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Red Dwarf: ‘Can of Worms’ Review

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Last night, I saw the final episode of the current season of Red Dwarf. How sad that we’ll now have to wait a year for any more. Season 11 turned out to be one of the best Red Dwarf series ever put on screen. Fun, laugh-out-loud episodes like Twentica went hand-in-hand with more downbeat, thoughtful installments like Samsara. But what can be said about Can of Worms? Well, I suppose you’d better stop fiddling with yourself and read my review to find out.

Judged simply as another installment of Red Dwarf, Can of Worms has a great deal to recommend it. It’s long overdue that The Cat got an episode focused on him. What’s more, the episode feels thematically appropriate to the character. The Cat has always been likeable, but ultimately very shallow, so it feels apt that Can of Worms should hone in on his sex life (one of the few things that truly matters to him). In spite of this, he still gets to be the hero at the end of the episode, which makes a nice change. It also indicates that, though The Cat can be selfish, he is also capable of stepping up to the plate to save his shipmates when circumstances demand it.

To give a brief summary, The Cat is seduced by a polymorph posing as a female cat, which impregnates him and thereby forces the Dwarfers to band together to fight the resultant offspring. Ultimately, only The Cat can tell the polymorphs from the real Dwarf crew because ‘a mama always knows’, which gives him the chance to kill the monsters and be the hero. That’s another major point in this episode’s favour: it has a nice, clean, uncomplicated (by Dwarf standards) set-up with a straightforward resolution. There is complexity in the episode, but it arises from the characters’ own foibles and questionable decisions. For example, there’s one scene in which there are multiple versions of each Red Dwarf crew member on screen simultaneously, as the polymorphs impersonate them. This situation only occurs because the Dwarfers failed to dispose of the polymorphs when an earlier opportunity arose (they looked so cute when they were little!) and because they then allowed themselves to get split up. This is classic Dwarf and it makes for great comedy: the situation is bad to start with, but the characters’ inability to deal with it is what escalates it.

On a related note, it’s nice to see Polymorphs make a comeback as the monster of the week. They were one of the most conceptually interesting creatures in the classic series and they always seemed a little underused to me.

All in all, Can of Worms is a funny, action-oriented episode with a couple of great comic set-pieces. It’s certainly a worthy addition to the series.

However, I do have one complaint. It doesn’t feel like a season finale. Don’t get me wrong: series 11 had a purely episodic approach with little-to-no interconnecting narrative linking the episodes. That’s fine: Red Dwarf doesn’t need a series narrative to work and each episode can stand up on its own merits. I wasn’t expecting something that gave a big series finale plot pay-off. However, it would have been nice if the episode had tied the rest of the series together thematically. There wasn’t much thematic cohesion throughout the series, so an episode that successfully united its predecessors would have made a worthy season finale.

But ho hum. The episode we have is the episode we have and it’s actually very good. Minor thematic gripes aside, it gets my seal of approval and my dugong of congratulation.

#Secret diary of a fat admirer #Red Dwarf #red dwarf 11 #red dwarf xi #The Cat #Kryten #Lister #Rimmer #can of worms

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fBhGWKCq24)

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Red Dwarf: A Personal Reflection

Guess what, Tumblr! You’re actually going to get a feature-length blog courtesy of yours truly for once. I’m technically supposed to be working now, but my clients seem to have pissed off into the sunset, leaving me at a loose end. Due to the return of Red Dwarf to British telly screens, I’ve been hankering to write something about what the show means to me. So let’s use this precious time in which nobody is paying me minimum wage to do anything to talk about that.

I first encountered Red Dwarf when I was too young to know what it was about or to pick up on most of the jokes or even understand a lot of the out-there concepts that it toys with. I was just a toddler- I don’t think I could have been older tha five. I also had EPIC AUTISM, which meant most of the world was a baffling sequence of hallucinatory-feeling pseudo-experiences for me anyway. I could blither on about what this tells us about the society we humans have made (trust me, my early hyper-literal-yet-surreal impressions say a lot more about that than they do about my brain chemistry), but that’s a blog for another day. The point is, I was very young and mightily disjointed in my thinking. It’s therefore impressive that Red Dwarf mananged to latch onto me ol’ brain-tank anyway. I just responded to it intrinsically. Looking back, I remember threethings standing out: the bleak, forboding tone (astonishingly bleak, in fact, considering it’s a comedy), the sense of isoltion (Red Dwarf is three million years from Earth, remember) and the not-entirely human nature of some of the protagonists. I didn’t necessarily get the jokes, but I was fascinated by the sense that these people were alone in the vastness of space. It’s fair to say that this was my first encounter with something that later came to preoccupy me regarding sci-fi: the problem-solving and interpersonal behaviours of small groups of people in the intense isolation of space. Also, on a similar note, the idea that space is so enormous and remote that it forms an inherently isolating environment. I found (and still find) the idea of getting lost in the vastness of infinity with only a few companions a strangely alluring idea. Obviously, I didn’t have the words to express these feelings when I first saw Red Dwarf: I just knew that something about it was cool.

Anyway, fast forward more than a decade, and I picked up the series again. I can’t remember exactly how I rediscovered it- though I suspect it hinged on asking my sister “what was that sci-fi show with the humanoid cat in it?” As a considerably older, wiser me, I was able to get it as well as appreciate it. And fuck me if it wasn’t really, really funny. As well as responding intuitively to the sense of deep, oddly-compelling isolation, I was able to fall in love with the humour. Rimmer’s pedantry and Lister’s snide remarks; The Cat’s self-obsession and Kryten’s alternating literal-mindedness and passive aggression. It was a riot. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I watched series the classic series 1-8 and just plain enjoyed it. I grew attached to the characters and learned to feel for their struggles and tribulations, too. Bear in mind that at ages 16-18, I was basically content for the first time in my life. Life had not, frankly, been a lot of laughs up until that point, so I rediscovered Red Dwarf at a point in time when I could fall for the humour without needing anything more, really. I was okay, and that meant I could appreciate it from a purely technical standpoint without ascribing additional emotional resonance to it. It’s a mark in the show’s favour that, even when being judged just as a sci-fi show and just as a comedy, it still held up and kept me hooked.

Which brings us to now. Seeing Series 11 come to fruition caused me to return to the show. Now I’m viewing to through the eyes of a rather cynical, adult... but also through the eyes of someone who is socially and politically aware. The appeal of space’s isolation now makes sense to me. On a deep, emotional level, it’s about escaping the complexities we find here on Earth. How does Doctor Manhattan put it in Watchmen? “I am tire of being caught in the tangle of their lives”. Red Dwarf’s universe is pretty bleak, but it still has a certain allure, especially considering that the central characters can still find humour in their situation. What’s more, I’m now able to appreciate the show’s underlying poltical and philosophical ideas in a way I wasn’t able to before. It’s not complicated, but it is heartfelt. The show’s central political thesis is that social class is arbitrary and that personal worth stems from basic human decency not necessarily career accomplisments or self-serving goal-attainment. It’s philosophical thesis is eve simpler: everyone is capable of decency or heroism. What’s more, one doesn’t necessarily have to transform oneself as a person to exhibit these qualities, as they can co-exist with ordinary human personality flaws and failings. Rimmer is still Rimmer, but he nonethelesss became Ace (and, in another version of himself, a working class hero). It’s fundamentally redemptive. That’s Red Dwarf’s genius, I think: combining a down-beat, pessimistic tone that emphasises the more brutal aspects of reality with an optimistic message. The world might be cruel and unfair, but you can be better than that. I’m too cynical and too realistic to feel heartened by blind, chirpy optimism, but Red Dwarf’s message still has the power to make me feel better about life. It’s optimistic but it’s not unrealistically opimistic.

So what does Red Dwarf mean to me? A lot of dispirate, seemingly-contradictory things. It’s both an escape and a reminder that I don’t have to escape. It’s a brutal portrayal of unfair circumstances (and we can all relate to that on some level), and a toolkit for rising above them. Oh, and it’s still really, really fucking funny.