Red Dwarf: Cured

Who still thinks bringing Red Dwarf back is a good idea? Seriously, who? How does this keep happening? When's the last time this show was actually good? 1992? However it happens, it's happened again, and I honestly have no idea if this follows on from the previous season or if they've retconned it again. Who even cares? The crew this time consists of Rimmer, Lister, Kryten and the Cat, because apparently someone thinks there's still something of value to be mined from those four.

The facial expressions say it all.

That's the big problem, of course. These characters are done. They had to reset Rimmer just to be able to keep using him because he'd evolved to the point of not being funny or interesting any more. Only it didn't work. Just resetting him is boring. We've seen it all before. And the others are even worse. Lister's gone from an amusingly disgusting slob with no skills or ambition to a reasonably competent leader. Kryten's lost most of his quirks and personality. The Cat's gimmick is now just that he's kind of dumb and kind of vain. Danny John-Jules is still fun to watch, but the character is garbage. They seem to have forgotten the point of him being a cat.

I'm not sure Stalin had more than two lines.

As usual, the crew stumble upon a relic of humanity, in this case a research base where the scientists were trying to cure evil. To test their theories they had clones of Hitler, Stalin, Messalina and Vlad the Impaler, who have all been preserved in stasis along with the head scientist. Of course they wake up and the crew hangs out with them for a while. I was never quite sure, but they seemed to be going for some kind of "joke" about Hitler being gay, which was really weird, and the others barely even had anything to do in the whole episode.

mfw i'm watching this show

Hitler and Lister play guitar together for over a minute of screen time, and there's an extended sequence in which the whole joke is just that Messalina isn't attracted to the Cat and he can't believe it. Eventually there's the inevitable argument over whether they should bring these people back to the ship or leave them to their fate and then the inevitable sneak attack. One or more of these supposedly cured psychopaths is still evil! Except it's the doctor, obviously. I know the plot isn't necessarily all that important in comedy, but come on, this was just lazy.

In fact, it turns out that the four clones are actually robots and the doctor set up this charade for... I don't know. Reasons? He was also pretending to be paralysed for no reason. Whatever. The cat pretends to side with the doctor but then shoots him and the crew leave. That's it. I'll admit, it wasn't actually terrible. There were some amusing bits. But not many, and nothing memorable. Mostly I just don't know why anyone's still bothering with this. Make a new show with new characters. This one's done.

As anticlimactic as it looks.

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