Review for Red Dwarf: Back to Earth

Introduction

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t get this, that I would simply just avoid the mini-series, and pretend that it never happened. In the end, I buckled, and went and ordered the Blu-ray anyway. I’ve been revisiting Red Dwarf over the past few months, ever since Series 10 was released and I reviewed that. It seemed a timely opportunity to revisit the series again right from the beginning, and I’ve been taking a leisurely trip through the eight BBC series, revisiting some old classics, and finding some unexpected gems. One of those unexpected realisations was that Series 8 wasn’t as bad as I remembered it to be, and indeed this second time around, I was actually laughing... a lot...


That isn’t the reason I caved in and bought Back to Earth though, as the experience of watching it on Dave is still fresh enough to not invite re-evaluation. No, it’s that side of me that I hate the most, the obsessive collector, the guy who has to have everything to do with his current object of fan fervour. There’s a reason why I own Robocop 3, Jurassic Park 3, Star Trek Voyager, Spider-man 3, and X-Men 3, and that has nothing to do with the quality of the product. Hmm... I really should stop watching three-quels.


There was a 9-year gap between Series 8 and Back to Earth, and it’s hard to see just why such a hiatus occurred. My initial issues with Series 8 aside, the show certainly finished on a high, with fan fervour hardly diminished. But nine years between outings does beg the question as to what happened. Did the search for the ever-elusive feature film scupper the TV show, or did the BBC just tire of it. Certainly, reading between the lines of the extra material in the latter series DVDs, you can get the impression that bureaucracy at the BBC was making it difficult and expensive to make a sci-fi sitcom without outsourcing half of the work, and it seems that only the revival of Doctor Who reminded the BBC that they could indeed do this sci-fi stuff as well.


Whatever the reasons, and regardless of how much the creators wanted to make it, and how badly the fans wanted to see it, it seems that the BBC didn’t want Red Dwarf anymore, at least not directly. It fell to Dave to fund further Red Dwarf, and last year’s Series 10 was a return to form for the comedy. They began with a three part mini-series though in 2009, almost a proof of concept, or another attempt to prove a feature film was possible (the first is Series 8’s Back in the Red trilogy). I watched Back to Earth when it first aired, and I have to say that I still don’t understand just how Series 10 got made on the back of it...


9 years since the end of Series 8. Series 9 has been and gone, and with it went Kochanski, who got blown out of an airlock. That’s left Lister moping and mourning his lost love, in between annoying Rimmer by ironing his sneezes. There’s a problem with the water supply though, has been ever since Lister left the tap running and flooded Holly. This time it’s a blockage in the pipes, and when they go down to the storage deck to investigate, they find an honest to God sea monster in the pipes. What’s more, it’s a dimension jumping sea monster, as the suddenly revived science officer hologram Katerina Bartikovsky explains. She’s back, taking command, getting rid of the incompetent Rimmer, and taking over the mission to keep Dave Lister sane and happy. Step one is to use a bit of the dimension jumping sea monster to create a hole in time and space, and get Dave back to Earth. The first problem is that all of a sudden their reality is rendered invalid by opening the hole. The second problem is that they all end up in a reality where Red Dwarf is actually a comedy sci-fi show on TV, and none of them are real. The third problem is that the show is coming to an end, and they’re about to be written out of existence.


Red Dwarf: Back to Earth is presented on this Blu-ray in its Director’s Cut feature length form with a few edits to tighten up the pacing, although should you wish to recreate the original Dave broadcast experience, you can also watch the individual episodes of the three-parter as well.

Picture

Red Dwarf goes HD. For the first time, we enter the realms of widescreen and high definition with Red Dwarf, and its Dave debut allows for clarity and production values that we have never seen before in the show. On this Blu-ray disc, the show gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at 1080i 60 Hz resolution. It’s a shame it isn’t a progressive transfer, as there’s just the slightest hint of unevenness to pans and scrolls that is indicative of interlaced video. The image is clear and sharp throughout, and the production values get progressively stronger the further into the story we go. The initial scenes aboard Red Dwarf certainly make the most of the sets, but there is also a lot of digital background and green-screen work here that doesn’t impress. That said, Kochanski’s memorial and the G deck scenes do look spectacular. The second act has the benefit of being present-day and Earthbound, but the final act pulls out the full Blade Runner, and the production values really do shine here.

The only issue I had with the image quality was some odd strobing on the Rovers Return sign.

Sound

The Director’s Cut gets a DTS-HD HIRES 5.1 surround track, the occasionally used HD lossy format, here limited to 2Mbps bitrate. Dialogue is clear throughout, and the surround effects are adequate, doing enough to bring the story across. Once more it’s a question of progressive improvements, with the opening act of the show rather lacklustre, but really picking up in terms of sound design quality the further into the story you get. English subtitles are provided, but noticeable by its absence is a laugh track, although with Red Dwarf: Back to Earth straddling the border between comedy and drama, a laugh track would be inappropriate for much of the show.

The individual Back to Earth episodes on this release get a mere DD 2.0 stereo track, albeit at 448kbps. Subtitles are provided in English if you should need them.

Extras

Back to Earth comes in an Amaray style case, with 2 discs, one at the rear and one on the front. The content is presented with animated menus.

Disc 1

Still need to calibrate that HD set? This disc comes with a handy High Definition Set Up Guide that takes you through the process of optimising your home cinema set up. It’s a pretty detailed walkthrough that should help you get the best out of your display and your sound set-up, and it’s a nice addition to the disc, if not quite as comprehensive as some dedicated discs. It means you’ll have a use for this disc even if you don’t like the show.


You can play the Director’s Cut from the main screen, but if you want the individual episodes, you’ll have to go to the scene select option.

The individual episodes get cast commentaries from Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules, Chris Barrie, and Robert Llewellyn. It’s like they haven’t been away for long, although given that the Series 8 DVD was released in 2006, and this was made in 2009, that is indeed the case. It’s a fun anecdote-filled commentary that is entertaining to listen to.


The Director’s Cut on the other hand gets Doug Naylor to talk about the making of the show, and he’s surprisingly candid about it all, including the failed attempts to make the movie, the disconnect from the BBC, and the difficulties of working with Dave. He even acknowledges the disquiet... okay well hate of some fans towards Back to Earth, and it is useful to hear his point of view. He also points out the differences between the DC and the episodes, and yes, there are some beyond the removal of the intervening credit sequences. This is a useful commentary, fun and informative.

Disc 2

The Making of Back to Earth is split into two on this disc, no doubt reflecting the original TV broadcasts. Part 1 is 24 minutes in length, while Part 2 is 48. In it, the cast and crew speak about the show, and there are plenty of clips from the episodes, as well as behind the scenes glimpses of the production. It’s a nice, interesting piece and well worth watching.


The rest of the extras are under the Bonus menu.

The longest and most interesting of the featurettes is The SFX of Back to Earth, which takes us behind the scenes of the CGI work. It’s introduced by Mike Seymour, and reveals an interesting approach to outsourcing,

Back to Earth Premiere lasts 6 minutes and features the cast, Doug Naylor, and a couple of celebrity guests at the premiere offering some soundbite interviews.

Cast Signing Session lasts 8 minutes, and offers a little informal banter between the principals as they add their monikers to some memorabilia.


The Press Kit Video is the 6½ minute sales pitch for the show.

The Behind the Scenes Web Videos offer short snippets of fun about Carbug, Lister on Corrie, Cat’s big entrance, and Kryten dangling. All in all these last just under 9 minutes.

There are a whole lot in the way of trailers here, one of the advantages of going out on a commercial channel. You get the intros and the idents the cast recorded for Dave to introduce the episodes and the classic shows on that Red Dwarf Easter Weekend back in 2009, and you get the commercials used on the US PBS networks.


There are photo galleries offering production stills and behind the scenes images, both presented as 4-minute slideshow galleries.

Of course no Red Dwarf disc would be complete without the Smeg Ups lasting 11 minutes, and deleted scenes, 4½ minutes worth. The latter can be watched with or without the Doug Naylor commentary.

Apparently the DVD release has a Cat related Easter Egg, but I couldn’t find it on the Blu-ray.

Conclusion

Back when Red Dwarf: Back to Earth came out, I was a little more predisposed to liking it, coming off a 9-year Red Dwarf drought. It still was bad enough to make me miss the first episode of series 10, thinking that the show had well and truly jumped the shark by jumping to Dave. This second time around, having seen and enjoyed series 10, and having re-watched the first eight series as well, I have no such generosity for Back to Earth. This really is a bad show.


There are things that I do like about it. The production values are certainly better than anything we’ve seen before, or indeed since. There are some classic Red Dwarf moments in there when taken out of context, and I’m conditioned to appreciating the Blade Runner parody almost automatically, despite the fact that in execution it is a dismal letdown. Also Craig Charles gives a great dramatic performance in this story. Finally I do like the idea of Back to Earth, although once again, in execution it is wholly deflating.


Nitpicker’s annoyances out of the way first... Red Dwarf has never been big on continuity, but with every new series, and every new episode the canon grows, and you find yourself trying to fit the edges together. In Back to Earth, you wind up wondering just which Rimmer is on screen. Did the Rimmer from series 8 die and come back as a hologram? When you hear this Rimmer talking about the Despair Squid from personal experience, you realise that it has to be the original Rimmer, the one that left to become Ace in Season 7. Except Series 10 will throw another spanner in the works by having Rimmer discuss the end of Series 8 from personal experience. Actually it’s questions like this that provide a welcome distraction from the reality of Back to Earth.


There’s another problem I have with this show. It winds up looking like a remake of another, much better Red Dwarf episode, Back to Reality, the one with the aforementioned Despair Squid, while our heroes have visited Earth of the past on several occasions, whether through Timeslides, Backwards, or through contrivances like Ace Rimmer’s Dimension hopping drive, or the Matter Paddle. This really should be nothing new for the boys from the Dwarf.


Then there’s Blade Runner... homage, parody or rip-off? Elements seem like homage, certainly the production design, the creepy Rimmer munchkins, and ‘Rachel’, while the whole parody of transposing the creator to the writer of the show, with the Dwarfers looking for more life does work. But then the show starts paraphrasing from the film, and at times even quoting verbatim. That’s where my tolerance fails.


What I hate most of all about Back to Earth is the metafiction aspect of it, the TV characters coming out into the real world. Metafiction as an exercise in itself, breaking the fourth wall, and becoming self-referential is all well and good. One of my favourite sci-fi comedies is all meta-fiction, Galaxy Quest, but it works as it’s a parody, and a one off. Metafiction as an experimental episode in an ongoing series has never worked for me. One of my first experiences with it was in a Star Trek short story, which had the original series crew replaced by the actors for the show when the transporter broke down. Ever since then I’ve associated it with fan-fiction, an exercise in sterile mental masturbation. I do not want to see Sam Beckett leaping into Scott Bakula, I wouldn’t want to see William Shatner in command of a starship, and I certainly didn’t want to see Dave Lister on the top of a double decker, clumsily name-dropping the name of the channel that he’s on in the middle of an episode.


If that isn’t enough, the story ends with a deflating whimper, and while the whole story has been a shameless wink at the audience, I’m still reminded of the ending of that Moriarty holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with Picard pondering on the nature of reality, wondering if his adventures too are being played out on a box on a table somewhere. It’s cheesy to the point of making my teeth itch, and gives me an urge to hurl a cushion through the TV screen.


There are moments of Back to Earth that just about click with me, but they are too few and far between. In the end I’m left with the sour taste of missed opportunity, an over-cooked parody, an unsuccessful exercise in metafiction, a sense of cloying commercialism beyond that required for a commercial TV channel, and a lacklustre conclusion to the story. The sole saving grace of this release is that the extra features are more enjoyable than the show itself. This will be the least watched disc in any Red Dwarf fan’s collection, but any self-respecting Red Dwarf fan will have it.