Red Dwarf Back to Earth Review
When I first heard about the new Dave Red Dwarf Special I was excited. Then I learned that it was to be written by Doug Naylor only without Rob Grant and I became worried – the last two series of the original show were extremely poor. So I approached Back To Earth with mixed feelings.
In the end it far exceeded my expectations – in a negative direction. It was much, much worse than I had thought possible.
The fault didn’t lie with the cast, @bobbyllew and the others slipped back into their characters with ease. No, the problem lay squarely with the script. It was uninspired, slow and lacking in laughs. It stank.
One of the things I really appreciated about the early series of Red Dwarf was the smart, tight plotting. In Back to Earth that was missing and with the absence of a laugh track I’m sure I could actually hear the sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped. There was no depth and the story just plodded from one unimaginative set piece to the next. To add insult to injury the one surprise reverse was simply a lift from an earlier (much better) episode.
One nice touch was the Bladerunner stuff (although the “writing your own life” idea was nearer to Doctor Who – The Mind Robber). It was a good spoof but merely underlined the paucity of ideas in the new material. It didn’t make me want to watch more Red Dwarf, it made me want to watch Bladerunner again.
All of which I could have forgiven had it been funny. It wasn’t. True, there were a few good lines and the odd superb visual gag – the Starbug car was brilliant, as was the Bladerunner photo enhancement. However the script was in serious need of “gagging up”. That wouldn’t have been difficult, there were plenty of missed opportunities for humour. The cast did a valiant job of squeezing what laughs there were from the material they were given but it just wasn’t enough.
Back To Earth was initially intended to be a two part show but was extended to three episodes during production. Apparently Naylor couldn’t stop writing new material. He’d have done far better spending the time tightening up a two episode show. As it was the final lines of episode three were unintentionally ironic.
Still, perhaps it’s appropriate that Red Dwarf Back to Earth had three episodes. One episode for each of the letters ‘R’, ‘I’ and ‘P’.
Possibly related posts:
•Red Dwarf Series Ten
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