RD IV–”Camille”, or Awwww, Mechanoid Lurve

So…um. Crap, starting these things is always the hardest part. Sometimes even my genius can’t help me write a sufficiently awesome and perfect opening paragraph. Gimme a minute.

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Hey, who here has seen Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl? God, I wish I could write like that. Putting together a small group of like-minded writers who could perform and retain control of their own work is one of my fantasy jobs. The problem with that, however, is I’m sure plenty of other groups do exactly that and never make it out of third place in the Haw-Haw Klub’s Tuesday night amateur comedy competition, trying desperately to convince the audience and themselves that their work really is genius, it’s just been snubbed out of jealousy on the part of the bigwigs in the massive conspiracy against talent and creativity that is mainstream entertainment. But oh, if I could! If I could write something as good as “Nudge, Nudge”, or the “Poofy Judges” bit, well — that’d be almost all the creative fulfillment I could handle, there.

Speaking of performing, I have to address something in “Camille” right off the bat — the performance of the title character. Everything else about this episode is quite all right with me; in fact, the Comedy Police really did quite well with this one. But I’m just not feeling her performance here. I know she’s Llew’s special lady and that, and I’m sure she’s a hoot in real life, but her whole performance comes off as rather flat and expressionless — not enough so to convince me she was going for the whole “I-Am-A-Robot” thing, but nowhere near as expressive and bursting with personality as Bobby’s performance as Kryten. I don’t mean this to sound nasty, and I really, really, really don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but — it’s just not funneh, and the delivery of some of those lines (like “He’s right. I’m just a huge green blob.”) brings me right out of suspending my disbelief. On the bright side, however, Camille-Rimmer and Camille-Lister are pretty good.

Of course, this episode is also about Kryten’s learning to lie — to his perceived superiors, at any rate. He can already lie to other mechanoids, as he proved in “The Last Day”, but that isn’t quite the same as what he’s learning to do here. I almost get the feeling that lying to another mechanical is sort of like the servants in Upstairs/Downstairs or some other Edwardian drama fighting with each other: it’s all right to do it to a fellow-servant, but interactions with your master warrant a higher standard of conduct. Of course, the entire idea that “some give orders, and others obey” is precisely what Lister has been trying to destroy, root and branch, in Kryten’s personality — and that includes teaching him to be deceitful, unpleasant, and offensive. This would probably be easier to accomplish were it not for Rimmer, who would actually quite like to have a servant or three (as we have seen in his frequent abuse of Kryten’s programmed deference to all humans, “no matter how insane”, throughout episodes like “Kryten”, “Bodyswap”, and later “Meltdown”) and who rather resents it when the khazi-droids get uppity and put on airs.

This brings me to another important point. “Camille” isn’t just the episode where Kryten learns to lie to humans; it isn’t just the episode where he falls in love, either. It isn’t even just the episode that riffs on Casablanca (which I can’t really comment on, as I’ve never seen it). This episode also marks, I think, the beginning of a long-running power struggle between Kryten and Rimmer that would become a feature of the show until Chris Barrie’s departure in Series VII. Sometimes, as in “Meltdown”, Rimmer gains the upper hand with the use of insults and appeals to Kryten’s programming; but more often, as in episodes like “Quarantine”, Kryten is the one successfully undermining what little authority Rimmer had with passive-agressive asides (you can’t tell me that Kryten’s jabs at Rimmer’s mother in “Polymorph” were all a slip of the speech circuit) or by out-pedanting Rimmer with his encyclopedic knowledge of Space Corps Directives. Obviously Rimmer wants someone he can order around, and Kryten, like any neophyte rebel, relishes the opportunity to take the smeee heee down a few pegs whenever he can. Perhaps, at heart, Kryten and Rimmer are alike in ways that neither of them would readily admit.