I’ve never read any of Lawrence Miles’ Doctor Who books, though I gather they’re quite popular.īut his attitude always really pisses me off. “Miles is the worst troll cunt on the entire internet.” The “exterior” shots are now CGI rather than modelwork, Red Dwarf X has failed to be terrible simply because it’s cramped, and understated, and… well… cheap. “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” is a very bland episode of an SF series that isn’t dramatic enough to be drama and isn’t funny enough to be comedy. The seventh series made even them too embarrassed to admit to liking it. As do the parents of one lead character and the fantasies of the other, throughout the whole 25 years and counting.Īnd the Reductionist Generalisations and assertions that are brimming over with wrongability include bits like these:īy this stage, Red Dwarf fans were already seen as the kind of gits who expressed themselves through T-shirts from Forbidden Planet rather than conversation, much as Python fans had been since the ’80s. It’s an idea repeated throughout the series: “Justice” ends with a rant about free will that’s undercut by a pratfall which suggests an apology on behalf of the writer/s for explaining the point, while “The Inquisitor” gives us a creature that makes us feel guilty for not achieving greatness. We could take the characters’ own immutable shallowness to be a sign of this, but the idea of being trapped in your destiny occurs as early as the second episode (“Future Echoes”, as if most of you didn’t know that). “Bound” in its truest sense, too, the sense that you’re tied to your future. We’re trapped by who we are, and by what we’re absolutely, inescapably bound to do. Yet in Red Dwarf, the great fear is of foreknowledge, of predestination.

If you look at early-phase Doctor Who (certainly the ’60s, but leaking into the ’70s), the worst thing that can happen to you – the very worst imaginable horror – is to have your consciousness invaded. (Personally I still haven’t forgiven him for those horrible things he said in the Randomness Times: that Terry Pratchett’s only got one joke which is “There’s a troll but he’s called Kevin”…)Īnyway, in this case, the bit I found interesting is his opinion about what Red Dwarf’s central preoccupation is, compared to threats in other sci-fi: (“I know, I didn’t expect that either.”) Read it before he deletes it like most of the other stuff he posts!Īs usual with his TV criticism, it’s well written and has some interesting insights… but it also contains reductive, generalised assertions that are bound to wind people up.

Prominent Doctor Who Author/Fandom Man Lawrence Miles has written a blog post about Red Dwarf. Saw Andrew Ellard posting about this on Twitter…

Doctor Who by Lawrence Miles