The third episode from the latest series largely takes place
away from the ship, as the crew find themselves stranded in 23AD, where they
have a supposed meeting with Jesus himself, during his missing years. Things naturally
get a bit messy, and it seems as though the course of history may end up irreversibly
altered. Either that or the invention of ‘the bag’ occurred several centuries
earlier due to the Dwarfer’s meddling.
There’s a nice call-back to the third series at the start of
the episode, when The Cat shows great enthusiasm for a crazy golf tournament
that he’s set up in the medi-lab. The scene ends with an open ended joke:
Lister found some meat in a freezer near Kryten’s quarters, but The Cat steals
it from him before he gets the chance to eat it. The pay-off to this joke comes
much later on, when it is revealed that the ‘meat’ was Lister’s organs, which
Kryten had removed. Funny or gross? Take your pick!
There is then a little bit of character inconsistency as
Rimmer reprimands Lister for reading books. This scene probably would have
worked better had the reason for Rimmer’s distain been that Lister is too
stupid to take in anything intellectually stimulating (such as in ‘The
Inquisitor’ from series 5, in which Lister is reading the comic book version of
Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’). Instead Rimmer is
portrayed attempting to dismantle the work of Shakespeare – something he once
tried to defend from being burned. Despite this it is a pretty funny scene: “I wasn’t even toilet trained when I was five”
“You’ve barely mastered it now!” I was also glad to see Kryten acting more
like his old self, as opposed the whiny scoundrel he became in the later series’.
We are then introduced to the main plot of this episode,
when the crew receives a ‘rejuvenation shower’ (somehow) from Sweden (somehow!).
The jokes about Swedish flat-pack furniture have been done in many other comedy
series already, and given this show’s deep space setting they seem a little out
of place. However, this didn’t prevent the infomercial jokes from ‘Trojan’ from
working, so I can’t complain too much, and I did laugh at the hash-job the crew
made of assembling the shower, as well as the line about parts left over at the
end. Something goes wrong, and the crew are transported to 23AD.
Rimmer deduces that they need lemons in order to create a
battery to get them back to Red Dwarf, and this leads to the crew walking 4,000
miles to India, as lemons don’t yet exist in England/Albion. The joke about potentially going back to
England once they had the lemons was funny, but I’m glad it was only a joke and
not a plot device.
The crew then accidentally stumble upon Jesus, which dominates
the remainder of the episode. From here onwards the material is very hit and
miss. Once again there are inconsistencies with Rimmer’s character, who acts as
though he is a big fan of Jesus, despite previously having stated that he
thought Jesus was a hippy: Well he was,
he had long hair and he didn’t have a job!” although it is good to see that
the writers haven’t forgotten that his middle name is Judas! The ‘Last Supper’
image was a funny visual gag.
There were lots of possibilities once the crew brought Jesus
back on board Red Dwarf, but nothing much really came of it. The prospect of
Jesus learning about all the wars caused by Christianity was very rushed, and
lead to the eventual reveal that the ‘Jesus’ this episode revolved around, wasn’t
the real Jesus, as Jesus was a fairly common name in those days!
Overall there were some good jokes in this episode, and a
couple of decent call-backs which were reminiscent of the show’s earlier
seasons. The main storyline was a bit messy in its delivery, and missed out on
some interesting possibilities – as not many sitcoms could plausibly get away
with bringing in Jesus as a character. Nevertheless it was a fun episode, and
as long as that is the case with this new series, any complaints I have are
effectively nullified.
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