Red Dwarf kicks off its twelfth (and final?) series with a bit of a corker. These episodes were recorded back in 2015-16 along with Series XI, so there's information on the plots out there if you want to go looking. However, if you don't want to be spoiled, go watch the episode first, because there are some big surprises crammed into the half-hour.
"Cured" is an intriguing title that gives very little away, but gets you thinking. Who is cured, and of what? Once the one-line blurb of the episode was released, we knew that it would involve a space station where a cure to evil has been found. Still very intriguing, and it still tells us nothing about what the episode actually contained.
For an alternative title, I suggest "Jamming With Hitler."
One of Red Dwarf's greatest strengths has been its use of high-concept story ideas as a springboard for comedy. A force field that ensures tit-for-tat justice for all misdemeanors; hallucinations that take on solid, living form; a world where time runs backwards. Red Dwarf takes clever ideas and runs with them as far as it can in thirty minutes. If the series has a flaw, it's that its format doesn't allow it long enough to explore the ideas its writers come up with.
After a straight-forward and funny opening scene around the poker table, the episode gets straight on with the bizarre ideas. What if someone found a way to isolate the gene for evil, and could remove it? How would they test this? How could they experiment on the most evil people in history? What if they could re-engineer historical figures from their descendants' DNA? In five minutes, Doug Naylor throws enough sci-fi ideas at the screen to fill half a season of Doctor Who. There's some very wonky science here (you can't trace a male ancestor through mitochondrial DNA, it's passed along the female line) but seeing that it's all a big bluff anyway, it doesn't really matter.
The important thing is that we get to see our heroes interacting with nice versions of Vlad the Impaler, Valeria Messalina, Josef Stalin and, making his third appearance as a Red Dwarf character, Adolf Hitler. There's a lot of mileage to be gained from this idea, and the script touches on the philosophical questions that it raises, but mostly, it's played for laughs. In fairness, none of it is especially cleverly written, although some of Messalina's interaction with the uber-vain Cat are really effective. No, it's the performances of the cast that make the comedy work, from the incredulity of the Dwarfers to the over-the-top niceness of the "cured."
The star is Ryan Gage as Adolf "Dolfy" Hitler. He manages to somehow be both effeminate and Teutonic, sympathetic and hilarious. He's absolutely brilliant, making a version of Hitler who's turned over a new leaf and just wants to make new friends into someone you can't help but like. And then he jams with Lister, in what may be one of the greatest single scenes in Red Dwarf. I've been singing "The Happy Wanderer" for days. I wanted them to take Dolfy with them. What other show could get away with having a lovely version of Hitler as a regular character?
In the last five minutes, the entire plot is revealed as a red herring. It's a bit of a let-down, damaging the episode by rushing its ending, a problem that plagued the previous series. We see the Dwarfers forced to experience their worst fears, in a sequence that's both funny an horrifying, and to begin with, I assumed that this was part of the cure for evilness that the sinister Professor Telford had cooked up. But no, he was just being evil. I mean, he was a very obvious villain from the outset, but the sudden revelation that the historical figures are just more droids made the entire story less interesting. Still, the finale scene did end well, with the Cat's "pokey face" wrapping up the script with a strong callback to the opening scene that worked very well.
Overall, I'd say that the Hitler jamming session outweighs any disappointment with the resolution. No, go back to the moonbase and pick up Dolfy before that protoplanet hits.
Good Psycho Guide: Four chainsaws
Best line: Cat: "Hitler? Isn't he dead? I thought he died playing golf!"
Rimmer: "He was in Berlin, you goit - in a bunker!"
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