"Red Dwarf" Back to Earth: Part 2 (2009)

Director:

Doug Naylor

Writers:

Rob Grant (creator) and
Doug Naylor (creator) ...

TV Series:

"Red Dwarf" (2009)

Original Air Date:

11 April 2009 (Season 1, Episode 2)

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

TV Mini-Series

Cast

Chris Barrie	...	Rimmer
Craig Charles	...	Lister
Danny John-Jules	...	Cat
Robert Llewellyn	...	Kryten
Sophie Winkleman	...	Katerina
Tom Andrews	...	Salesman
Karen Admiraal	...	Woman
Jon Glover	...	Man
Jeremy Swift	...	Noddy
Julian Ryder	...	Bus Driver
Charlie Kenyon	...	Boy on the Bus
Nina Southworth	...	Girl on the Bus
Richard Woo	...	Swallow

Trivia:

One of the extras in the London street scenes is wearing an Ace Rimmer t-shirt.

Goofs:

Factual errors: Rimmer tells Bartikovsky that after the water tank broke, they were washed along at 70 knots per hour. The knot is a measure of speed equalling one nautical mile per hour, so it should just be 70 knots.

Quotes:

Dave Lister: What are these things?
Kryten: They're Digital Versatile Discs, sir. DVDs for short. They were very popular in the early part of the 21st century before they died out and were replaced with what we use now.
Dave Lister: Oh, you mean videos?
Kryten: Precisely. Back then no one knew that the human race were utterly incapable of putting the DVDs back in their cases. Case in point: over 2 trillion went missing in just over 20 years. Videos are just too big to lose.

Movie Connections:

References "Star Trek" (1966)

Pretty good overall - loved bits of it

I don't normally write comments, but I felt I had to when I saw the average score given to this series and episode - no smugging way (I can't believe the swearing filter includes Red Dwarf's favourite expletive)! It's true that some of the early bits of this episode were a bit too off-the-shelf, but it had one scene, near the end, which had me rolling around with laughter (probably shows how immature I am, but I don't care).

And another thing - it REALLY annoys me how people give a show scores of 1, 2 or 3 which it clearly doesn't deserve. What it really means is that they loved the earlier series and hate anything that could crack it out of the casing of amber they've created around their old memories of it, and expose them to the light of a new day. They can't accept giving it a 5/6/7/8 and letting their opinion be subsumed into the average, because they're SPECIAL and know best. I was tempted to give it a 10 to counterbalance them, but I thought honesty was the better policy. Disengaging rant-mode. Sorry.

Actually it's pretty good considering their time away from the screen. They're not as ring-rusty as you'd expect, and there're signs of the old magic in there. If they make another series I'll certainly give it a chance, and if they can raise the bar just a tiny bit from this one, I'll be very pleased to welcome Red Dwarf back from the dead.