Red Dwarf

Comments and reviews

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  Member review

  Ray Okonkwo

  Oct 21, 2026

  8/10

  Red Dwarf still holds up for me as one of those shows you can drop into almost anywhere and find something worth staying for. The basic setup never really gets old: Lister drifting through space millions of years out, stuck with Rimmer’s hologram, the Cat, Kryten, and Holly’s fading brain. Most of the laughs come from how badly these personalities grind against each other rather than from big sci-fi set pieces. I keep coming back to the smaller moments—Rimmer inventing new ways to be petty, Cat treating every corridor like a fashion runway, Kryten trying to process human nonsense with that earnest flat voice. The writing trusts the cast to sell the absurdity without needing constant explanation. That said, the show has a clear streak of anti-religious material that sits there in plain sight once you notice it. In the episode “Lemons” the crew ends up in Roman Britain and later India and briefly decide they’ve met Jesus. The man they latch onto is shown leafing through a modern book about Christianity and reacting to it like he’s studying for a test. Then the reveal lands that he is only “Jesus of Caesarea,” and the actual Jesus becomes the punchline of the whole bit. It is played strictly for laughs, with the historical figure treated as disposable comedy fodder. Earlier, in “Waiting for God,” Lister finds out the Cat people built an entire religion around him as “Cloister the Stupid.” They wiped themselves out in holy wars over a misread line of scripture about the colour of hats at a hot-dog stand. Lister straight-up calls religion ridiculous while the last Cat priest dies convinced a simple cold remedy is a sacrament handed down from God. The whole arc treats faith as a catastrophic misunderstanding. Then in “The Last Day” Kryten’s belief in Silicon Heaven is framed as a deliberate lie coded into androids to keep them obedient. Lister spends most of the episode trying to talk him out of it, presenting the afterlife story as nothing more than a control mechanism. These scenes are not subtle background gags; they are central jokes that keep returning to the idea that religion is either stupid, deadly, or a tool for obedience. I still give the series four stars because the character work and the low-stakes weirdness usually win out. The time-loop episodes, the parallel-universe hops, the mutant-creature run-ins—they all work best when the show stays focused on how Lister just wants a curry and a quiet life while everyone else spirals. Holly’s deadpan senility never stops being funny. The shift from the big mining ship to Starbug actually helped the comedy; the smaller space forces them into closer quarters and sharper arguments. You can feel the writers enjoying how far they can push Rimmer’s snobbery or Cat’s vanity without breaking the group. Even when the plots get ridiculous, the dialogue stays rooted in ordinary irritation and affection. That balance is what keeps me watching whole runs instead of just cherry-picking famous episodes. The religious material does leave a mark, though. It is not every episode, but when it appears it is pointed enough that you cannot pretend it is accidental. The show keeps returning to the same well: faith is something dumb people invent, something that gets them killed, or something programmed into them so they will behave. Lister’s dismissals are written as the voice of reason. For a comedy that otherwise thrives on letting every character be equally ridiculous, those moments single out religion for special treatment. It does not ruin the surrounding jokes, but it is noticeable and it is consistent across different series. If you come for the banter and the strange shipboard life, Red Dwarf delivers more often than it misses. The core quartet (plus Holly) remains one of the better odd-couple ensembles on television. I can sit with an episode that is mostly Rimmer inventing new regulations or Kryten polishing the floor and still walk away satisfied. The anti-religious bits are part of the package, not a late addition, and they are written with the same confidence as the rest of the gags. That confidence is why the show works at all; it just happens to aim some of that confidence at an easy target. Four stars feels right—plenty of rewatch value, a few episodes that drag, and a clear bias that never quite goes away once you have seen those three stories back to back. It is still the show I put on when I want familiar voices arguing in deep space, even when I roll my eyes at the sermon jokes.