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SESETEEDRD – what could it mean …

Sounds like something Kryten might say while trying to break his programming.

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The dog looks like his name is Duane. 

Yes. He looks like Duane Allman.

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What were your guesses?

I took the point at which they were sucked into the portal to be the end of the first episode, though I watched the subsequent minute or two. And I took the point at which they rocked up at Coronation Street to be the end of the second.

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I watched the 70 minute version that’s presently on the iPlayer, but I watched it in three daily chunks. I guessed where the joins were. I started a Red Dwarf-athon on January 1st, one episode per day.

I hadn’t watched most of them since the ’90s.

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That’s interesting – I disliked Part 1 all over again when I watched it, but Part 2 drew me in. I think the first part is especially jarring because it’s set on Red Dwarf, the same environment and circumstances as the first few series, but without anything like the same energy.

But when I saw the Red Dwarf DVD cover in the shop, the guy behind the counter who’s a fan, the kids on the bus who recognise Lister, that’s when I saw it for what it really is – a big, affectionate, one-off novelty. The whole point of it, I think, is to exist outside the usual Red Dwarf universe.

It’s almost like an elaborate Comic Relief skit. Rik Mayall would never break character as Alan B’Stard to channel his Young Ones persona in The New Statesman, but in the Comic Relief sketch, he does. A Dalek would never audition for Eurovision in Doctor Who.. etc.

So although obviously it’s a properly produced, 70 minute feature rather than a quick sketch, I think the same principle applies. Breaking the rules for a bit of fun for the fans.

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The one thing that kept pulling me out of RD:BTE was the unquestioning resignation of the crew to being characters in a TV sitcom in this dimension.
It was just incongruent with how Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat would have behaved in that situation. It felt fake. The crew has been whisked to plenty of strange dimensions in the past and their first instinct was always “ok how can we escape this place and get back to our own dimension”.
In BTE they just immediately resign to the fact that they are TV characters? It didn’t feel like we were watching the RD crew. It felt like watching Craig Charles, Danny John Jules, Chris Barrie and Robert Llewellyn pretend to be Red Dwarf characters because the script told them to.

Well .. I’ve just watched Back to Earth for the first time since it was first broadcast, and to my great surprise – I liked it. A lot.
Apologies if extreme necroposting is considered bad form for your first post, by the way.
Anyway I really disliked it first time around, mostly for the reasons articulated in the first post. What you could have written above was “It felt like watching Craig Charles, Danny John Jules, Chris Barrie and Robert Llewellyn”, and stopped there. That’s exactly what it is. It is massively fourth-wall-nudging; that’s the whole point I think.
The whole thing is a sly, affectionate wink in the direction of the fans. If you accept it for what it is – a more slow-paced, reflective, subtly nostalgic and wistful one-off 70 minute feature, it works really well. Or at least, it did for me.

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