RD VI–”Emohawk – Polymorph II”, or Hey, Look, My First Negative Review

Welp, folks, I have a very good reason for not having any reviews up until now. However, until I think of it, will you accept that the Devil made me do it?

Well, all right, not the Devil, but the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series has been a real temptation of late; but I just finished listening to it not long ago. I didn’t realize just how profoundly unsatisfying — fuck that, heartbreaking — the ending to Mostly Harmless was until I heard the ending to the radio series. It was good. It was hardly perfect, but when one considers that this series’ creator had by this time died, it was good. That is the way you bid farewell to characters you’ve followed all these years; that was, more or less, the way it all ought to have ended (at least if it had to end with Mostly Harmless).

Oh, and Vivian Stanshall’s Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. Go download it. Now. (Seriously, his family basically encourages it from what I gather. It’s almost impossible to find any other way.) How can anyone not love a guy who writes a love song to his penis (“How the Zebra Got His Spots”)? Excellent stuff, well worth listening to. Bit dark in places, tho’, and weird — “Rawlinson End” stuff this ain’t. Rather personal stuff from the Ginger Geezer.

But I digress. I have a lot of bitching to get to, so let’s get right on it. The first thing that came to me as I watched this episode is how much different in — well, in tone it was from Series V. Where Series V is quite, quite story-driven, almost story-dependent, this series seems more focused on packing the script with sharp one-liners; particularly this episode, which almost seems to be three part-episodes stitched together: “Simulant Chase”, “Zany Wedding In the GELF Village”, and “Wacky Hijinks We Couldn’t Fit In The First Polymorph Episode — Now With 33% More Duane Dibbley!”

It almost seems — and I dunno if I ought to say this — reminiscent of h2g2: They go one place, things happen to them, funny things are said, circumstances drive them to another place, lather, rinse, repeat. Except it doesn’t feel right here, because Red Dwarf isn’t, I think, designed for that kind of plot — it’s why the characters are as deep as they are, so Grant Naylor wouldn’t have to rely on “send characters to wacky place, Character A reacts (1), Character B reacts (2), etcetera”. Douglas Adams did sci-fi comedy with zippy plot, inversion/ignorance/satire of sci-fi tropes, along with just about everything else, and an endless capacity for invention; RD does it with the way its unique and complex characters (not that h2g2 characters aren’t deep, but I don’t think any of them are so well-defined as, say, Kryten or Rimmer) interact with those same sci-fi tropes left more or less untouched. The run-all-over-the-place plot serves to constrain the characters a bit, which is good up to a point — and then only if the plot is much good, which I don’t think it is in this episode. For instance, Rimmer –whose character had been explored almost to the point of tedium in Series V — snaps more or less right back into his role as Rule-Obsessed, Anal-Retentive Bully, and Kryten falls right into place as the One Who Knows Everything About Nearly Anything. I’m not calling this kind of running-about plot a step backwards or anything, mind you; if anything, it’s more of a lateral move. Or rather, it would be were it better executed, and I don’t think it’s done particularly well here.

I guess part of what irritates me about this episode is that in order for it to progress, pretty much all of the Dwarfers have to show some rather astonishing stupidity. The characters suffer at the expense of funny gags. Moreover, some of the jokes just kind of get on my nerves as well. “Worse than one of Lister’s drunken fry-ups”? Isn’t that one of those self-referential jokes that people are always complaining about in Series VII and VIII? I just think that line is rather weak, is all.

And the alter egos. Sweet Jeebus, the alter egos. The first time the Polymorph removed emotions from the crew, the consequences made a certain amount of sense: when Rimmer’s anger was removed from him, we were left with a massively non-confrontational dweeb, and the Cat minus vanity was simply a depressed slob. Now these two characters have effectively the same qualities removed from them (they’re referred to as “snideyness” and “cool”, but I don’t see them being any different from anger, which would make Rimmer snide, and vanity, which is what everyone else but the Cat would call his “cool”), with results that are not only completely different from what one might expect, but which rather fug of “hey remember these characters aren’t they a laff a minute hahahahaha look at ‘em go!” — particularly the appearance of Duane Dibbley. Duane spends his time wringing every laugh he can get out of the geek stereotype (as if they hadn’t gotten enough mileage out of him in “Back to Reality”) and Ace acts like a git: “Here’s the plan: suck me, the emohawk, and Duane out the airlock, all heroical-like! I’ll break Duane’s neck first ‘cos he’s just that pathetic har har.” That’s not the “Dimension Jump” Ace, that’s stupid testicle-based hypermacho action-movie thinking. In fact, this Ace is possibly more intolerable than the one we see in “Stoke Me A Clipper”. Of course, I guess it could be argued that that’s how Arnold sees Ace, but such a vicious caricature would imply that he still has his “snideyness”, which he’s not supposed to; and if that’s not what left Rimmer, then what did? So I’m guessing that’s not quite what the Comedy Police were aiming at here.

Even the ending’s not much more than a bad laugh-grab. “What a Dibbley”? Is this an attempt at a catchphrase? What the smegging fuck? It’s just a gag tacked on at the end for a larf, that does nothing to anything that went before it (unlike the end of “Queeg” or “Parallel Universe”). I think I’ve seen episodes of Scooby-Doo that end more satisfyingly. And I mean the later ones, with Scrappy. A certain percentage of this episode — well, okay, the last third — simply is not up to Grant Naylor’s best. This one ought to have gone back for a rewrite.