It's been a while (almost eight months, in fact) since I started watching this season but it's only six episodes long so I thought I might as well try to finish it. Guess what? It's still real bad. It's interesting that I concluded my last review by saying that the theme of the episode seemed to be that criticism is bad, because the message of this episode is the exact opposite of that. In fact, insulting and belittling people is good... because otherwise they might be happy and confident?
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| Remember how Rimmer's a narcissist? That's the joke. |
And just as the last episode began with a bit that had nothing to do with the rest of the episode (finding Lister's guitar) so does this one. This time it's Rimmer naming a moon after himself and picking up some rare and valuable "Helium-7". Then the ship gets hit by the titular timewave, which has absolutely no effect on them but does leave behind a spaceship from the past. They mention that the timewave could send them back in time if they get caught in it, but that doesn't happen and I don't know why they mentioned it. There's not even a ticking clock or a desperate last-minute escape, it just doesn't happen and no one mentions it again.
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| Looks like maybe some people had fun with the costumes at least. |
Anyway, this ship that's appeared is going to crash into Planet Rimmer (actually a moon, and I don't even know if that's meant to be funny) so they have to go over there and save it, but there's a rule on this ship that no one is allowed to criticise anyone. This apparently means that the crew are completely blind to their own faults and deficiencies, because no one can tell them about them. It also, for some reason, means that no one is doing their job but people are doing each other's jobs badly.
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| He dresses like this because no one's allowed to be mean to him about it and that's... bad? |
Already you can see where this is going. I can practically hear the writer complaining about "millennials" and "participation trophies", even before Rimmer says that he went to a school that didn't allow competition and gave everyone prizes. It's bog standard "kids these days are lazy, entitled snowflakes", but that's not even the worst thing about it. The worst thing is how badly it's executed. I can't even get angry at this because it's mostly just confused and nonsensical.
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| All the police wear pink, so that's not a personal choice, it's a uniform. |
Of course the Red Dwarf crew are arrested for criticising and there's a bunch of time wasted when they meet a fellow prisoner (who does nothing) and try to escape (and are immediately recaptured). Did I say the worst thing about this episode was how poorly the message was communicated? I was wrong. The worst is the blatant padding. I'm guessing they had about half a script and just threw in some unrelated scenes to get it up to the right length, because a nothing in this episode goes anywhere.
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| The script's three pages short. How about a jail scene? |
Anyway, they get taken to a machine that's going to remove their ability to criticise, but of course Rimmer overloads the machine. Then his inner critic appears, and they defeat it by criticising it - although it's not at all clear why it needed defeating or what kind of threat it posed. But somehow that convinces the captain that criticism is good and he lets them go and makes everyone go back to their real jobs, so the disaster is averted.
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| And why does Rimmer's inner critic look like Blofeld? |
This episode didn't offend me like the first two, but it was a complete mess and devoid of humour, so I'm not sure it's much of an improvement.
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| Without insults, there's no way for an adult to know that their drawing is childish. |
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