Screenhead

I admit that, before I wrote this one up, I had to hit Wikipedia and get better acquainted with the Red Dwarf series.  All I had seen of it was some occasional PBS episodes back in my high school days, and frankly, it looked WAY too low-budget to be entertaining.

Of course, I’ve caught a few more since then, and improved my outlook considerably, but I still needed a refresher going into the newest adventure of the Dwarfers, Red Dwarf: Back To Earth, a copy of which was recently sent my way.

Here, the crew of the Red Dwarf, a mining ship stranded in space for fully three million years following an accident, find themselves in another dimension after an attempt to get home and restart the human race: namely, our own, in which the Dwarfers are the cast of a popular sci-fi sitcom.  They’ve also just found out something horrible–they’re about to be canceled.  Now, can they get their series renewed and get back to the Dwarf?  Or will they share Star Trek’s fate?

This really is good stuff, folks.  Even if you haven’t seen a whole lot of Red Dwarf, you should still be able to appreciate the panoply of jokes thrown at you from the sidelines, and all the extra-strange minutiae isn’t just sci-fi. There’s one great sequence where Lister, quite possibly the last human being alive, commandeers his series’ creator’s typewriter and proceeds to run amok, commanding hologram Rimmer to repeatedly bash his crotch against a writing desk and android Kryten to step on a series of rakes, in the grandest Sideshow Bob tradition.

Yes, Simpsons already did it.  I love subreferences.

Anyway, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands this riotous British sci-fi a full eight out of ten for being obscure yet  hilarious.