RD II–“Queeg”, or Mutiny on the Red Dwarf

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.

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