Review: Red Dwarf: Epideme and Nanarchy

Like in Series One, the last two episodes of this series are interlinked, and so here they are together.

Series Seven, Episode Seven - Epideme

"Old five fingers has checked out!"

Well, it's the penultimate episode already, that can be quite clever in places but clever in an interesting way rather than a funny one. Here goes.
          Deep inside an astro-glacier, the crew find a starship. On board, all of the crew are dead, but they find the stasis-preserved body of Caroline Carmen, one of Lister's old girlfriends and a supply officer on Red Dwarf. They bring her on the ship and while Lister sleeps, the zombified Carmen tries to have sex with him. Lister thinks for quite a while that she is Kochanski, until, of course, Kochanski walks in the room. She manages to infect Lister with the virus that she, and the members of her crew, were suffering from.
          Kryten tells him that the virus is Epideme, an intelligent parasite that should stop the neural relays for nictotine, but instead stops blood and oxygen. To save Lister, they hook him up to a moniter and find they can talk to the virus. They have a discussion about human superiority, and how Lister eating a chicken is the same as the Epideme killing Lister.
          They plan to cure Lister by forcing the virus into his left arm and then cutting it off. Lister is upset, but ready to do anything to be cured. They end up cutting off his entire right arm instead. When he awakens, he is extremely upset, and he's also still infected.
          Lister plans to rid himself and the universe of the virus by going back onto the astro ship and setting off some explosives. He ransoms himself to the Epideme, and bids farewell to the crew of Starbug. The epideme accidentally lets slip that the crew of the Astro ship were actually travelling towards a cure. Lister changes his mind.
         They then ask Epideme how to make the ship go faster, and they tell him. They then use this information to get to the planet before Lister dies. However, when they get there, the planet has already been flamed to rid themselves of the virus. Kochanski stops Lister's heart, and his mad undead form bites her hand, infecting her. She then cuts off her amr, revealing it to be Caroline Carmen's, and ejects it into space. They ressurrect Lister, and everyone's happy. Except Lister, of course, who has no right arm....
          Ok, I'd say that this is the strongest episode of Series Seven. It's got all of the Doug Naylor aspects and yet it's tightly plotted with some good ideas and logical paths. A lot of the humour is passable, but none of it's particularly laugh-out-loud.
 
Series Seven, Episode Eight - Nanarchy

"Last week on Red Dwarf... 'high voice' Something terrible happened to Mr. Lister's Arm! "

So we get to the finale, and it's been quite a long series, what with the extra episodes and the change in tone around the early bits. The series has definitely suffered without Rimmer, but There have been some successes, like Beyond A Joke and Epideme.
          We get an opening that recaps Epideme. Lister tries to do the things he used to do it daily life, by having Kryten "be" his right arm. They try to name the famous one-armed people from history, but they fail rather dramatically. Kochanski sees that Lister is exploiting Kryten as a slave. They try to fit him with an artificial arm, controlled by thought, but the amount of effort required to simply pick up a ball is so much that it's more or less useless. They then decide to use Kryten's nanobots to reconstruct Lister's body, the same nanobots that stole Red Dwarf. Since the nanobots have dissappeared, they retrn to where Kryten saw them last - the SS Esperanto (from Back To Reality). When they wake from deep sleep, they find a planetoid that the scanners say is Red Dwarf.
          They go onto the planetoid and take some soil samples, and find that the entire planetoid has been engineered by the nanobots from the remains of Red Dwarf. Among these remains is a portable Holly (NORMAN LOVETT WOOO), who explains that the nanos made a mini Red Dwarf and left everything else. They then realise that the reason their scanners can't pick up the nano Red Dwarf is because it's within the ship, and it's tracked down to Lister's laundry basket. Kryten berates the nanos and orders them to recreate Lister's arm and Red Dwarf.
          The nano-bots turn Lister into a bulging muscle man, which he is unhappy about. They then fly back into Red Dwarf, but for some reason are extrememly small....
         Ok, it's another decent episode, and Norman Lovett certainly gives the whole thing some pace. One can't help but be satisfied by the solution to the problem that they've faced for the last two series, but there's also some ok comedy and it never goes truly mad with itself. Series 8... well, that's just.... a different matter.

Thanks.