While I am generally enjoying the current series of Red Dwarf on Dave, I couldn’t stop thinking there may have been serious MacGuffin issues with last night’s episode, Lemons. Deliberate or otherwise, I felt a sense of frustration at everything that went on rather than laughing out loud like I’ve done in the two episodes previous to this one. Lemons, to me, is the weakest episode of this series so far..
When Kryten – a robot – brings a rejuvenation shower into the crew quarters that’s supposed to rejuvenate the person taking the shower back to the peak of physical fitness, the crew assemble the unit from it’s flatpack boxes. But like with most things, they muck it up. Upon activation it sends them back through time (and space) to 23AD Britain. Kryten thankfully still has the remote control, but it has no batteries. He apparently left them behind – but how the hell did he operate the shower in the first place?
Instead of considering Kryten’s internal power system – he’s essentially one big walking talking battery – and that he has more ports and sockets on him than Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection, the entire crew treks four thousand miles to India just to obtain lemons to generate enough electricity so that they can hook it up to the remote control and go home (and taking somebody called Jesus with them).
This, folks, is why Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and Cat never have nice things happen to them.
