Back in 1999, Red Dwarf VIII aired. Although the most critically-lambasted season to date, it also matched Red Dwarf VII's extremely high ratings (well over six million for some episodes, unheard of for a sitcom airing on BBC2). Fans could be excused for expecting the show to continue for many years to come. Instead, they got nothing.
The reasons why the show went off the air seem obtuse, but it seems to have been a combination of the enormous workload on Doug Naylor for writing and producing the series almost single-handedly (after the departure of his co-creator Rob Grant after Season 6) and his insistence, likely not coincidentally, on making a Red Dwarf feature film instead. Funding had apparently been sourced for a larger-budgeted theatrical theatre, only for this to fall through at the last moment. Additional funding was secured but again collapsed. By the time Naylor had gotten tired of this dance and gone back to the BBC, the BBC had lost interest. More bemusingly, they remained resolutely uninterested even after Doctor Who returned in 2005 and became a monster hit, and the BBC started looking for other genre TV ideas (such as Merlin) whilst ignoring their other proven, long-running SF success.
It fell to cable channel Dave to give the show its long-awaited resurrection. Made with what initially appeared to be a reasonable budget, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (the "IX" is a retcon, applied solely to make the ordering of the seasons make more sense on streaming services and on media releases) was a surprise hit for Dave and led to the commissioning of further series. Critically, however, Back to Earth was mauled on release in 2009 and time has not been much kinder to it.
The mini-season starts promisingly, with some solid Rimmer/Lister gags in the bunk room on Red Dwarf. You may be wondering how the crew survived the events of the Red Dwarf VIII cliffhanger and how Rimmer is back again as a hologram and what happened to the hundreds of crewmembers who evacuated the ship...and you can go on wondering, as you'll get no answers here (to be fair, the wiki has a reasonable guess). More important to the plot is that Kochanski is apparently dead and Holly decommissioned due to a malfunction. There's some very solid CGI at work here, including some half-decent virtual sets and an excellent CG model of Red Dwarf itself, and the show's first move into high-definition is reasonably impressive.
The plot kicks in when the ship's science officer Katerina Bartokovsky is resurrected and promptly decides to retire Rimmer, whom she deems has failed in his mission to keep Lister sane. A sequence of events results in our familiar crew travelling to a parallel universe where their lives exist solely in a television series called Red Dwarf. In an increasingly metafictional story, the crew meet one of the actors playing them on the show and have to find their creator before he decides to write a final episode in which everyone dies, which would kill them in their reality as well.
This metafictional idea isn't necessarily a bad idea, and in fact has been explored in Red Dwarf before, particularly in the likes of Better Than Life and Back to Reality, but those episodes were co-written with Rob Grant. The Grant-Naylor partnership made those meta episodes work, but Naylor by himself struggles. Especially weird is that he latches onto the idea of basing some story ideas on the 1982 movie Blade Runner, a very fine film, but also quite an old one by that point with no guarantee that the general audience knew what he was referencing. The special also relies a lot on knowing that Craig Charles plays a character on soap opera Coronation Street and knowing whom some of the incidental actors were on that show, which dates it painfully. It's also not particularly funny, the direction (also by Naylor) is not great and the pacing is terrible. The lack of a laughter track also hurts the show's timing, with the actors visibly struggling at times with not getting any feedback.
However, the story does perk up whenever Lister has to confront the spectre of Kochanski's death and the parallel world giving him the opportunity to possibly meet her again. Red Dwarf is at its best when it mixes comedy with pathos, something it forgot in the last couple of seasons, and it does bring that element back here with some great scenes of emotional intensity for Craig Charles, which he rises to.
Beyond that, the special is, well, not very special. Some good ideas and great vfx are undermined by poor storytelling. Sophie Winkleman as Katerina is saddled with a terrible accent and sound mixing that makes her unintelligible in some sequences. For every joke that lands, there are at least three that do not.
Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (**½) is not totally without merit, with some impressive visual set-pieces and at least a few gags that land well. But poor pacing and direction undermine its better parts. After this special, fans started pondering if it was better for the show to simply end forever. Fortunately, the Dave channel had other ideas.
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