You don’t create a sitcom that can run for more or less two decades, with a decade’s break in between, by sticking to a single formula, a single iteration of the core idea.

Series V-VIII of Red Dwarf saw the core tenets of the show change many times, so the show by the end of this collection is fundamentally the same, only inasmuch as most of the core characters are still on board.

Series V is in some senses the final season of Iteration 2 of the show – the slicked-up, credible effects version that kicked in at the launch of Series III with the arrival of Robert Llewellyn’s American-accented version of the domestic service android, Kryten.

As a series, the fifth outing has all the things you could probably want – inventive sci-fi like holoships and total immersion video games, classic villains like the Inquisitor, glorious bizarre imagery like Rimmer with the holo-virus, dressed in a gingham dress and with Mr Flibble the sock-puppet penguin as his Anti-Sooty companion, and the arrival in the Dwarf universe of Duane Dibbley, an inversion of the cat’s personality on a level with Series IV’s Ace Rimmer.

But there’s also something a little thin about the fifth series – Holoship telegraphs its entire plot of Rimmer sacrificing his dreams in an act of love within minutes of the opening credits. Terrorform re-uses the idea of Rimmer’s self-loathing for the third time in five series (following Me2 in Series I and Justice in Series IV) and feels distinctly reheated in its application. And even The Inquisitor, an innovative time-travel take on The Terminator, with Jack Docherty of Absolutely giving it laldy as the growly, skull-faced fiend, feels like a minimum-impact episode, despite technically wiping out half the crew along the way.

In fact, life either beyond Red Dwarf or with significant changes to it is a kind of mini-theme of Series V – Rimmer briefly leaves the Dwarf in Holoship, Lister and Kryten are almost erased from existence and replaced in The Inquisitor, Red Dwarf itself entirely explodes in Angels and Demons, and in Back To Reality, the crew contemplate lives entirely different from those they’ve known on the Big Rouge One.

Granted, that contemplation almost drives them to a suicide pact, but still, the tone of the series helps introduce the audience to an idea of the show beyond the existence of the giant red spaceship after which it is named.

Series VI takes that premise and runs with it – Red Dwarf is lost, hundreds of years have passed, and the crew are reduced to living in their shuttle-with-knobs-on, Starbug.

That shift makes Series VI feel fresh, although its episodes were written in a hurry, and it would be the last TV series that included Rob Grant on writing duties. That means you can also spot some short-cuts in the writing – it’s here that we start to get pat gags like the Space Corps Directives, the “Old Cat Sayings” and the “excellent plans with just one fatal flaw” to help fill time and space while delivering a moment of humour.

The level of innovation though, is still strong. In Legion, the dynamic changes significantly when Rimmer, the ultimate expression of impotence, gets a hard light bee, meaning he finally has a physical presence. Gunmen of the Apocalypse finds quite enough science-fiction justification to take the Dwarfers to the Wild West, and Out Of Time adds a time drive to the crew’s potential future, while ending the series by blowing them up.

As ya do.

There’s also a slight whiff of unfortunate recycling in Series VI – Emohawk is clear about that, being subtitled Polymorph II, and bringing back both Ace Rimmer and Duane Dibbley to maximise the nostalgia factor. And Rimmerworld re-uses the schtick of Rimmer’s self-loathing again – time four in six series, to just minimally better purpose than Terrorform.

It’s slightly weird to say, but despite this recycling, Series 6 feels fresher than Series 5 by virtue of the shift of ship, the loss of Holly (Hattie Hayridge), the consolidation of Kryten’s role as Explainer-in-Chief, and the through-line of storytelling throughout the episodes, in that there is a common crew goal of recapturing Red Dwarf, despite the endless distractions that try to stop them.

Series VII maintains the premise of Series VI – the Dwarfers continuing to search for Red Dwarf – but it also shakes the Etch-A-Sketch of the show’s elements again.

The departure of Rob Grant frees the seventh series to go on wilder tangential journeys. Exhibit A, Tikka To Ride, where Lister’s misuse of time travel to replenish Starbug’s Indian food supplies ends with the Dwarfers being instrumental in the assassination of John F Kennedy. 

There’s a sense in such freewheeling comedy that we could be in safe hands here, and Stoke Me A Clipper, which brings back Ace Rimmer one more time actually finds something deeply interesting to do with the character, while to all intents and purposes killing off the Arnold Rimmer we know. 

That loss of Chris Barrie should be huge, but the script handles it well, and before we know where we are, we’re gaining a new crew member in Alt-Universe Christine Kochanski, now played by Chloe Annett.

It’s a slight reset for the character, as Clare Grogan’s OG Kochanski (last seen as an illusion in Series 6’s Psirens), had a down-to-earth vibe you could believe would be attracted to Dave “Vending Machine Repairman” Lister. Annett’s Kochanski plays into the version of the character as seen through Rimmer’s eyes, as being “totally out of Lister’s league” – an opera-loving posh girl from the nicest part of Glasgow, who grew up with “perfect CG teachers and perfect CG friends.”

Annett throws herself into the reality of the role with gusto, though Kochanski’s written through a distinctly male gaze from the Nineties. 

Ouroboros and Duct Soup are relatively standalone episodes, the first dealing with not just Kochanski’s arrival but Lister’s always-dubious parentage, and the second giving Annett some excellent Kochanski-time in a story that is ultimately about Kryten’s over-attachment to Lister and his insecurity at Kochanski’s arrival. This arc is one of the rare times, along with for instance, Rimmer’s gazpacho soup horror and his ghastly relationship with his father, where the show uses entire episodes to genuinely delve into the characters’ personalities and emotions.

While Blue and Beyond A Joke continue that trend, they feel oddly padded affairs – Blue finds Lister missing Rimmer (to the extent of dreaming about the two in a passionate lip-lock) and acts mmmmostly as a long set-up to the final gag-sequence, a rollercoaster of Rimmerness, with ghastly musical accompaniment – the fun of which you rather lose in an audio-only version. Beyond A Joke starts and ends with a Jane Austen game, but focuses on Kryten’s response to frustration and anger. 

Epideme, one of the stronger science fiction ideas in Series VII, brings us a charismatic virus that Lister tries to chat to death, only for Chloe Annett to have her strongest moment as Kochanski all season when killing the thing. And Nanarchy leads us on a merry chase for Kryten’s never-before-mentioned android-healing nanobots – which naturally turn out to have turned Red Dwarf into a planet and gone off on a wild quest of their own in Lister’s clothes bin.

Because it’s Red freakin’ Dwarf, that’s why! It almost begs you to take it too seriously, so it can point and laugh at Captain Serious.

Suffice it to say that by the end of Series VII, our heroes have regained not just Red Dwarf but also its entire revived crew, along with both Original Holly (Norman Lovett) and…erm…Watch Holly (also Norman Lovett, but Norman Lovett playing the three million years in the future version. Do keep up!).

Some would argue that would be a natural stopping point for the show – sure, Lister hasn’t made it back to Earth, and hasn’t managed to get with Kochanski (either the alternative dimension version or the resurrected version in the rebuilt Red Dwarf – of whom, incidentally, no mention is ever made).

Nahhh.

Series VIII though, is episodically odd. It starts with a three-part story arc about how the crew’s post-Dwarf story could possibly be true, given that the resurrected Red Dwarf crew have no memory of the events they describe, and for instance, believe that the creation of androids like Kryten happens at a date which is in their personal future. 

There’s a kind of trial by psychotropic drugs which spans the three episodes, and much use made of a hangover from all the way back in Series V – the positive viruses that give the sufferer either luck or sexual magnetism. 

There’s a little notice paid to the notion that the reconstituted original Rimmer is as unreconstructed as he was back at the start of Series I, but the whole thing feels glossed over in an attempt to reboot the core Dwarf crew – he’s bribed to come along, ultimately, by the promise of responsibility for five shiny buttons on their getaway vehicle, which is funny, to be sure, but feels much too easy a get-out for the OG Rimmer to even recognise as a viable path.

The whole three-episode arc is ultimately rendered redundant when the crew are found not guilty of the crimes for which they are tried… buuuut entirely guilty of a bunch of other crimes committed during the process of proving themselves not guilty, with exactly the same sentence.

Tiresome? Just a little, but only really because the pickup of the new old Rimmer feels a bit too much like picking up a new new Rimmer, a Rimmer who’s had experience with the Dwarfers which this non-hologrammatical version hasn’t had. 

Cassandra is a relative oddity because it upgrades the tonal shift of the series again. Come Series VIII, not only does Red Dwarf have a high security prison on board, which is something that’s never been part of the mythos before, but in the space of a handful of lines of dialogue, it appears that the prison (to which our Dwarfers are consigned) has a special squad of semi-suicide troopers, to be sent on hazardous missions. That’s the second tonal change within a handful of episodes, and it’s almost enough to make your head spin.

The actual storyline of Cassandra, with an AI capable of perfect prognostication about the future, feels relatively throwaway in comparison with the tonal shift, which is a shame, as what it throws away is a cameo by Geraldine McEwan. But it delivers some fun about predestination along the way, while bedding in the idea that our Red Dwarfers are now also [Yellow] Canaries, undertaking missions to deal with curiosities and problems that the ship encounters, a lot further into deep space than it ever intended to go. 

Krytie TV is probably the episode of Red Dwarf that has aged most poorly over the years. Already a dubious concept, with Kryten being assigned the female gender simply because he lacks a penis, it would be cut before transmission these days, as its notion of him spying on and broadcasting live from the women prisoners’ showers is entirely transgressive and invasive.

It was back when it was broadcast too, but the window of premises for comedy has shifted in a positive direction since, so the episode, watched or heard in 2026, feels altogether icky.

There’s fun within the ick, as Lister and Rimmer work towards an appeal that ultimately bites Rimmer in the bum, but if there’s an episode of Red Dwarf that could be jettisoned into a black hole, Krytie TV has to take pole position.

The two-episode mini-arc known as Pete is based in some solid science-fiction potential, with a “time wand” that can digitise time. Its effects are rapidly multiplied beyond reason for comic effect, and before we know where we are, a tiny songbird has been transformed into a hulking great T. Rex, stomping around the cargo hold of Red Dwarf. Let the merriment and monstrosity ensue!

And Only The Good… frankly endangers all the work of Series VIII by bringing a metal-eating virus on board Red Dwarf, with the only solution being – naturally – to create a mirror universe and hop over to it, allowing the newly reconstituted ship to be destroyed.

It’s a mostly “nothing” episode with a moderately surreal ending that pits Arnold Rimmer against the actual Grim Reaper, but it leaves the series open to any variation of “new” Red Dwarf to follow it. 

What actually followed it, the moderately bizarre Back To Earth series… is a matter for a different review. But while Red Dwarf was never necessarily about going out of any series on a bang, Series VIII more than most went out on a phnerr.

In our review of the Series I-IV audio release, we identified one big issue that occasionally got in the way of your listening pleasure. The sets are simple, pure, raw audio, including sound effects and music. So when, for instance, Series III begins with a Star Wars-style information crawl over music, unless you know what it said, you’re lost without any additional voice-over. 

That made a handful of moments in that first release lack the punch they had on screen, and limit the appeal of the set to those with a strong enough memory of what happened in vision, so they “got” the jokes or the poignant moments, even when the visuals were absent.

Wellll, we’re here to tell you that that problem is only magnified in this second set, for a very straightforward reason.

Just as Series V and VI saw the introduction of an increasing number cod gags – Space Corps Directives, Old Cat Sayings, etc, so as the show got bigger and broader, it included more and more sequences where the whole of the comic premise was visual. 

Things from the hallucinatory escape from the law in Back To Reality, the many shifts of form of the Emohawk in Emohawk, the joyous reveal of the female Rimmer concubines in Rimmerworld, the long sequence and particularly the payoff of the crew following Ace Rimmer’s light bee in Stoke Me A Clipper, Kryten’s medical in Back In The Red, and his life among the women (to the tune of Stand By Your Man) in Krytie TV, not to mention most of the point of Only The Good… are all relatively meaningless in the unexplained audio versions. 

Also, while it’s not something in which Red Dwarf indulges often, non-linear storytelling, explained with an on-screen date to show that you’re a little back in the show’s own chronology, can really mess you up during Back In The Red, simply because you’re missing that pointer on what’s going on – and you can find yourself skipping back to previous scenes or the previous episode to make sure you haven’t missed something crucial.

So is Red Dwarf: Series V-VIII worth your money?

Well… yes, if you’re a longstanding Red Dwarf fan in 2026, who wants a travelling or sleeping version of the show you can laugh along with, and don’t have access to the visual versions of these series on any convenient handheld device.

If Red Dwarf’s in any sense, a new prospect to you, you might struggle with the purist-pleasing choice to go narration-free here significantly more than you would have done with the first four series, due to that inflation in the rate of visual-only jokes, setups, payoffs and whole concepts. 

Even as a dedicated, old-enough-to-have-seen-the-first-series-on-broadcast fan, you’ll notice the music cues that seem extra long without the visuals they’re accompanying, and remember the gags you’re not seeing here, and it will give you a momentary sigh, or pause, or determination to rush back to your visual media the next time you get a chance. 

But simply for the pleasure of the writing, the evolving performances, the increasingly fast shifts of tone and fundamental elements, there’s something that remains irresistible about the idea of plugging the latter four series of Red Dwarf into your ears and forgetting the world around you.

You’ve seen the world around you, right?

Sometimes, lying shipwrecked and comatose, drinking fresh mango juice is absolutely the better option. This is one of those times. Tony Fyler

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