Red Dwarf: Season 2
(Region 2 DVD)
(1988)
review by Billion$Baby

So just a few months after the original series had run, Red Dwarf 2 was aired. The first series was not repeated at the request of Grant & Naylor who had been disappointed with the minimal sets, most of which had all been painted in a boring military grey. They'd spent most of the budget for that first series on the model of the Red Dwarf ship. That was an essential purchase but with it built already, series two had more cash at it's disposal combined with more in
put from Grant & Naylor towards the crew and cast members.

As well as Grant & Naylor wanting the sets to be more colourful and for the characters to be able to leave the ship, the obnoxious Arnold Judas Rimmer character was to be toned down slightly. We hear in one episode that three whole years in the Red Dwarf vesse
l have passed since we saw Lister get introduced to the Rimmer hologram.

I'm a big fan of this series. That's because I especially rate three of the episodes - Better Than Life,Thanks For The Memory and Stasis Leak. All six episodes are very funny but Better Than Life could just
possibly be an equal tie with Back To Reality as my absolute fave RD outing. Back To Reality is actually mentioned and a clip shown on one of this two-disc set's featurettes.

Episodes in Series 2:

Kryten - Hmmm. This very early version of the character appears at the start of this series but we don't see him again until it's reprised by another actor in Series 3. As mentioned in the dvd booklet, UK residents would have recognised the "Androids" soap opera and theme music to be a lampoon of "Neighbours" the Australian soap which was (and still is?) frighteningly popular in the UK. Rimmer is still utterly despicable in this first entry in the series and it's interesting that he mentions that he always wanted to have the "Ace" nick-name at school.

Better Than Life - Oh man, what a great episode! A Red Dwarf postal pod arrives after tracking the giant vessel for three million years. Now you find your perception of the Rimmer character warming slightly as you hear of Rimmer's horrible childhood and then you get to watch Lister, Rimmer and Cat enter the Better Than Life interactive game where all your fantasies come true. Except for Rimmer whose brain just can't accept nice things happening to him and whose absolute worst nightmares start to become reality. Chr
is Barrie is outrageously funny in this episode!! And it's cool to see the Groovy Channel 27 Hologram newsreader that was mentioned in conversation on the first RD series.

Thanks For The Memory - Rimmer and the other three celebrate his death day. The next day, they awake to find that four days are missing, Cat and Lister both have plaster casts on their feet, Lister's jigsaw has been mysteriously completed and four pages from his diary are torn out. Holly has no answers since the black box recorder is also missing. Who is responsible and why? Rimmer thinks it must be "Aliens!" but only a tombstone entitled "To The Memory Of The Memory Of Lise Yates" hidden on a distant moon has the answer.

Stasis Leak - What's a stasis leak? A "magic door" if you're trying to explain to the Cat but it's really an opportunity to resurrect the entire Red Dwarf crew when a portal is discovered on deck 16. This portal allows access to the living vessel just three weeks before Rimmer's negligence destroyed it - but you can't bring anyone back. There's some very funny stuff here as we hear of the pre-hologram Rimmer's voyage into "trip-out" city after his unfortunate hall
ucinogenic experiences on funky funghi. And it's especially good fun to watch Rimmer's treatment of the giant chicken which shows up in his living quarters! This is one of those episodes where the continuity of the show doesn't hold up as it predicts an event that never occurs. But Doug Naylor states that he and Rob Grant chose early on never to worry about the continuity of the show and to concentrate more on the comedy aspects instead.

Queeg - Holly the eccentric ship computer is replaced by an authoritarian personality called Queeg. No work, no food. Or in the case of Rimmer, no lengthy work-outs, no company energy for his hologram. As you'd expect, Holly is soon badly missed by the three guys. There's a very enjoyable lampoon of 2001 in here as a stupid song is sung as a computer personalityis erased!

Parallel Universe - An odd episode. We meet the female equivalents of Rimmer, Lister and Holly and a daft Dog character. There some The Day The Worm Turned type Two Ronnies humour as we listen to accounts of a matriarchal Earth society and we're left with a bit of a cliffhanger surrounding Lister's future. A good but not great RD episode and an odd way to end this very impressive series.

This two-disc dvd is another excellent region two release from the BBC. The full-frame print quality is slightly better and with the inclusion of so much more colour on the sets, it looks much more impressive than the last dvd purely because all of the sets on
the first series was so damn grey.

The extras are excellent. One 30 minute featurette interviews Garry Bushell (UK tabloid newspaper television critic) one moment, and then Professor Stephen Hawking the next. Which did make me laugh - as I'm sure it was supposed to. The deleted scenes are also
well worth checking out for some cool stuff that was cut out of Thanks For The Memory purely for running time reasons alone.

Here's the extras list:

-Cast commentary for all six episodes.
-Deleted scenes. (18 mins).
-Out-takes. (7 mins).
-30 second BBC2 trailer.
-"Red Dwarf A-Z" documentary. (30 mins).
-"Alt. personalities" featurette. (3 mins).
-Doug Naylor Interview. (16 mins).
-All of the footage shot for the Tongue-Tied song and dance dream sequence. (3 to 4 mins)
-Special Effects raw footage...zzzzzzz...(4 mins).
-Isolated music cues for this series.
-Two talking Red Dwarf book chapters read by Chris Barrie.
-Photo Gallery.
-Easter egg (Cartoon versions of Grant, Naylor and Ed Bye talking about the Queeg episode). (2 mins).
-Informative 12 page booklet and cool animated menus.

Another generous Red Dwarf dvd from the BBC who are ensuring that it really is worth replacing your vhs copies of the show. And for someone like me who didn't have any vhs copies at all, it's a bloody result and a half!! Collecting these is great fun. It seems as if these RD dvds are getting a region two release roughly around two months apart each time.

It's nice to observe that when the dvds are all bought and placed together, the sides will form one massive and rather pleasing Red Dwarf logo. I had wondered why the Series One dvd didn't have a title down the side of it...and now I know. Shame I'm not as
impressed with these rather crap double disc plastic cases that they're using. Still, never mind, apart from that tiny dvd case niggle, this is a perfect release.

(Hopefully the region 1 Red Dwarf dvds won't be too far behind now).