Category: review

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Red Dwarf X, it’s that Doug Naylor finds it hilarious when characters talk to machines with funny voices.

If there’s a second thing I’ve learned from Red Dwarf X, it’s that I don’t find it particularly hilarious when characters talk to machines with funny voices.

First, the good: there’s far less vending machine romantic mayhem in this episode than I expected. However when “the good” is just relief that the pile of shit is smaller than it could have been, “the good” really reveals itself as a relative concept indeed.

Now, the rest: it just wasn’t funny.

I wish it was.

I really, well, true, and honestly wish that I could laugh the way the studio audience was laughing, but nothing was really…you know…all that good.

Okay, fine, some more good: the dialogue wasn’t awful. It was sub-par, certainly, but not offensively bad the way the Shakespeare scene from a few episodes ago was, or as absolutely everything in the first episode of the series was. But I think there’s a world of difference between “not awful” and “good,” and “Dear Dave” didn’t seem interested in exploring that world.

The plot, as it is, kicks in around halfway through the episode when out of nowhere — and after a particularly terrible setpiece involving charades — the mail arrives. Lister finds a letter from three million years ago suggesting that he might have fathered a child. Then we forget about that for a while until it’s time to end the episode and we get a definitive answer. Spoiler: it’s the one definitive answer we could have gotten without gleaning any insight into the characters.

That’s that, then. The plot is dealt with in two scenes and maybe mentioned in two more. So what do we do the rest of the time? Have Lister hump a vending machine, have Rimmer argue with the MediBot — off-camera, thank Christ — and have Kryten take all of the toilet paper away so that The Cat can walk around for a while with shit in his crack.

If any of that sounds like classic Red Dwarf to you then congratulations, you’re in for a treat. For me, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that Doug at last gave us a full episode about what the crew’s downtime was like…the dead space between adventures…that avenue of quiet comedy between the interesting parts of the characters’ lives that endears me so endlessly to The Venture Bros.…and it was this padded and flat.

Previous bottle episodes like “Marooned” and “Duct Soup” both dealt with extenuating circumstances. In “Marooned” we had Rimmer and Lister in a crashed Starbug, so their exchanges, though now legendary, weren’t representative of their “normal” ones. And in “Duct Soup” Doug had deliberately steered Red Dwarf into a nearby sun so that he could destroy it before it got any worse WHOOPS I MEAN KRYTEN DID THAT SUN THING FOR A DIFFERENT REASON, so, again, even though it focused on the smaller interactions between the characters it was doing so with an adventurous backdrop.

Here we don’t have that. That’s a good thing. This is a chance to learn something first-hand about the crew that we’ve only been able to guess before, which is what they do when they aren’t doing anything.

As characters, they continue to exist when the cameras aren’t rolling. They do things between episodes. Sometimes we hear about them, but usually we don’t. As characters, they live. As characters, they breathe. As characters, they are.

What “Dear Dave” cements for us is that they aren’t. They’re not characters…they’re puppets reciting lines from a lifeless script. This is their downtime, and there’s nothing for them to do. They can’t live their lives because they don’t exist unless they’re making funny faces or arguing with machines or lusting repulsively after women.

These aren’t people anymore. If they were people, we wouldn’t have to contrive ridiculous situations in which they could be caught rubbing their cocks against vending machines. What did that say about Lister’s character? What did that reveal about him? To what facet of his personality was it true? It didn’t even work in a logistical sense…how in shit’s name did he intend to pick up the vending machine while lying on top of it?

No part of this works unless you find grown men grinding their genitals against machines funny. Maybe you do. I’m not judging you. But if you don’t, “Dear Dave” leaves you with some pretty slim pickings.

It just wasn’t funny. The dialogue was decent, but only decent. None of the physical comedy worked for me, and the only laugh — though I confess it was a big one — came from The Cat trying to keep Lister from picturing his ex-girlfriend with another man. Granted, that was itself a pretty direct lift from “Duct Soup,” where it was also the only funny thing in the episode, but I’ll take what I can get.

The biggest crime “Dear Dave” commits is that it’s just there. As the years go by I doubt I’ll warm up to “Trojan,” but at least I’ll remember it and think about it. “Dear Dave” doesn’t even feel like something I’ll remember next week.

Maybe one day I’ll see a clip somewhere of Lister fucking the vending machine and think, “Oh yeah…that fucking happened.”

But otherwise, I doubt it’ll leave any impression at all.

I can’t even say that this is the episode that made me realize the characters aren’t really characters anymore, because that happened around 20 episodes ago.

“Dear Dave” had every opportunity to make me reconsider that realization, though. It could have shown me that they’re still funny. They’re still real. They still have identifiable hopes and dreams, and that even if I’m not keen on their adventures anymore at least they still really are.

Instead we humped a vending machine and walked around with shit drying in our asses. And it was just as fun as it sounds.

Roll on the final episode, please.

As if only to prevent this from turning into a Red Dwarf review blog, one of my other favorite shows of all-time has decided to bless us with an early premiere: The Venture Bros. won’t be starting its fifth season until next year, but its creators — and network — were generous enough to speed up production on one episode. And though it was an 11th-hour decision to ship this one early, and it’s not technically the season premiere, it’s an absolutely perfect whetting of a Venture fan’s whistle.

It’s by no means a masterpiece, but it doesn’t aim to be. It aims to catch us unaware, and I think it does that. It aims to sell itself a bit short — it’s The Venture Bros., after all, where all of the most exciting stuff is off-camera by design — but then absolutely nails the ending, with a devastating revelation for one of the characters, and a genuinely touching speech from a character who’s far too long been kept from speechifying.

And I think it also did a great job of illustrating, by contrast, just why I’m so disappointed by the new Red Dwarf. In the case of both that show and this one, I didn’t tune in for the plots. Or even the jokes, really. I tuned in for the characters. If the plots were solid and the jokes were great — and they nearly always were, in both cases — then that was just a fantastic bonus. Really all I wanted to do was be there. I wanted to spend time with this small community, isolated in each case from the larger universe around them, immersed in their own problems, big and small, and fending for something like an understanding of who they were. In each case it’s a show about people who don’t particularly like each other, but whose enforced proximity periodically reveals itself as a kind of love. It’s a comedy of dynamics, and I like to see it unfold and explore itself.

But with Red Dwarf, I no longer feel like I’m in the company of characters. I’m in the company of scripts, and puppets that act them out. They don’t feel real to me, and they no longer act human. In the world of The Venture Bros., though, I still feel at home. They’re people. They’re rich and complicated characters that are still learning new things about themselves, which was what the most recent episode of this show took for its focus. By contrast, the most recent Red Dwarf focused on exploding testicles and didn’t so much as bat an eye when the last known female in the universe was killed. (They were mainly just disappointed they didn’t get to stick their genitals inside of her first. It was bad.)

I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more I’m willing to concede that maybe “A Very Venture Halloween” was a quiet masterpiece. A gentle piece of introspection that conceals its meaning without dulling it. It’s no coincidence that Dermott mentions It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, nor is it a coincidence that he misses that classic special’s greater moral. He dismisses it as childhood ephemera. He overlooks the larger things it has to say about faith and growing up and disappointment…because it’s a cartoon. So is The Venture Bros. And that has something to say with its own Halloween special, too.

Dermott is in a rush to grow up. Dean is not. Dean is the one who, by the end of this episode, grows up.

The plot itself is minimal, which is fine for a show like this. Again, spending time with the characters is the main draw. Nobody expects to see much in the way of action anymore…five seasons in and we’re wise to the show’s cycle of withholding. We know that we’ll catch the Venture family during its downtime, and that’s what we anticipate. The miracle is that the exact form of that downtime still manages to surprise, as it does in this episode’s glorious opening sequence, which shows us Hank and Dean through the years, attempting to give their father a Halloween fright.

It’s the final scene in this sequence that seems to button it up, but really its destination is in the scene just before it: Hank and Dean stage their own bloody, accidental deaths…and their father’s non-reaction gets them wondering. As might be expected, Dean is the one it truly haunts, and when he later meets a character called Ben, he has his question answered.

Like Hank in last season’s brilliant “Everybody Comes to Hank,” Dean here finds himself punished for pursuing — knowingly or not — the answer to a very important question about his family. Unlike Hank, Dean has no “out.” He can’t double-back on the knowledge. This is who he is…and there’s an innocence he can never reclaim for knowing it.

Elsewhere, Dr. Venture and his friends take bets on whether or not trick-or-treaters will be able to make it past the compound’s defense system, and Dr. Orpheus hosts a magic gathering. The former is strictly comic relief, but its ending is surprisingly sweet, and it overlaps the Orpheus story as well, providing an uncommonly wholesome counterpoint to Dean’s metaphysical distress.

Of course, the trick-or-treaters are still young. They’re children. Real children. Not children in the way that Hank and Dean (and Dermott) are children…the real children have their lives ahead of them. They haven’t been shaped into an image from which they’re doomed never to escape, and they haven’t lived long enough to understand betrayal. When Ben speaks to Dean, it’s clear that he cares about him. But by simply telling him the truth he as good as killed him. Dean Venture can never go back. And at this point, he may not even try.

The children know they’re wearing masks…Dean just learned he’s been wearing one his whole life. And now it’s gone.

It’s a small episode. It’s quiet. Its grandest revelation is spoken softly from one end of a sofa to the other, and the only character in a position to understand what it all means spends his night in dark introspection, standing outside of his own party, alone.

It’s actually quite beautiful, and its closing moments are absolutely perfect. It may lose something by being separated from the rest of season five, setting up themes and developments that won’t pay off for months, or it may gain from that.

It gives us time to think.

Like Dean sitting on the roof of the compound, early in the morning on November 1, we’re left with a lot to consider.

Of course, you and I will move forward just as we are, changing gradually, so slowly we might not even notice.

Dean doesn’t have that luxury. Halloween is over, and he’s been forced into adulthood with a shove. It’s time to graduate from Peanuts to The Twilight Zone. Even if we’re not ready.

Because, really, how could we ever be ready?

Hands up everyone who’s surprised that I think this episode went off the rails the moment Lister’s ballsack got wired to explode. No takers? ON WE GO THEN

I guess the upside here is that we now know “Lemons” was a one-off. A comparative breath of fresh air in the midst of a series that didn’t know what the hell it was trying to be, but was damned determined to annoy the everloving shit out of you while it tried to find out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and my disappointment I guess technically qualifies as a spoiler, since the first act was actually quite good. In fact, while I didn’t need another “Lemons” per se, I actually started to believe that this episode might surpass it. After all, early disappointments in that episode had to do with far too long and unfunny exchanges (such as the Shakespeare bit) and buffoonish physical idiocy (assembling the Golden Shower or whatever the fuck). Here, the potential was there for each of these things to rear their heads again…and instead it was done right.

Rimmer delighting in the forms Lister would have to fill out was perfect character comedy. It worked. It was long, but it was funny. And the length of the exchange says a lot about his commitment to it; Rimmer isn’t a bastard for the sake of being a bastard…he’s a bastard because he is who he is…which just happens to be a bastard. A fine distinction, and one that this totally understandable character development rides nicely. After all, this is a man who is utterly sincere in wanting to protect his crew from exactly the sort of accident he caused that killed the crew. He can justify that, and he can justify it because he believes it. It’s real. He’s a human being…something he arguably hasn’t been since series VII. It’s really, really nice.

Oh, and the physical stuff…I was referring to Kryten drying spoons by farting on them, but I don’t have much to say there.

Well, okay, I can just say that it was fast and funny, very much a Futurama style joke that doesn’t overstay its welcome. So neither will I and that’s enough of that.

So far, so good. Kryten and Cat speaking in unison wasn’t particularly funny, but the reveal of the title of the book Cat is carrying is good. As in…really good. As in a very smart joke well executed. So thanks to that, I have at least a few seconds of “Entangled” that I can nominate for inclusion in a highlight reel.

Then Lister reveals that he lost a poker game to some BEGGs (don’t ask), because if it’s one thing Red Dwarf needs it’s loads of weekly side characters that make it feel like the crew is living in lower London rather than in the bowels of a mining ship lost 3 million years into deep space. The BEGGs (really, don’t ask) wired some bombs to his testes because lol bombs and testes. The first act ends there along with my dignity, because I was enjoying this and now I suddenly feel ashamed for doing so.

Act two, to put it diplomatically, is a screaming pile of shit. It opens with the crew confronting the BEGGs (honestly now…) who resemble GELFs so much in every way that there really shouldn’t be a distinction, Kryten and Cat start talking in unison again because crystals or something, the BEGGs (fuck you) all choke to death because of that I guess, though shit knows how that’s supposed to work, then a TV turns on because of course it does, and it’s showing some black and white movie obviously and the characters in that movie speak totally unrelated lines which so clearly are meant to be oblique clues to the crew about consulting the cover of the book Cat was holding which in turn provide vague guidance on how to Save Lister’s Nads.

If that feels like narrative flow to you, then being bashed over the head with a baseball bat must qualify as an at least passably written short story. It’s garbage. It eats up time. It makes no sense and serves no purpose.

Last week Doug had the crew beam into Britain even though he needed them in India. That made no sense, until it had a killer punchline, which retroactively justified an odd decision. Here we get odd decision after odd decision without much (if any) cause for laughter.

The Quest For the Non-Exploded Scrotum brings the crew to a space station where they find a lone surviving human being. Well, a monkey as the result of some off-screen (and again unnecessary) experiment but they restore her with three minutes left in the episode, which means she’s destined to be killed and nobody will give a shit. It’s like “Trojan” again, but even more jarringly awful because the big joke is that she probably would have let Rimmer cum inside of her and now he can’t do that hahahahahahahaha.

I don’t know when this show became It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia but the lack of human response in this crew is becoming pretty distracting. At least when they met Jesus they played with his dick in the service of a helpful medical procedure. It was crass, but it had a purpose. Here we’re shooting side characters and kicking them out of airlocks and not paying any mind to what that says about the crew as people. Which is fine I guess, as Doug obviously didn’t pay any mind to that either.

Or maybe they just know next week they’ll meet a whole slew of new disposable characters so nothing’s really lost.

I remember when these characters used to be people, though. The first half of this episode remembered that, too. Those were good times.

Oh well. I don’t care. We have two episodes to go and one of them is a love story starring the racist vending machines from “Fathers and Suns”.

Lucky us.

Well, that was fucking awful.

Okay, with that out of the way, we can…no. No, it was just fucking awful.

“Fathers and Suns” represents the fifth consecutive episode in which the nicest thing I can say is that it’s nice to see the cast together again. And it’s getting to the point that it’s no longer nice to see the cast together again. What’s nice about knocking them around in humiliating ways while the sharp writing and character-driven comedy that once defined the show circles ever more deeply down the toilet?

Like last week’s “Trojan,” “Fathers and Suns” has a can’t-miss premise. And then it spectacularly and insultingly misses anyway. I’m still reeling from just how thoroughly they managed to botch a Rimmer’s-brother reunion story, but “Fathers and Suns” wastes no time in shoving even larger problems into our faces.

The plot is threefold. Firstly, Lister is coming to grips with certain emotional issues that have resulted from learning that he’s his own father. That was something he learned 15 years and 18 episodes ago so it’s a little strange he’s not so much as thought about it again until now, but since it’s the best thing about the episode I’ll take it gladly. The second plot is that Rimmer and Kryten install a new computer because if they didn’t do that then nothing would abruptly try to kill them at the end of the episode. The third plot is that the crew seeks the council of “Taiwan Tony,” a racist caricature of a vending machine in order to inquire about racist things. Surprising everyone, this third plot is an absolute pile of shit.

So, the good: like much of series VII, the Lister plot isn’t particularly funny, but it raises fair issues. It’s a better story than it is a joke, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be nice to have some comedy elsewhere — which is where Taiwan Tony and his voice straight out of a blacklisted Loony Tunes episode come in, I guess — but it’s handled interestingly enough, what with a videotape that Lister recorded for himself before getting blind drunk…so that he’d be able to separate himself from the advice he was passing on.

Poke logical holes in that basic setup all you like (it’s pretty damned easy) but it’s actually…well, nice. I like the idea of Lister practicing tough love, and forcing himself to shape up. I wasn’t laughing, but I was enjoying…and that’s the nicest thing I’ve been able to say about either episode so far.

Sadly, that’s about where the positives end. The new ship’s computer Pree is drawn from the same well the show has dipped into several times before, but here there’s a difference: this time, Doug doesn’t even know what she’s supposed to be doing. First she’s predicting the future, which is a good enough idea in itself. Then that’s gone and her performance must mirror that of the senior officer, so she makes incompetent repairs to the ship. Then that’s gone and she tries to kill Lister. Then Lister’s gone so she steers the whole ship into a sun.

While each of these developments would make for an interesting story on its own (and, indeed, some of these things have already made for stories of their own), the narrative whiplash we get from leaping from one so quickly to the next is almost painful. And while each of these sharp detours is at least tied somewhat to the last one, they quickly form a pretty incompatible logic within themselves. For instance, Pree couldn’t repair the ship properly because Rimmer couldn’t repair the ship properly; her performance is tied directly to what Rimmer can and would do, and that’s a major plot point. Then we need a different major plot point to happen, so she flushes Lister into space, even though that’s quite clearly something Rimmer wouldn’t do. We take great pains to set up one thing, only to ditch it in favor of something else that we then need to set up anew.

It ends with Pree gassing the crew with nitrous oxide, even though a previous plot point revealed that there was no anesthetic left on this ship, and Doug isn’t sure how to end an episode anymore without saying, “Okay, now this character wants to kill everyone.” Then the crew manage to shut the computer down because everyone, including Pree, forgot she could predict the future, and they all fuckin’ dance.

Slather all of this scattershot, barely-connected nonsense plotting over a disarmingly unfunny introduction to Taiwan Tony and some mortifyingly poor performances from the new Medibot and Dentibot characters (Seriously, why would anyone program a dentist robot to impersonate a slavering Peter Lorre? What’s the real-world logic there?) and you have an episode that almost challenges you to find something funny about it.

The Lister plot aside, “Fathers and Suns” plays like a Garth Marenghi-style parody of Red Dwarf. It hits the basic notes, but ensures that they sound sourly. It looks and sounds like the actual show, but is clearly needling parody of everything it can do wrong.

Clearly. I have no other explanation. Taiwan Tony and Dr. Lorre have no other explanation. The new-computer story that couldn’t decide what it was about has no other explanation. The protracted setups of plotpoints that are outright ignored or contradicted a scene or two later have no other explanation.

The Lister plot deserved a better episode, but, at this point, I’m not sure I’m right to expect a better episode. Next week they meet Jesus and make Jesus jokes, so there’s that. Oh well. I’ll just have to hope Doug manages to gas me with the non-existent nitrous as well. That wouldn’t do much for the state of the comedy, but it might at least make me laugh.