Red Dwarf: "Officer Rimmer"

It is 13 October 2016, and time for another episode of Red Dwarf.

After an act of cowardice accidentally saves another starship, Rimmer (Chris Barrie) is promoted to lieutenant. Not only does he take the opportunity to lord it over his crewmates, he uses a captured bio-printer to replicate himself dozens of times to populate the whole of Red Dwarf with Rimmers.

As with all of the other episodes of Red Dwarf's 11th season, "Officer Rimmer" takes a bunch of old episodes and throws them into a blender. In this case the resulting mess feels deeply unpalatable - while there are a few early jokes that work incredibly well, the episode as a whole simply fails to work. You can only recycle these sorts of jokes so many times, and in the main Red Dwarf appears to have passed that limit some time ago.

Red Dwarf: "Give and Take"

It is 6 October 2016 and time for another episode of Red Dwarf.

When exploring a soon to be destroyed space station, Lister (Craig Charles) is captured by an insane medical droid and has his kidneys removed. With only days left to life, he must convince the Cat (Danny John-Jules) to donate a replacement kidney.

With this 11th season of Red Dwarf there has been an enormous reliance on revisiting and remixing old storylines. This left the season premiere "Twentica" feeling particularly tired and repetitive, but managed to make the second episode "Samsara" a rather pleasant slice of nostalgia. "Give and Take" falls somewhere in between. There is some great character work and some genuinely funny gags, but the core narrative has simply been lifted from other episodes.

Red Dwarf: "Samsara"

It is 29 September 2016, and for the second episode of Red Dwarf XI.

The Red Dwarf discovers an escape capsule. As it approaches Kryten (Robert Llewelyn) and the Cat (Danny John-Jules) speak to one of the survivors. When the capsule is opened, both survivors are dead. The capsule's trajectory is tracked back to a crashed spaceship - the Samsara - lying at the sea floor of an ocean moon. Once onboard Kryten and Rimmer (Chris Barrie) are separated from the Cat and Lister (Craig Charles) and the true horror of the Samsara is revealed.

Last week I complained about how weak and tired the season premiere of Red Dwarf seemed to be. It was filled with old, repetitive jokes, and drew its humour from science fiction concepts and situations without really exploiting the core cast for humour. I always feel comedy comes best not from story but from interaction between characters, and over the years Red Dwarf seems to have increasingly forgotten that fact. I'm not sure if "Samsara" is honestly any fresher - it's still recycling the same jokes that have maintained the series for close to 30 years - but it at least works with the characters this time around. The result is a genuinely funny, if old-fashioned, half-hour of TV comedy.

Red Dwarf: "Twentica"

It is 22 September 2016, and time for the Season 11 premiere of Red Dwarf.

When a group of cyborgs travel back in time to change Earth's history, Lister (Craig Charles), Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Cat (Danny John-Jules) and Kryten (Robert Llewelyn) ride the timestream back to stop them. They discover an alternative 1920s America where technology has been outlawed and the cyborgs rule the Earth.

Red Dwarf returned last year for an 11th season, beginning with this time travel adventure. It's been a long-running series with some enormous gaps in between seasons: while this might be the 11th season, it comes a full 28 years after the series began. It feels old. It feels worn out and jaded. Obviously the cast are almost three decades older, but that's fine: actors get old, and there are always stories you can tell with a man in his 50s that you cannot tell about a man in his 20s. The cast have aged. The characters, by-and-large, have not. The series itself - the sense of humour, the plots, the gags - just feels so dreadfully, miserably old. Even the jokes are likely receiving an old age pension.

Red Dwarf: "Dear Dave"

I have been remiss in my Red Dwarf reviews. Season 10 is done and gone, and yet I still haven't reviewed the final two episodes. Let's redress that now with a look at the season's fifth episode, "Dear Dave". Lister is increasingly depressed about his life as the last human being alive. He's going stir-crazy, sulking on couches and flirting with vending machines. When a post pod arrives, Lister discovers that an ex-girlfriend - now dead for millions of years - may have had Lister's son without his knowledge.

This is a very mixed episode, combining the sort of comedy that made Red Dwarf so good in the old days with scenes that are just painful to watch. Lister falling over a vending machine and looking like he's having sex with it would have been tedious 30 years ago. In 2012, when this episode aired, it was just dreadful. As a result this is the most uneven episode of the season so far.

It's Cold Outside #4: "Entangled"

In Red Dwarf X's fourth episode, Lister loses Starbug and Rimmer in a game of poker, resulting in his being fitted with a explosive device to his groin. Meanwhile Kryten and the Cat become quantum entagled with each other and start saying everything in unison with each other.

Well it had to end sooner or later. Red Dwarf's unexpected winning streak of genuinely funny episodes comes to a crashing halt with "Entangled", an episode reminiscent of the tedious episodes around the sixth and seventh seasons - replete with strange ugly mutant people, overplayed gags and fairly shoddy writing. It's not completely devoid of humour, but quality jokes are thin on the ground this episode.

In the end it boils down to a question of quality versus valuable time. Is this episode of sufficient quality to warrant your valuable time? In this case I'd have to say no.

It's Cold Outside #3: "Lemons"

The team get stuck on 1st century Earth and need to create a lemon-based battery to power the remote control that can restore them to the future. On the way they meet a noted historical figure in India, with typically disastrous results.

I feel like this season of Red Dwarf is charting some kind of twisted course through the history of the series. While the first episode felt like something out of Season 4 or 5, and the second like something out of Season 1 or 2, "Lemons" feels much more like a late-season episode - only actually quite funny and with more to recommend it than most of Red Dwarf's later instalments.

It's Cold Outside #2: "Fathers and Suns"

It's Father's Day, which leads Lister - who due to a time travel incident is his own father - to realise that he's a disappointment as a son and a failure as a father. Rimmer and Kryten install a new shipboard computer to replace the now-departed Holly.

If the premiere left any doubt that Red Dwarf has improved considerably with this new season, this second episode completely erases that doubt. I compared "Trojan" to Red Dwarf around its fifth or sixth season. "Fathers and Suns" is for the most part much more akin to the series back in its third season. The characterisation is razor-sharp, the gags are mostly based on character rather than situations, and the overall vibe is much more akin to the likes of "Balance of Power" or "Marooned" than, say, "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" or "Back to Reality". I'm slightly shocked to admit it, but this is the first Red Dwarf episode in quite a while to be genuinely good.

It's Cold Outside #1: "Trojan"

Way back when it started I was an enormous fan of Red Dwarf. It was a ridiculously cheap BBC2 sitcom set on a spaceship with a small cast. It was low on production values and used the science fiction as a backdrop for some classic character-based comedy. I watched both seasons and raved about it to my largely uninformed friends, for whom the series has come and gone without crossing their pop culture radar.

Some years later I was amazed to discover the series lasted beyond two seasons, and watched as Red Dwarf went from strength to strength, gaining mass popularity as it went. Sadly, the longer the series went on the less I enjoyed it. The science fiction stopped being a background for the comedy and started becoming a source for it. Smart dialogue got replaced by more visual gags. The characterisation went south: by introducing the android Kryten the series rendered another character (the ship computer Holly) utterly redundant, while the three regular characters Lister, Rimmer and Cat slid into stereotypes and stock running jokes. The nadir seemed to hit around the sixth season: the two subsequent seasons shook things up by introducing Chloe Annett as new regular Kochanski, but the series was still a long way from the quality of those first 12 episodes.