< Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: On a lighter note...

Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

On a lighter note...

One of my favourite post-apocalyptic stories is a comedy series from the BBC called Red Dwarf. It's not really conventional post-apocalypse material though... humanity isn't hit with a catastrope, at least as far as we know. Instead, the main character, Dave Lister, who works on a mining space ship (the Red Dwarf)is put into stasis (essentially frozen in time) as punishment for having had an unquarantined cat.

But for Lister the plot thickens... He is brought out of stasis by the ship's computer three million years later, the time it took for a lethal radiation leak to wear off. For him, it lasted only an instant. For the remainder of the crew it really wasn't much longer, it's just that they didn't survive :)

Dave Lister becomes the last human being, whose only companions are Holly (the ship's computer), a hologram of his dead roommate Arnold Rimmer (who he couldn't stand) and the creature that evolved from his pregnant cat. They set course for Earth so that Lister can pursue his dream of having a sheep and a cow and breeding horses on Fiji.

This could only ever have been brought to TV in the UK and is one my faves. My description really doesn't do it justice but I have the DVDs of the first two seasons if anyone would like to see them.

www.reddwarf.com

3 Comments:

At 11:24 PM, Blogger Miriam Jones said...

Perhaps I should have put it on the course.

 
At 2:56 PM, Blogger Lucy said...

Just checked out the website and it looks like a great series. I think British television is a hoot. It seems to me the Brits have a lot of great original ideas for television and the networks in the US are always trying to copy them but always add an American twist. Perhaps we will soon see a post-apocalyptic reality series on Fox soon - they've tried everything else.

Thanks for the heads up on Red Dwarf.

 
At 4:32 PM, Blogger ~Joe said...

Sadly the US did try a ripoff of this. I think it was called "Homeboys in Space" and had that lack of sophistication that makes American 'comedy' so dull.

 

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