RD I–”Waiting for God”, or David Ex Machina

First off, today is my birthday. Let joy be unconfined, and let there be feasting and worldwide celebration, and ice cream cake. I’m already doing that right now, with some classic Doctor Who: Jon Pertwee’s “The Time Monster”, featuring Robert Delgado’s excellent turn as the Master (it’s so hard to find someone who can play an unmitigated bastard so well). Have I mentioned that Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is marvelous? That whole era of Who is chockablock with energetic, somewhat campy fun, and none of it would work without someone like Pertwee in the lead. All in all, I’m much impressed by the classic Who I’ve taken in so far. And I haven’t even seen anything by Tom Baker yet.

But I’m not here to talk about me, or about classic Doctor Who, superlative as it may be. I’ve been fortunate enough to find a relatively undamaged Red Dwarf Series One DVD, so I decided to review “Waiting For God”.

If there’s anything joining most of the characters in this episode, any thread connecting them or quality they all share, I suppose it might be disappointment. Lister is shocked when he finds out that untold numbers of Felis sapiens have been slaughtered in his name (although the cynical part of me wonders if, given the track record of other organized religions in this regard, he shouldn’t have been able to guess that such a thing had probably happened); the Cat Priest’s character is rooted in the bitterness and despair of being abandoned by his people and his god; even Talkie Toaster is allowed a taste of shattered illusions when he’s informed that not everyone wants toast all the time.

And of course Rimmer gets his hopes dashed. It almost goes without saying that whatever Rimmer wants is the one thing he is, with very few exceptions, never going to get. In fact, arguably he gets twice the disappointment that anyone else does here, beginning with his reading Captain Hollister’s confidential personnel reports. It’s clear from his reaction that he had hoped — not to say expected — a rather more glowing description of himself than that which Hollister left behind. On the surface, this whole routine doesn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of the story; but perhaps it serves to set the tone, structurally and psychologically, for the much more crushing defeat he suffers (and arguably sets himself up for — he observes the full quarantine period despite his status as a hologram, which should protect him from any contagious diseases a presumably corporeal alien could give him; so why wait, except to make himself more tense with anticipation?) at the end of the episode.

That brings me to the odd part. Inasmuch as this episode can be said to have a message, it is abundantly clear that that message would be that belief in a higher power of some sort, be it aliens or God, is ultimately fruitless. This much is borne out by Rimmer’s experiences with the garbage pod and his certainty — the feverish, zealous, absoultely rigid faith that only the truly insecure are able to sustain, and that cracks somewhat, perhaps, even as he explodes at Lister — that contained in it would be the creature or agent through which he would gain a new physical body. But if that’s so, then why would Lister masquerade as Cloister, and rekindle the dying faith of the Cat Priest? It goes against the grain of the story, except perhaps as a way to clear Lister’s conscience. Maybe Lister put aside his modern beliefs to offer a ray of hope in the last moments of the life of an old Cat (although he couldn’t really have known those were his last moments); perhaps he was simply expiating some of his God-guilt at all the slaughter committed in his name (although he had no way of controlling or predicting that he would be deified). Either way, it doesn’t really make sense, does it?