Red Dwarf: Mechocracy

I actually timed it this time. it takes about 13 minutes (of a 28 minutes episode) for the actual plot to start. The entire first half of the episode is set-up. And if you're wondering if the pay-off is worth it, you haven't been reading these reviews. To its credit, I didn't find this episode as offensive as the previous ones, but I'm not sure that's the tag line they'd go with for the advertising.

This scene has nothing to do with anything.

The episode begins with a little self-contained sketch in which Kryten "tricks" Rimmer into mopping the floor by just telling him to do it after Rimmer tries to teach Kryten patience - the joke being that Kryten is already supremely patient and Rimmer is not. Wait, did I say joke? Because that isn't a joke. It's four minutes of my life I'll never get back.

At least the sets look pretty cool.

This is followed by another mostly self-contained sketch in which the ship goes on "yellow alert" and Rimmer says the only vaguely amusing thing in the entire episode. Not funny enough to bother repeating here though. Anyway, the gist of it is that they've found a ship in danger and it's transmitting its "e-cargo" to them, which turns out to be a virus, forcing them to abandon ship. Except that all the ship's machines pool their resources to power up the antivirus and they don't abandon ship.

Are the duplicates supposed to be a joke, or just laziness?

This leads to the episode's main plot, which is an election to choose a representative for the ship's machines, and for no reason it's Kryten vs. Rimmer. If you're wondering if this has something to do with the fact that Rimmer is technically a machine, nope. In fact, Kryten implies that Rimmer is not a machine. Also they keep saying that the winner of the election will be "president" but that makes no sense. Not, like, makes no sense because it's a joke, it just seems like whoever wrote this script somehow thought that anyone who gets elected to any position gets that title.

This reminds me of the Command and Conquer games.

Both sides run attack ads that are clearly trying so, so hard to be funny - but aren't, and manage to secure half the votes. Which means that Kryten and Lister have to go and get the deciding vote from the Talkie Toaster. Remember that joke in season one where the toaster wants Lister to eat toast all the time? Imagine if they just did that exact bit again, but without the originality or comic timing. Wait, you don't have to imagine it because they did.

"Remember when this show was funny? Please laugh now."

Also the Cat has reading glasses and is embarrassed about it because reading books makes him less cool. Like I said at the start, the previous episodes are definitely worse, but this one is just nothing.

Is this a joke? Is it anything?

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