he drifting denizens of the starship Red Dwarf continue their endless, smegged-up return journey back to Earth, with a fresh disaster awaiting them at the rate of several per episode.
In "Camille," they find an alien engineered to become the perfect mate of every life form it encounters—but when it reveals itself as a hideous blob with a single eyestalk, only Kryten the android still sees past surface appearances. In "DNA," the crew encounter a derelict spaceship equipped with a device capable of engineering genetic cords to order: a device that first turns Lister into a chicken and then gives Kryten his first real taste of humanity.
In "Justice," their port of call is a space penitentiary, which promptly sentences the supercilious hologram Rimmer to a long-term imprisonment and obliges Kryten to defend him on the grounds that he's too big a git to be considered willfully guilty of anything. In "White Hole," the senile computer Holly regains the vast intelligence she's lost over 3 million years, but local anomalies over time and causality render Lister's skill at pool a more vital survival skill.
In "Dimension Jump," Red Dwarf is visited by an alternate-world Rimmer, who, unlike the stupid, arrogant, incompetent, cowardly and unlikable Rimmer known to the crew, is a swashbuckling charmer whose charisma leaves everybody marveling, "What a Guy!" Finally, in "Meltdown," the crew is transported to a planet where wax simulacra of famous historical figures ranging from Hitler to Marilyn Monroe fight a surreal final battle between good and evil.
Still lost in space, and still a bunch of gits
Series IV continues to open up the show, taking the characters off-ship from time to time, even pitting them against a bug-eyed monster or two. It's laugh-out-loud funny at the best of times, worth a wry grin even at its worst.
The characters continue to evolve, too. Cat seems to have some rudimentary understanding of the world around him, and Dave Lister is given a few opportunities to show physical bravery. There is a spectacular gross-out involving space mumps.
The best new character here is Ace Rimmer, a dashing, selfless hero from an alternate world whose studly perfection wins off everybody. It's funny not just because Ace presents a perfect sendup of the flawless adventure hero, but because he provides such an extreme contrast to the Arnold Judas Rimmer of Red Dwarf. "Our" Rimmer's disgust at the heroic Rimmer's antics is so transparently fueled by jealousy and his own deserved sense of comparative inadequacy that it emerges as the comic highlight of the series. Ironically enough, the supplemental material reveals that "Ace" was created out of sympathy for actor Chris Barrie, who had plaintively begged writers Grant and Naylor for a respite from episode after episode of Rimmer as intolerable git.
The extras include the usual lively cast commentary, onscreen cast and crew interviews with entertaining tales from the production; the background on "Meltdown," in which we learn that the original Gandhi lookalike (a very elderly man) was sent home out of fear that he wouldn't survive location filming, is the highlight. There are the usual "Smeg-Up" outtakes of blown lines and other disasters. A "Can't Smeg Won't Smeg Special," placing the cast on the set of a cooking show, is less successful; in fact, it's downright tiresome. A featurette involving dramatic moments from the adventures of Ace Rimmer, as shown here and in subsequent seasons, is enjoyable enough but filled with spoilers for anybody encountering these episodes for the first time on DVD. A music video, "Lurve," offers a montage of romantic moments from the show's entire run: fun enough, but also replete with spoilers. The episodes themselves are the real treasure.
