Future echoeS

Red Dwarf enters lightspeed to speed up their journey to Earth, but due to a cock-up of arrangements, the crew aren't in stasis when this happens, and begin to notice some peculiar events involving the wrong people at the wrong time - echoes of the future.

Lister is revealed to live to a fine old age and has two children, Jim and Bexley, one of whom is shown to die in a navicomp explosion. Meanwhile, the Cat breaks his tooth and Rimmer gets screwed out of knowing what happens to him in the future.

A fun little story. I quite like how despite immediately following the plot-heavy first episode which dealt with the rather strong topic of the entire ship dying, it remains perky and upbeat, even when dealing with the future death of Lister and his son! I kind of admire how the show just wastes no time at all in getting stuck in to time-related nonsense; not quite time travel per se, but seeing the future and other whatnots. Some sci-fi usually wait a while before tackling it, but oh no, not Red Dwarf! They wouldn't properly time travel until later on, though they found a crafty way to achieve the same goal in series 2.

After the first episode's density of gags, story, introductions and exposition, it's almost a relief to just have an episode that takes its time and allows itself to throw in stupid gags that are worthless but amusing nonetheless - like the scene of Lister singing and getting insulted by Talkie Toaster, or using shaving cream in place of deodorant.

There's plenty of great, great interaction between Lister and Rimmer, such as Rimmer's whining about "you livies hate us deadies!"; and although they appeared in the first episode, I feel like this is when the bunkbed scenes really came into their own. Even little things like Lister driving his bike around for, what, five seconds? - and singing those corny songs, it just adds a little bit of pizzazz to the matter, showing that despite everyone being dead and have little chance of reclaiming his original goals, he's still having fun.

Talkie Toaster appears a lot throughout the episode, along with a vending machine with a lisp early on. The vending machine is cute and makes for silly prop comedy, but Talkie at this point wasn't utilized to his full extent, and felt kind of partonising if I may be honest. It seemed the writers planned to make 'machine comedy'... not quite a big part of the show, but at least have some prominence, as a talking toilet would make a quick (and suitably crap) gag in Balance of Power, but by series 2 they had all vanished, and probably for the best.

Talkie Toaster would return in series 4 (after appearing in a series 2 deleted scene) with an entertaining new persona, and another talking vending machine would appear in series 8, also done fabulously, but for the most part the series stuck with character humour instead - and I'm glad. The comedy works better when props aren't chirping in with one-liners.

Maybe it's just me looking too much into rather shallow plot points, but I always felt the point of Lister and the Cat going into stasis was dropped rather suddenly. Obviously because, well, when you can see the future,lightspeeding back to Earth probably pales in comparison. That and there's only being so much you can squeeze into 30 minutes. But it feels like going into stasis is pivotal before they enter lightspeed; the early story's emphasis on them rounding up their possessions to take into the pods, prompting the usual crack about the Cat's wardrobe and some angst from Rimmer over being left behind until they're ready to leave. And then once Lister has his odd encounter with Rimmer in the command room about déjà vu, all thought of stasis is forgotten about.

I admit I was under the impression they needed to be in stasis before they hit lightspeed, like, for the sake of their wellbeing - the ship has artificial gravity, sure, but how do the passengers hold up when the miles-per-hour is in six digits? Of course, given how it's said in series 2 the ship only has two stasis pods (which seems odd for a ship that's five miles long and had a crew of under 200 people before it got retconned!), that's just me thinking stupidly and delving too much into fanwank.

Some of the foreshadowing was cutely masked by gags with the Cat, like his reaction to the dog in Lister's photograph and trying to hunt his mechanical goldfish. They're cute scenes for a character who hadn't gotten much spotlight in previous episodes, and they happen to be plot-relevant!

Likewise, the reactions to the future echoes are just great - Lister is concerned because he's going to friggin' die, while Rimmer... he's already dead so, pssh, what's he got to lose? His humming of a funeral march during Lister's brainstorming is just fantastic, but karma bites him in the ass when future-Lister disappears before he could tell him his future. I never knew what was up with Rimmer suddenly wearing his hair in a bowlcut at the end, though.

The first episode has got a lot on its plate to deliver, so you'd figure the rest of the series could have taken it easy. Instead the second episode essentially shows the fate of the main character, achieving one of his dreams of having kids, and arguably reveals his final fate as well. It's a fun story that takes it time rather than cramming everything into the time slot, and has plenty of cute character moments.