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A disappointing return to the mining ship Red Dwarf.

Despite the general putridity of its last two broadcast series, hardcore fans have been clamoring for a return of the crew of Red Dwarf since it went off the air in 1999. A proposed feature film was in the planning stages for years, but never quite materialized, and the cast went on to other projects and varying levels of success. Now, a decade later, the “boys from the Dwarf” are back – and by all that’s good and holy, they really should have stayed away.

Okay. Maybe that’s being a bit harsh. Red Dwarf: Back to Earth is certainly not the worst thing ever produced by this team (it’s superior to the whole of Series VII for example), but, after all these years, it is profoundly disappointing in just about every way.

Written by co-creator Doug Naylor, Back to Earth is a three-episode miniseries originally broadcast in April 2009 on Dave TV in the UK. It begins with the boys – slobby Dave Lister (Craig Charles), dopey hologram Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), preening humanoid feline Cat (Danny John-Jules), and prissy “mechanoid” robot Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) – pretty much where we left them: bored to death on the endless journey through space aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf, trying to get back to Earth. Kris Kochanski – the only female member of the crew (played by Chloë Annett in the earlier series) – has died, and Lister reads Jane “Oosten” novels to her headstone. Through a series of events too tiresome to summarize, a crisis involving a giant squid in their water tank causes the ship to resurrect (in hologram form) foxy science officer Katerina Bartikovsky (Sophie Winkleman), who uses the squid DNA to open a dimensional portal that will supposedly get the boys back home. But instead, they land on an Earth (in the year 2009 of course) in which Red Dwarf is a fictional TV series starring actors that look Just Like Them. In a rather obvious (but not wholly unwelcome) homage to Blade Runner, they seek out first actor Craig Charles on the set of Coronation Street (where Charles has indeed played the popular character Lloyd since 2005), and then their creator (Richard O’Callaghan) who holds their fate in his hands, and in his typewriter.

Yeeesh. Where to begin? First and foremost, the whole meta/post-modern thing feels extremely trite at this stage. Doug Naylor explains (in the commentary and making-of docs) that this format has been around for centuries, and of course he’s right, but it has been particularly overused in the last decade or so, and RD:BTE can’t help but seem like the last guest at the party. Naylor seems to think (and says as much in the doc) that the “twist” ending which basically resets the storyline at the end is its saving grace, but the problem is, it’s the exact same gag used more than a decade earlier in the episode “Back to Reality.” Naylor has always seemed to struggle with solo scripts since the show’s co-creator Rob Grant parted ways with RD after Series VI, and while Back to Earth is not as atrocious as Series VII (the absolute nadir of Red Dwarf), it feels like one of the aimless, only-vaguely-amusing shows of Series VIII. The plot is overly, overly complicated, the gags are mostly lifeless, and the whole “we’re only fiction” posturing is leaden and banal. Back to Earth is a mess, and not a particularly funny mess. There are a few gags littered through the three episodes that might provoke a weak smile (the “new” Starbug is one of them, but even that was constantly spoilered by publicity photos), and there’s a certain amount of mileage to be had with the Blade Runner stuff, which means episode 3 almost manages to be “interesting.” But on the whole, this feels very flat, and first-time viewers who never saw the original series would probably be utterly baffled as to why anyone thought this stuff was funny in the first place. The boys do their best with the weak material, and Danny John-Jules and Craig Charles look as though they haven’t aged a day. But none of them can elevate the material to anything really worth watching. Which is a bloody shame, because for at least the first four seasons of its original run (and some would say the first six), Red Dwarf was a truly magnificent series.

So, Back to Earth may be bollocks, but in the spirt of “the food’s terrible but there’s so much of it,” this 2-disc set is jam-packed with special features.

Dics One features both the three episodes as they originally ran on Dave TV, and the “Director’s Cut” version which re-edits the three into a single movie. This Director’s Cut, refreshingly, features no added footage, and in fact Naylor has actually tightened it up somewhat for better pacing. Also, a couple of overt references to the original episodic nature of the show were removed, such as Rimmer’s referring to it being a three-parter. This is how Naylor originally intended to do the story, but was forced to break it down into episodes at the behest of the folk at Dave TV. I have to admit that this version does flow better without stops-and-starts every 23 minutes. The Audio Commentary by Naylor is largely technical, but fairly interesting, especially during a long section where he discusses the problems with the proposed RD film, and why it was ultimately abandoned. Naylor isn’t the most dynamic speaker in the world, but he does make the effort to keep the commentary going for the entire run of the show. The episodic version is also fitted with a Cast Commentary featuring Charles, Barrie, John-Jules, and Llewellyn, but anybody that has ever listened to the actors’ commentaries on the regular series know they’re pretty useless, and consist mainly of the boys laughing at the jokes, complimenting each other’s performances, and generally not saying much of interest. This one is slightly better than the worst of those, but still only marginally listenable.

Disc Two is anchored by The Making of Back to Earth Part 1 (which was aired at the time of the original broadcast) and Part 2 (new to this DVD), which give a fairly exhaustive overview of the entire production, including how the special effects were achieved. There are also sub-menus with a bunch of other bits and bobs, including the usual Smeg Ups (bloopers), a handful of Deleted Scenes, plus Trailers, shorter featurettes focusing on specific subjects, photo galleries, and just about every single piece of video-ephemera associated with the original Dave TV broadcasts. There’s a lot of stuff here, but if you’re not particularly impressed with the main feature, it can get a bit tiresome. Those that do love Back to Earth should have just about anything they could ask for provided on these discs.

And, in a cute, if not unexpected, move, the DVD packaging looks exactly like the prop DVDs used in the episodes.

It pains me to pan RD: BTE because I am such a fan of the original series. But Dwarf hasn’t been truly funny for a long, long time, and I suspect if this feature (which won high ratings on its original Easter weekend broadcast) does lead to a new series, it’ll just be more of the same. But who knows? Maybe Red Dwarf can still rally and stoke up some of the fires that fueled its early episodes. Stranger things have happened, and I’m rooting for the boys to make the kind of genuine comeback that Back to Earth clearly wants to be, but never quite achieves.

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