So the comedic implications of their being roommates are obvious.

Rimmer was killed along with the rest of the crew during the accident (which he caused), and has been reanimated as a hologram to keep Lister company. Out of the entire crew, he was the one Lister had spoken with the most (despite most of their conversation being insults).

The Cat: vain and self-absorbed with an enormous wardrobe of garish zoot suits. He's the evolved descendant of Lister's cat, and the last of his kind (the others abandoned the ship after a religious dispute).

Holly: the ship's senile computer, allegedly with an I.Q. of 6000. Played in a wonderful deadpan by Norman Lovett as a disembodied head on a screen.

Despite being only six episodes, the first series quickly became a hit in the UK:

1.1 The End: this episode sets the scene: we meet Lister and Rimmer at their demeaning jobs repairing vending machines. Lister is put in stasis and reanimated three million years later to find an empty ship ...

1.2 Future Echoes: the ship reaches light speed and the crew start to see 'echoes' of future events. Rimmer sees Lister being killed in an explosion, and Lister tries to prevent this destiny from occurring.

1.3 Balance of Power: Lister wants to activate the holographic recording of his secret love, Kristine Kochanski. To do this, he'd have to deactivate Rimmer, who refuses. Lister decides to take an exam so he'll outrank Rimmer and be able to order his cooperation.

1.4 Waiting For God: Lister discovers that the cat race had erroneously deified him. He's horrified at the thought that holy wars were fought in his name. Meanwhile, Rimmer is analysing what he believes is a craft built by aliens who can give him a new body.

1.5 Confidence and Paranoia: a mutated virus infects Lister and causes his hallucinations to become real. Personifications of the confident and paranoid aspects of his personality appear.

1.6 Me²: a second hologram of Rimmer is activated, and the two move in together. Rimmer 1 discovers that maybe hell isn't other people after all ...

Red Dwarf is a landmark in the history of science fiction shows and is definitely worth your attention. Sticklers be warned: it pays little attention to continuity, and even less to scientific accuracy. It's a lot of fun though.