I actually miss the audience laughter for some reason. It looks odd with higher production values too.

Agreed.
And the cgi scutters are rubbish too.
This is all quite disheartening.

All in all, the first episode was better than I thought it would be, in that it wasn't completely awful.

I think that splitting it up into three is going to hurt it. This one really felt like nothing at all was happening.

Definitely. Overall, not bad.

I thought Kryten was great
Look Sir! Confirmed!
On my way to dirtville now sir....

I liked that they kept it small and made it about the relationships between the characters. The squid bits felt like it could have been from the early series, albeit done in a way that went on too long and utilising some rubbish cgi.

Indeed, i was saying to a mate just now, it'll probably get going properly tomorrow night.

Kryten was great in this episode though

It was ok, not bad, not great. CGI ruined it a bit

Gunmen of the Apocolypse coming on right after sort of shows how good Red Dwarf was though and makes the new one look a bit meh in comparison, so far

I just want to cry a bit. Do you ever feel like the best things in life have come to pass?

I didn't even know it was on tonight.


That's so much how I feel it's almost as if I wrote this.

Speaking of Gunmen...
Why was it so shoddily edited just now? In fact why was it edited at all?
One of my favourite exchanges completely obliterated, after Lister disengaged from the AR machine, and trying to claim he doesn't just use it for sex:

Lister: What about Zero-G Kickboxing and Wimbledon?

[Next lines completely cut]

Rimmer: You only play Wimbledon because you're having it off with that Jailbait ballgirl.
Lister: Another lie. She's not jailbait. She's seventeen!


Some horrible jailbait ballgirl murder occurred which I wasn't aware of?

I was glad that they showed Quarantine afterwards. Easily one of my favourite episodes, mainly because it's really creepy.

That's quite odd, I mean it's hardly offensive.

I thought it was alright & was content enough to watch a one off that didn't nosedive into the realms of Blackadder: Back & Forth. The performers clearly did miss an audience though. I do think when they get to Earth it'll most likely get worse. I don't like the idea of CarBug.

Huzzah for like-mindedness.

I didn't watch series 8 but the little bit of it I did see the entire crew were back to life, can anyone tell me what happened to them and why they aren't there anymore?

I didn't like the 'posher' production either, it felt a bit like a Comic Relief special.

Oh my fucking god. Are they honestly doing the script from League Of Gentlemen's Apocalypse?

That is what I thought... meh

This is bad. This is really bad.

They actually just name-dropped 'Dave'!

What the smeg was that?

I think they are just glossing over that with references to the fictional Series 9 and 10, which is just one of several things very, very wrong with the second special.



I thought the exact same thing. I mean, that barely worked in that film, why retread it in such an awkward format?

I thought the same thing.

Although I really enjoyed it for some reason, far more than yesterday's episode.



I think it's final proof positive that I've hit the "no taste in popular culture" wall. My TV executive training is now complete.

I thought that too...

Well, it was a nice thought about Red Dwarf returning and the crew seem... energetic.
It seems like the script is the problem here. It might get better yet?

Edit: I was wondering about the edited shows too. They all seem too broken up and without there usual genius. Massive gaping segments and all. Very strange...

That was the first thing that popped into my head.

It's been interesting to see that they've not actually tried to recapture what the series used to be like. In that, they've not done a traditional straight studio sitcom format like each series was. These specials have clearly been written and filmed with the more recent style of sitcom in mind - no audience, straighter acting and more pathos, but still very comical.

I'm still in two minds as to whether these Red Dwarf episodes have pulled it off completely. I'll make my mind up when I've seen all three.

I had heard on t'internet that there was gonna be some sort of league of gentlemen's apocolypse type stuff going on....
I was very wary of this, but it has actually come out a lot better than expected!
I think people just need to view these episodes as an extended episode....This sort of thing would not seem out of place, if it was within a series.
But yeah, maybe it doesn't work as a 3part special, but i'm certainly enjoying it

*I am still drunk whilst typing this*

Yeah, i was sitting there for a couple of mins, thinking "Fictional characters coming into real world trying to find their creators, where have i seen that before?" then i remembered.

Maybe Grant and Naylor will suffer the same fates as Pemberton, shearsmith et al, from that film?

As for my opinion on the ep, i wouldn't have said terrible, but this is definitely nothing to shout about. I liked it when Rimmer Killed the big suze hologram

It's definitely getting worse. I think they made a big mistake showing old shows at the same time because they just demonstrate how poor the special is. I'm hoping the documentary tomorrow will be the best thing about the remake, I was disappointed that in the Smeg Ups shows they didn't show any of the convention footage because those were always my favourite bits.

Jesus that second episodes was dire. The Blade Runner references didn't make it any better.

Dear god, what was that?? make it stop!! what was that bit with the kids on the bus all about?

Edit - what was any of it about?

They did that with Series 7 too, except they replaced the audience with canned laughter. Any return to anything from Series 7 is a bad move.

As a book, I think the plot might work, but as a TV show it's just annoying.

And Big Suze better not be dead!

Well we were expecting it to be a big pile of smeg... so I'm actually enjoying the new shows even though I know it's rubbish.

Before I'd seen part 2, I never considered it possible for a tv series to jump the shark twice.


I think the best way to look at these episodes is as Doug Naylor's 90-minute pitch to get series 9 commissioned. And I honestly hope it happens. Then maybe a film will get made, and even if that's crap, it'll be worth it cos they've been wanting to do the film for 15 years now.



Series 7 wasn't recorded live in front of an audience, but they've never used canned laughter, - it's always been a real audience.

I don't know.

Hmm, not sure how I feel about the third part. On the one hand, it was better than them following that plot choice through to the end, yet it was also kind of a cop-out to just go back to an old plot device.

It probably would have worked better as one half an hour episode.

The end was quite rushed, but then they were on a very tight budget by the look of things. For a moment I did think they'd swung from the LoG Apocolypse route to having a Life On Mars ending, but they just about pulled it back to something RedDwarf-ian.

RedDwarf Ian, the biggest fan around.

A little too much Blade Runner, but I still liked it even though it's just BTL again.

By the time I got there I was hoping for the last two minutes I got, so I'm happy.

Enjoyable. Not the best. Not the worst. I'll buy it.

The last episode was the best in my opinion. I might watch all three back to back tonight. Get a better perspective on it all.

Enjoyable. Not the best. Would be the worst were it not for most of series 7. Can't imagine I'll want to watch it again.

I watched all three parts back-to-back last night, and whilst it wasn't as bad as I had feared - going by some of the comments I had read on here and elsewhere - it was certainly a long way from being classic Red Dwarf.

As others have commented, it really did seem to suffer from the lack of a laughter track. The joke about there being no toilet paper was classic Red Dwarf fodder, but without any reaction from anyone it just didn't build and in the end wasn't very funny. I have a suspicion that had there been a laughter track it would have made the joke work.

They definitely flogged the Blade Runner analogy to death, and the re-use of the despair squid as a plot device was disappointing, but the show was very polished on what I am guessing was a limited budget.

I hope this does become a full series, but there are definitely some kinks that need to be worked out before they do.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised. I expected shit and I got weird and not funny instead. All the Blade Runner stuff was just plain strange, handled in a mostly Scary/Date/Epic/Disaster Movie style in which it was just there with no real humour to it's presence. It wasn't quite the League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse rip-off it first seemed and the references to a non-existent series 9 were quite a clever way of not explaining how it was back to normal after series 8. Agree a laughter track would have helped the conventional gags from not sounding quite so terrible, as the low-key jokes were the ones that worked best (the geek store guy 'listening to headphones' was a particularly good one). But I still found I had a fondness for the characters (especially Cat and his incredible diving suit) and found it amiable enough, even if the laughs could be counted on one hand, which ain't great for three episodes worth and nine years to think about it.

I have to say I think it slightly redeemed itself in the third episode. I liked the reuse of the despair squid and Cat having taken it from the ocean planet but I hated the self aware characters looking for their creators. It could have made a decent half hour show but I stand by my original feeling of it being a Comic Relief special. I really hope they just leave it be and don't do any more specials or films because it'll just tarnish the six good series.

I was going to write my thoughts but Rory seems to have stolen them.

I do miss the 'naffness' of the first few series (even though I enjoyed watching how they'd produced all the CG bits in the 'making of'), and I was very disappointed that they pilfered the L of G ideas, but although these specials were far from perfect, I did actually find myself really enjoying the characters being plonked in this ridiculous storyline.

Once they'd revealed it was a despair-squid hallucination, I thought for a bit that they were talking about the original squid from series 5. ...which would've made the episode better, as it would mean that series 6, 7 & 8 never happened.

Record ratings for Dave.

Not entirely unsurprising.

I do think the old sets were part of what made the old Red Dwarf more enjoyable,they gave it quite a cosy feel whereas the new sets were very well made but a tad sterile and cold.

After watching the last episode of the special i warmed to it a bit more, but overall it felt a bit like lazy writing, saying that though, i'd still watch a new series if they made it

Well after the weekend, to Red Dwarf, let's not say au revoir, rather, fuck off.

Don't be shy, Andrew. ...tell us what you really think.

I missed the last episode. On purpose.

You didn't miss much!

Slightly better than the other eps, but nothing to shout about.

Robert 'Kryten' Llewellyn has just announced on his twitter that series 10 has been commissioned!
Starting filming in 2010.