Well, Back To Earth has finally graced DVD, and well, just to celebrate that, I thought it’d be a good idea to post this little article/essay I wrote after most fans said that the special was a let down.
Since the airing on the digital channel Dave of the brand new one off episodes of Red Dwarf, some have proclaimed it a letdown for being too similar to the series V finale, Back to Reality. However, the similarities stem farther than just having the same ‘villain’ in the form of the despair/joy squid.
The most basic and also most obvious similarity between Back to Earth and Back to Reality, is naturally, the title. Both contain the phrase “Back to” and then the relevant plot premise of the episode.
Now ending this here after only pointing out this one similarity is pointless. Firstly it is a waste of time, Secondly it makes the argument that Back to Earth is a re-written (possibly what Doug Naylor originally wanted from Back to Reality, essentially making Back to Earth a ‘Directors Cut‘, which is somewhat appropriate considering the level of influence from Blade Runner in the Back to Earth episodes, it would be unsurprising for Doug Naylor to pull a Ridley Scott move and continue to edit Back to Earth for the foreseeable future.) edition of Back to Reality redundant. And thirdly, it is an insult to your intelligence. Fortunately, the similarities do not end there.
The next similarity I have lined up is the beginning. Or rather, the concept created within the beginning. The beginnings of both episodes revolve around the Red Dwarf crew undertaking a ‘deep-sea’ expedition, eventually finding, as the one and only Dave Lister put it, “Some prehistoric leviathan that’s porked it’s way through this entire ocean”. And both times, The Cat, Kryten and Lister are ‘attacked’ in some way by the squid, whilst Rimmer remains in relative safety, and both times, he comments about the size of an object heading towards the Cat, Kryten and Lister.
From then on, the story of both episodes appear to go their own way. But, both episodes feature the same idea of the ‘Dwarfers’ then going through events which lead to them believing that they have left their world of Red Dwarf behind them and into a new world where they discover that they aren’t who they thought they were, where they must also deal with the consequences of not being who they originally believed they were, and accept who they are in these new realities. Even the start of their journey to discover who they are in the new ’dream world’ realities is similar, right down to the camera shot and lighting! (Referring to the discovery of the car that they are to drive.)
From then on it’s business as usual with random madcap capers for the crew to negotiate. Until it gets to the end, with them eventually realising that they are in an artificial reality and subsequently leaving it behind for their world again, where they then discover that there artificial dream state was created by the aforementioned leviathan, and that everything they learned from the people in the different realities were a lie, and that they are who they believed they were.
So in conclusion, as many have proclaimed, Back to Earth is, at it’s very heart, an essential clone of Back to Reality. Ok, on the surface Back to Earth and Back to Reality are highly different, but once you strip away the fancy CGI effects (which somewhat fail to keep in with the charm that the model shots from series 1-6 had.) and the new sets, outfits and gimmick plot devices, E.g. the Carbug and the “Creator” (In an unashamed copy of Blade Runner), the overall arching story arcs are almost mirror copies of each other, which is almost appropriate because for the continuity to not shoot itself into the nearest black hole (or 5), Back to Earth must be set within the Mirror Universe entered in Only the Good… at the end of series VIII, as this is the only way that the Red Dwarf crew can be onboard Red Dwarf, as the original was destroyed by the corrosive virus, leaving the mirror universe Red Dwarf as the only place left for them. However, if this is the case, the question of “what happened to the crew” has to be raised, as the entire resurrected crew of Red Dwarf was present in the mirror universe, albeit in their respective reversed roles.
