Okay, Chris, so you finally updated your website. Now that your site’s joined everyone else here in 2007/2008, I take back some of the lousy things I said about you not updating in a dog’s age.

Now just keep it up. Oh, and one thing — thanks very much for the lovely new Gallery pics, but dump the stupid Flash interface. Please. I stand firm on it being thoroughly useless and irritating. Maybe if you get rid of it you can upload more than twelve pictures! ‘Cos I think that’d be just great.

SuperHappy FunTime Update!: Whoever finally updated and corrected this (boldface and italics mine):

COPYRIGHT 2008 CHRIS BARRIE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
All other copyrights and trademarks are property of their prospective owners

Thank you.

Ha HA! I’ll bet you all — okay, you both — thought I was dead or something, didn’t you?

Well, I wasn’t. I did, however, discover classic Doctor Who, and, well, Tom Baker, and his hair, and his lovely voice…well, I got sort of…distracted, see. I mean, Tom Baker. Come on. You can’t fault me. It’s Tom Baker.

At any rate, here I am, and the reason here is where I have positioned myself is that I want to tell you about Howard Goodall’s web presence. Remember the last one of these things I did? Yeah, I said then that next time I’d cover this website (it’s in with my other Linkys! if you want to look).

Immediately, of course, I run into a problem. See, there’s just not much to say about the website of one of the best composers Britain has to offer. The man himself has a wealth of distinctions and honors under his belt, and rightly so, but his website is kind of…meh. The first page you see, a sort of splash/navigation page, has as its background a photo from (I assume from looking at other parts of his site) the television series How Music Works, and I think that’s about as spiffy as the graphics get around there.

The other pages, with few exceptions, have a pale grey background — nothing too hard on the eyes, which is nice, but nothing particularly daring or difficult for a website designer to acomplish, I’ll bet. The choice of fonts is a bit basic, too: the ubiquitous Comic Sans MS for the index page, and I’m guessing Tahoma for most of the text, or maybe Arial. (A quick MS Word check tells me that I was dead wrong. It’s Trebuchet MS, another fairly well-used font.) All this certainly serves its purpose well, but the overwhelming impression is of a very, very bare-bones website indeed. In fact, if it weren’t so scrupulously updated, I’d say that the site was several years old. (Those “return to index” buttons certainly look jarringly ancient by contemprary standards. I bet my mother could whip up something far nicer in Paintshop in minutes. Seriously.) And lastly, I think perhaps whoever updates the website would do well to cut down on the number of pictures (s)he puts on a given page. Maybe it’s just my craptastic dial-up connection, but I swear the “latest news” page must’ve taken ten minutes to load. That ain’t right.

If it sounds like I’m just a nasty old bitch who can’t be pleased with anything, I don’t mean to. After all, the site is as compendious and up-to-date as one could wish (whoever maintains Chris Barrie’s site, take note). It’s nice to see a website that appears to take the fan into consideration as more than an afterthought after throwing up a CV for the people who might hire him. Given the choice, I would much rather see a site that’s too basic than one that’s too ornate or Flash-y (I’ll get to one of them in a future article), but in 2007 it’s perfectly possible to have a nice basic site, free of Flash and loading problems, which design doesn’t send the visitor to sleep.

Arlene’s Verdict: If Mr. Goodall is paying someone to maintain this site, I hope he’s not paying much. Altho’ if he’s doing all this by himself, I applaud his hard work — right before I suggest he start paying someone to keep up his website.

And for my next Very Special Installment of “Dwarf on the Intarweb”, I take on Robert Llewellyn’s website. Pray for me.

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?

Yes, I know it’s been a while, and that my readers — perhaps even both of them — may even have begun to lose hope that I would ever update again.

Hah. Fat chance of that. I like the sound of my own writer’s voice entirely too much to give upon this weblog that easily.

“But if you like it so much,” I imagine my tiny readership saying to themselves, “why did you put off writing another article for so long?” This I answer in several ways:

(a) Look, I’m lazy. I’ve never made any secret of being horribly lazy. Mine is the Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes approach to deadlines: I work best only under pressure. Besides which, my computer is old and slow, so working in the WordPress article-writing window makes things even slower, and I can’t even save time by typing it up on my own time and copy-pasting my finished text.

(2) My library got the first of a set of Cowboy Bebop DVDs. I mean, c’mon, it was Cowboy fuckin’ Bebop, one of the better animes of the last decade or so. Do you seriously expect me to use precious Cowboy Bebop-watching time for typing up articles and interacting with people? Why the hell would I do that?

(hat!) I’ve also discovered that one of the PBS stations I can pick up is airing episodes of the latest run of Doctor Who (not classic Who, but previous series of the new Who). You may imagine now that I have just squealed like a schoolgirl, because that’s what I did when I first found this out.

Now, on to the reviewy goodness.

Ah, that opening theme. I really wish they’d been able to use it more in Series Three and beyond. It’s one of the good things about the Silva Screen “extended” Red Dwarf theme, the way it stitched together the “old” and “new” themes — and there are few enough good things about that “extended version”, at least to my ears, that that particular merit bears mentioning. Maybe the thing would have been a bit more palatable if it had sounded like it was performed on slightly more sophisticated equipment than a mid-priced Yamaha keyboard and Howard Goodall had written the lyrics to the “extended” verses.

Anyway, the first third of this or so sets up the situation nicely: Apparently Holly, in leading his dangerous troubleshooting expedition that launched Lister headfirst over a console, has forfeited his right to be the Red Dwarf computer’s avatar, and has to step down, ushering in the new and highly unpleasant Queeg administration, whose slavish adherence to the letter of Space Corps directives even in deep space is enforced by an avatar with the look and personality of the nastiest drill sergeant one can imagine. (Incidentally, I’d be glad to nominate Charles Augins as the best one-off guest turn in the whole of Series Two, at least off the top of my head. I can’t help but think, for instance, that Chris was being awfully generous in his praise of the lady whose name I forgot how to spell who plays Rimmer’s female doppelganger in “Parallel Universe”. But Augins does what he’s been asked to do convincingly and, dare I say it, with possibly just a tiny smidge of enthusiasm as we see him barking out orders and treating everyone with undisguised contempt.) We also get a rare and deeply enjoyable opportunity to see Chris Barrie flaunt his prodigious skills as a mimic. Why the hell is a man this talented wasting time with goddamn Tomb Raider films, playing second banana to the less famous of Angelina Jolie’s breasts? Argh.

Lots of other science fiction franchises have made much of the relationship with artificial intelligence and the ability to feel and understand emotions. Hell, it’s a major theme of speculative fiction. Look, for an example, at Star Trek: The Next Generation and the android Data’s emotion arc. Sweet jiggling Shatner on a pogo stick, Data and his emotion arc was a huge part of ST: TNG. They overlooked some great characters (hey, remember Levar Burton as Geordi LaForge? Hm? Only maybe you don’t so much, because they hardly did anything with his character compared to how much we found out about Data learning about emotions) in favor of episodes dealing with questions like: Is artificial intelligence capable of genuine emotion, or anything like it? Can an artificial life form learn how to feel? Should we let ourselves get too attached to it because we can interact with it rather like we can with a person, or should we never foget that, first and foremost, it’s artificial?

Red Dwarf answers such questions for its own universe loud and clear in this episode, in case it wasn’t already fairly obvious before: “Hell yes.” In fact, it’s more like “Of sodding course. What rock have you been living under?” It’s basically taken for granted, in the Red Dwarf universe, that AI can think and feel and tell bad jokes just like a human. He’s treated as such in every conversation (hell, Lister and the Cat keep calling Holly and Queeg “he” and “men”) and missed as such when the Dwarfers are separated from him. Even Rimmer accepts this as basically true, for all he treats (or tries to treat) Kryten and Holly as appliances (remember how he would ask Holly for things in Series One?). Holly’s not a computer here; he’s an AI person, with a pride that can be wounded and a personality not devoid of flaws (and a surprising talent for practical jokes and manipulation). The last few minutes of this in particular, when Holly is preparing for his apparent deletion, show this brilliantly: in exchanging their farewells, they show that they care about him, and that he cares about them. He absolutely relishes their reaction when he reveals his big joke — it’s a good bunch of friends indeed on whom you can safely pull pranks like this — and they’re naturally astounded, because “Queeg” put them through quite a lot of discomfort*. But it’s all fine by the next episode, ‘cos they know he was only having a bit of fun. And they wouldn’t hold a grudge against a friend.

*A side note: Whenever Chris goes on in the commentaries about how he was a bit flabby at such-and-so point in the series or episode, you can point to this as evidence that he’s far and away his own worst critic — he pulls off crunches and such (when Queeg takes over control of Rimmer’s body for exercises) with enviable ease.

Yes indeed, boys and girls, in today’s “Dwarf on the Intarweb” I take time to tell Chris Barrie (or whoever else is going to read my loose-brained philippics) what I think is wrong with his website, on his birthday. His special day. On which he is supposed to feel nice and have good things happen to him, along with cake and ice cream and greeting cards.

In other news, I am a horrible person.

But that’s not going to actually stop me.

Anyway, like tons of other Red Dwarf-related websites, this one has a splash page. And, on top of that, it’s got some kind of Flash on it to make the pictures change around. Look, if any of you read my diatribe article diatribe about Norman Lovett’s site, you would know that I think splash pages are a waste of website code, money, and site visitors’ time. I also feel strongly about how injudicious use of Flash can ruin an otherwise decent website. On the other hand, this site only has a bare handful of pages and a photo gallery (of which much more anon). It arguably needs all the pages it can get, poor neglected thing. Besides that, it’s easy to get to the home page from it because the link to it takes up most of the bottom half of the page. Besides even that, Chris looks awfully good in those pictures. (…I’m weak, I know.)

Allow me to copy a little tidbit from the home page here so I can play a little game of “What’s Wrong With This Statement?” **ahem**

“This site is dedicated to the work and career of actor and presenter, Chris Barrie. You may simply want an autographed picture, you may want to find out what projects are currently in development” (which you can’t find out here, because Chris’s site hasn’t been updated in about a year. Go check his news page if you don’t believe me. The last news update was in March ‘06. Honestly, the Red Dwarf official site does a much better job of keeping fans up-to-date on Chris’s career than Chris himself does.) “or you may find it hard to endure life without knowing how long, on average, the double sided tape used to stick Arnold Rimmers [sic] “H” to his forehead remains effective.” (Is that a subtle jab at the fanbase there, Chris? Clearly you’ve been spending too much time around that naughty influence, Craig Charles, and his ill-concealed disdain for sci-fi fans. Naughty. **wags finger**)

“For anything Chris Barrie related this site is well worth a visit.” (Only it isn’t, because there’s hardly anything on it. There’s six pages, not counting the splash page and that Flash abomination of a photo gallery. Mauve Alert’s a better site for Chris Barrie-related information and pictures, and it’s all but dead.)

That leads me nicely to the Gallery. Much as I’ve bitched about all the other things — well, the one big thing and the occasional little things — I think are wrong with this site, they’re really nothing terrible, and could be fixed quite easily if Chris just updated the damn site more often. That would be a thousand and ten kinds of absolutely wonderful, if he did that. For one thing, if the lone Massive Machines article and the columns he’s written are any indicator, he’s a really fine writer, and this fine writer, who can make combine harvesters and automotive repair interesting even to me, would probably draw more people over to his site if he just updated it sometimes. But the Gallery…the Gallery is beyond the pale.

I should probably have been tipped off about the Gallery and its multiple leves of irritation the first time I visited it, when it opened a completely separate page for viewing. It’s a Flash creation, and the pictures each take their own sweet sodding time to load, no matter if you’ve cycled through them before. I’m led to understand there may be captions at the bottom of these pictures, but for reasons I fail to fathom, I can’t actually see them — it won’t let me scroll down to the bottom of the picture, ho no, because it’s Flash and all the controls that whoever programmed this monstrosity thought you might need are in a teeny-tiny portion of the bottom right-hand corner, with seven buttons that, on my nineteen-inch monitor, appear to be about the size of a pencil’s eraser. And do you know how many pictures you actually get to see on this steaming pile of Flash?

Twelve. Someone went to a gargantuan amount of trouble and caused countless users frustration for two Tomb Raider pics, five Brittas Empire photos, and five pictures from Red Dwarf. (And really, he may as well not have posted the second one, the first in the gallery from one of the Tomb Raider films — Chris’s barely even in the picture there.) I suppose if we were talking about dozens of photos, one could just about barely justify making one unable to see them except in some silly Flash program. But only twelve? It’s worse than useless.

Arlene’s verdict: As long as you avoid the photo gallery, this site isn’t too bad, if sorely lacking content. It at least seems to have a slightly more personal touch than Norman Lovett’s site showed, even if it hasn’t been updated in about a year, because there’s a very good writer in Chris if he’d just care to show it to us fans more often. There’s potential for a fine site here — it just needs some more attention. Oh, and a completely new picture gallery. But other than that, it’s fine…

Um…happy birthday, Chris? ^_^

Next on “Dwarf on the Intarweb”: Fun with Howard Goodall’s site. Better than a kick in the bread tray.

In this week’s installment of “Dwarf on the Intarweb” I nitpick at and bitch about Norman Lovett’s online presence. Really, that sounds more fun than it actually is.

Like a lot of Red Dwarf-related sites, I notice this one has a splash page. It’s a waste of code, I think, but at least it loads quickly — but it loads quickly because there’s next to nothing on it, and most of what is on it could just as easily have found a home on the site’s home page or been eliminated altogether. And that, boys and girls, is why splash pages are a waste of time, effort, money and webpage code for everyone.

Anyway. I click on the rather oddly-designed “Enter” button and go to the home page, which is laid out simply enough, altho’ I notice it seems to have an awful lot of fiddly bits to load for such a simple page (f’r instance, those bars either side of the navigational buttons load in three parts, apparently ‘cos they have rounded ends. I’m no website design expert, but I suspect there’s an easier way to do that). It also has to be pointed out that the alternate text for the “Contact” button is “This is not a daffodil, repeat, this is not a daffodil!” I’m sure that wasn’t intended to rip off Hattie Hayridge, but it stands out among all the other legitimate Lovett quotes to anyone who’s seen much of Red Dwarf at all. Surely whoever actually made this site could have found another appropriate quote from Norm’s tenure as Holly? Goodness knows there are plenty to choose from. Just slapping up any old Holly quote regardless of whether it actually belongs on the website seems a bit lazy. (On the other hand, should Hattie ever establish a website of her own, I think this gives her the right to nick one of Norm’s best quotes for her own. That seems only fair.)

Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the tons of information and things to do available on sites like Tony Hawks’, but this whole site feels a bit wanting for content to me. I mean, it’s updated appropriately (if a bit sporadically; his latest gig for purposes of recording his DVD gets no mention on his news page) when he’s about to tour or say something controversial about Grant Naylor Productions, but his “biography”, for instance, is five lines and a laundry list of appearances in every medium but oil paintings, along with lines from reviews. I guess that’s good if you’re going to book him someplace, but the ardent Norman Lovett fan seeking information would be obliged to look elsewhere. Even the “Family” page is more an attempt to present a resume (imagine that word with the appropriate accents, please, ‘cos I can’t do those in WordPress) than anything else. Hell, arguably this entire site was designed first and foremost for agents, and appealing to fans was more an afterthought than anything else.

I also noticed something about the site’s design. The font for most pages on this site is Arial (having checked with my handy-dandy MS Word program), but on the RD page it’s Arial Bold and the Gallery page has one Arial caption but shows the rest in your bog-standard Times New Roman. Shouldn’t those all be the same font, or nearly? Or do I nitpick too much? On the other hand, the Gallery is about the most entertaining page on this site — the selection of pictures is rather interesting and the captions are composed well; this, along with the RD page and the news page are the only flashes of Norm’s inimitable style you’ll see on this entire website. Which is, all in all, a bit disappointing.

Arlene’s Verdict: Unless you’re booking him or one of his family members for a gig somewhere, this site’s damn near useless. The gallery’s kind of fun, tho’.

In my next “Dwarf on the Intarweb” article, I give Chris Barrie a one-of-a-kind birthday pressie: a review of his web site. And if that isn’t a heartwarming and touching gesture from a fan to a performer, I don’t know what is.

I actually came up with this idea a long time ago, before the Holoship even got off the ground. Well, to be honest, not so much “came up with” as “saw a several-years-old article at Groovetown about Dwarfy websites and figured ‘Hey, someone needs to do that again!’”. So I dug through my RD folder in my bookmarks and took notes on the better known — and not so well known — web presences of some important Dwarfy people and places. (Note: The sites I’m talking about can be found in the “Linkys!” sidebar to the right of the screen.)

Let’s start with a site I really liked. Tony Hawks’ site has a lot going for it. There is an unnecessary front page on it, but the link to get past that is clearly visible, so if you’re not keen on those you can move straight on to the home page. And a nice home page it is! While you do have to use something Flash-y to get around the site, it’s really very well-done Flash — it loads in no more than a second or two, even for my extremely old computer on a 56k connection.(Yes, 56k. We can’t get anything better where I live. It’s not offered. My family keeps checking.) In fact, certain other Dwarfy websites that shall yet remain nameless could stand to learn a few things from the execution of this Flash interface. I only wish there weren’t a video right there, that starts up immediately — my computer and connection don’t handle video very well at all. But I understand that most people don’t have that problem, so I won’t hold it against the site.

Another plus for the site: lots and lots of information. There are plenty of slebs out there who buy a web domain, slap up a few sparse page of information and maybe a few pictures, and call it a website. Hell, some of the Red Dwarf cast could be considered guilty of this — but more on that in later articles in this series. Not so here. Maybe it’s just because Tony Hawks has done quite a lot of things in his career — acting, singing, writing, not skateboarding — but here, for instance, there’s at least one page for each of his books (in some cases, two or three pages). Does, say, Stephen Fry do that? I assure you, he does not. (Not that Stephen Fry’s site isn’t nice — it’s just too busy telling everyone how shy and modest Stephen Fry is to actually talk about Stephen Fry for any satisfying length of time, which rather goes against the whole idea of having a website, surely?) There’s also plenty of multimedia thingys and wotsits for those of you who, for any reason, aren’t reading fans.

Of course, if you aren’t keen on reading, you’re missing out on one of the best things about the Tony Hawks site: the Skate Mail section. This is Tony dealing, in his own wickedly witty way (my alliteration; get your own), with the countless emailers who didn’t do their research before hitting “send”, or who have somehow failed to grasp the differences between this multitalented Brit and a certain famous skateboarder in the United States. It’s a bit hit-and-miss, since he gets a lot of these mails and they do tend to blend together in the mind after a while, but it nonetheless frequently made me snort and guffaw aloud with refreshing frequency — and I bet you would too, if you went and saw it. It was so funny I joined Tony Hawks’ Fun Club as soon as I finished reading. And the next time I have cash I’ll see what I can do about getting one of his books too.

Arlene’s verdict: Why are you still here reading this instead of visiting the site? Go! It’s a great way to kill a few hours. You’ll thank me later.

Next time on “Dwarf on the Intarweb”, I’ll complain a bit about Norman Lovett’s site. Ha, someone else complaining about Norman Lovett. Turnabout’s fair play in this case, right?

I present to you, gentle reader, a slightly late St. Valentine’s Day gift from me: A review of an episode all about insanity and power struggles. What better way, indeed, to say “I love you”?

…Well, I’ve already done “Holoship” and “Camille”. So quit yer whinin’. Anyway, this episode’s got quite a lot in it! So if it’s quite all right with you, let’s just skip the rambling entrance and get straight to the meat of the thing. All righty? All righty.

“Quarantine” begins with another episode in the long-running power struggle between Kryten and Rimmer, as Rimmer finds himself unable to persuade his crewmates even to launch a scouter at his command. It is galling enough for Rimmer that he wields no real authority or respect among the Dwarfers; to find that Lister and the Cat would liefer accept the command of Kryten — a mere sanitation droid, a bog-bot! — proves almost too odious to tolerate. The final splash of lemon juice in the wound, however, is the discussion about adding the hologrammatic Dr. Lanstrom to the crew. Not only is he marginalized when he issues the most innocuous of commands, and he is outranked in respect by one who he sees as an electronic scrubber of toilets, the other crewmembers are talking seriously of curtailing his existence privileges. Where would it end? Once he’s switched off, would he ever be reactivated? for Rimmer, the idea of being extinguished — the ultimate rejection — speaks to a very real and powerful fear (as witnessed in the discussions about it in “Future Echoes”). Yet Lister wonders why he’s “taking this so personal”.

Naturally, this exchange leaves Rimmer anxious, irritated and upset, and his argument with Kryten over Space Corps Directives does nothing to lighten his mood. Of course, Kryten isn’t making up Directives; but of course, Kryten isn’t about to use them against Lister or the Cat, either. While Lister antagonized Rimmer for the first two series because of the many basic differences in their personalities, Kryten becomes a very effective nemesis for Rimmer for the next several series possibly because they’re more alike than either of them would ever admit. Both show signs of a deep-rooted sense of inadequacy (Kryten’s, inbuilt; Rimmer’s, learned in his childhood); both have an idealized image of themselves that they can never quite realize (Kryten wishes to be a true rebel; Rimmer sees himself in command and wielding power); both of them, then, make themselves feel just a tiny bit closer to that image at the other’s expense (Kryten humiliates Rimmer with Space Corps Directives and passive-agressive gibes, while Rimmer appeals to Kryten’s programmed subservience and pummels him with insults). This desire for power on Rimmer’s part is to become an important component of this episode — but more on that later.

And so it is that the Dwarfers meet Doctor Hildegarde “Kill ‘em all” Lanstrom (allowing Rimmer to get a small portion of his own back before he is infected) and discover her various positive virii, including the luck virus, or “Deus Ex Machina Juice”. Incidentally, while I guess I can tolerate it for this one episode, the luck virus is something I wish they hadn’t brought back for Series VIII; it’s just far too easy to get a character out of any situation imaginable with it, same as it’s so easy to build a cheap sex gag or ten around the sexual magnetism virus. (Also, I note that out of the veritable treasure trove of advanced technology and things that presumably were tucked away on Starbug when VIII happened, that’s the only thing we see brought back. It’s just plain lazy writing.) At any rate, the rest of the crew manage to escape with both their lives and the box of virii, to rendezvous with Rimmer aboard the Red Dwarf. And thus begin the mind games.

The observant Red Dwarf fan will notice that Rimmer’s behavior is unusual immediately upon the return of the rest of the crew. The petty rule mongering he displays by sending the others into quarantine is more characteristic of the vindictive Rimmer of “Balance of Power”, using the potential loss of his cigarette supply as a sword of Damocles to keep Lister under his hologrammatic thumb. The Arnold Rimmer that might remember Lister’s various small kindnesses toward him is already gone, for the episode at least, as the virus nudges his mind inexorably towards absolute power and absolute sociopathy.

I’m not altogether sure that the holovirus makes Rimmer crazy, as such. A crazy man, I think, wouldn’t have nearly the capacity to plan, the play with, to jerk around the other Dwarfers as Rimmer does here — his confining the other crew goads even Kryten into uncharacteristically direct harshness. Even the dress and Army boots, along with the dialogue about the King of the Potato People, is not so much a manifestation of insanity on Rimmer’s part as it is a flagrantly transparent excuse to level such a charge against Lister, Kryten and the Cat. It’s a mindfuck, pure and simple, a manipulation, and probably the closest Rimmer will ever get to using people as pawns. He’s not exactly mad, but he is mad with power — downright out-of-his-curl-crowned-gourd drunk with it. We get a taste of Rimmer’s megalomaniacal tendencies in “Meltdown”; only now he’s been given infinitely more power than the command of a ragtag band of wax droids could afford him, with infinitely fewer consequences that the holovirus sufferer would observe directly.

This, perhaps, is what the holovirus does: it unlocks a magnitude and variety of supeernormal abilites with which no human can dream of coping without being overwhelmed and consumed — abilities so potent that only liquid Get Out Of Anything Free Card in the form of Lanstrom’s luck virus can defeat it. Giving a man who has been helpless throughout his life in the face of repeated heartbreak, injustice and plain bad luck the power to make the very fabric of reality his squealing bitch is a bit like giving whiny, unpleasant Anakin Skywalker the power to become unpleasant and crushingly powerful Darth Vader (only altogether less unconvincingly acted and generally shitty): by hook, crook or Force Choke, somebody’s going W.O.O. and he’s too totally addled with his newfound might to give a goddamn that those on whom he is meting out vengeance (subconscious-in-lieu-of-real-tormentors or otherwise) are the closest he’s ever had to friends.

…Wait, did I just compare Red Dwarf to Star Wars? And the universe didn’t implode around the resulting nerdiness singularity?

On a sort of side note to the previous paragraph, I think perhaps Mr. Flibble actually represents Rimmer’s last wisp of sanity. Note that he isn’t the one suggesting horrible and messy torment for the other crewmembers; Flibble is. It’s one last way of distancing himself, however slightly, from the atrocities he may try to commit — of acknowledging that last bit of Arnold Rimmer that still remembers that these are his crewmates, that bit which we see being drowned in a sea of unbridled psionic energy + lots of anger + convenient targets. Or is that just overanalyzing this poor, picked-over episode?

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.

…

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.

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.