Granted, not all of these foods will actually devour you; some will simply kill you or turn you into their zombie slave. But all are best approached with caution, and should only be handled by chefs with combat training.

Killer Tomatoes (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes): After years of being made into ketchup and mistaken for vegetables, the tomatoes get their revenge, and a killer theme song.

The Stuff (The Stuff): It's not clear what would possess a man to taste a slimy substance he found out in the woods, but it turns out the Stuff is delicious, addictive, and contains no calories. It also turns out that the Stuff is alive, and it chews on your brain until you've transformed into a nice, pliable zombie.

Bubble Shock! (The Sarah Jane Adventures "Invasion of the Bane"): Another zombifying substance is Bubble Shock!, a fizzy organic beverage. But it's actually an alien life form, one that turns drinkers into slaves of Mother Bane. While it doesn't have quite the brain-mushing powers of the Stuff, Bubble Shock! has a viral quality, with Bane zombies offering the beverage to anyone who hasn't tried it.

Popplers (Futurama "The Problem with Popplers"): Another mysterious foodstuff found lying on the ground, popplers are incredibly delicious nuggets of meaty goodness. There are just two problems: first, popplers are intelligent; second, they're the juvenile form of the ornery Omicronians, and Lrrr, the Omicronian ruler, thinks it's only fair that he should get to eat a human to set things right.

The Blue Plate Special (Spaceballs): Poor John Hurt. When he tried to enjoy a meal in Alien, he had a chestburster pop right out of him. Then he sits down for the blue plate special at a diner in Spaceballs and meets with the same fate.

Curry Monster (Red Dwarf "DNA"): In a typically boneheaded move, the crew of the Red Dwarf test a DNA modifier on a container of vindaloo, creating a monster that's half man, half Indian takeaway.

Killer Pizzas (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles "Case of the Killer Pizzas"): The pizza-loving foursome find that sometimes their favorite food can get a case of the munchies. An alien species from Dimension X lays eggs that happen to look like meatballs, and they manage to land on a handful of pizzas. Pop your pizza in the microwave, and those little critters hatch mean and hungry.

TMNT - Case of the killer pizzas

Wolfbullet | MySpace Video

Pizza the Hut (Spaceballs): He's delicious enough that he ate himself to death, but woe unto those who cross this cheesy gangster. They'll learn what it's like to have Pizza send out for you.

Bezoar Eggs (Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Bad Eggs"): When Buffy and the crew are given eggs to babysit as a class assignment, it seems like a minor nuisance. But it turns out those aren't chicken eggs they're faux parenting; they actually hatch bezoars, little parasites that attach to your brain stem (and, like all good parasites, render you their zombie slave). And Xander gets a nasty surprise when he hardboils his egg son and decides to enjoy a mid-afternoon snack.

Evil Gingerbread Men (The Tick, The Gingerdead Man): Be they the product of an eager baker or possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, these confections can be downright deadly. You'd imagine, though, that milk would be a major weakness.

Werewolf (Angel "Unleashed"): Werewolf is considered a delicacy among certain sadistic members of the Los Angeles elite. Unfortunately, werewolves tend to revert to their human form once they're killed, so they have to be served alive while the meat is carved off. But if the werewolf isn't properly restrained, you could end up on the menu.

Wub ("Beyond Lies the Wub" by Philip K. Dick): Again, it's rarely a smart idea to eat a species you happen to find just hanging out on another planet, especially if it's capable of literary discussions. The pig-like wub will let you eat it, but there's a hefty price; the wub will completely take over your body, essentially booting out your soul through your stomach.

Martian Water (Doctor Who "The Waters of Mars"): Actually, you don't even need to drink water containing the Flood to contract its zombifying contagion — just touching it will do the trick. Still, drinking the water is ill-advised.

Kandy Man (Doctor Who "The Happiness Patrol"): The good news is that this licorice-based robot won't actually devour you. The bad news is that, if you aren't visibly happy at all times, it will kill you — likely by drowning you in super sugary fondant.

Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (Ghostbusters): Sure, Stay Puft nearly demolished the entire island of Manhattan in the service of Gozer. But that toasted marshmallow glop that dropped on the Ghostbusters at the end of the move looked mighty tasty.

Ebola Cola (Transmetropolitan): As the slogan goes, "You Drink It, It Eats You."

Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Aqua Teen Hunger Force): A mutated meatball, milkshake, and carton of french fries, the Aqua Teens get into all sorts of mayhem, which often gets various creatures (and occasionally Maser Shake) killed. I probably wouldn't put eating the remains past them either, given the right situation.

Triffids (Day of the Triffids): Triffids have a lot going for them. They're a great source of vegetable oil (making them valuable crops), and they can fight off any potential predators with their venomous whips. Plus, they love to feed on rotting meat, which is easy to obtain once most of humanity has been struck blind.

Tom Turkey (The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XIX"): Since it's Thanksgiving week, this musket-wielding bird will cap off our list. After rescuing the children of Springfield from the murderous Grand Pumpkin, Tom Turkey gets invited to Thanksgiving dinner. But once he learns what people eat on Thanksgiving, he starts gobble-gobbling up the children himself.

Geocities had a fantastic DIY sensibility that encouraged absolutely anybody to put up a website. And people used it to upload articles from their old fanzines, and create sites on incredibly niche topics, like all the different versions of the Fourth Doctor's scarf we saw on Doctor Who, or the history of obscure TV shows. Nowadays, people would probably start blogs instead — but it's hard to keep a blog about Tom Baker's scarf going for terribly long.

Is there another fansite for science-fiction disco wizard Meco on the internet? We couldn't find one.

Anyway, we searched through Geocities in its last remaining moments, and pulled up some of our favorite sites that cover obscure or odd topics, plus a few of the silliest. What are your favorites that you'll miss when it's gone?

Jellied Jar-Jar Binks! Ummmm... yeah. Okay. http://www.geocities.com/rhelynn/SFC/
A really fun unified timeline for all science fiction stories (well, a lot of them, anyway...)




http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/3746/Scarf.html
Nobody will ever be this earnest about The Matrix again. Sadly. http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/theater/9175/neo/matrix101.html

Did you know there was a Space Family Robinson series for years before Lost In Space? I didn't.
Admit it, you want an easy to find repository of the original screenplay for Star Trek V. I love the part where they explain that the universe is real, and this movie will adhere to REAL science. http://www.geocities.com/ussmunchkin7/Star_Trek_V.htm

http://www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/ads.html
http://www.geocities.com/ktesh_kag/SMrecipes2.htm
This seems to be some kind of Star Wars parody site, but I couldn't quite figure it out. It's cute, though.
http://www.geocities.com/asnapier/nano/n-sf/
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/trout.html
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/6600/bwld.html
http://us.geocities.com/naran500/index.html







http://www.geocities.com/terabithia.geo/string.html
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/5555/

This appears to be the official site for Jupiter Moon, a somewhat obscure and short-lived science fiction series from England, containing reams of information. Hard to imagine that info will be available anywhere else...

Llewellyn made the announcement at this weekend's Dimension Jump '09 Red Dwarf fan convention, twittering it to the internet soon after:

Series 10 of Red Dwarf announcement just been made at DJ 09. To clarify the scripts have been commissioned, wont be filming til 2010

Within a few hours, he was clarifying that last clarification:

Want to re-state that UKTV, aka Dave have commissioned Doug Naylor to write scripts, still a long way to go before it's all official

So... there isn't officially a tenth season yet, but Dave is considering the idea seriously enough to pay for scripts. Guess we should wait and see how good DVD sales for Back To Earth are in the US first...

Red Dwarf to get a tenth series [Liverpool Daily Post]

"The Last Man On The Planet Moon"
Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood's August 31st 1952 episode of The Spirit was right in the middle of the Outer Space sequence of stories, but that didn't mean it lost its focus on small vignettes about the common man - In this particular case, about a man whose space madness meant that he hallucinated a world where he was the only man left from his mission, trapped all alone on the Moon. Forward thinking stuff from a period when Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon made space safe for newspaper comics readers.

Solaris
Stanisław Lem's original 1961 novel, that is, not the George Clooney movie. Lem imagined an alien being that prompted psychological responses in humans who tried to contact it, producing a particular strain of space madness - Trauma As Particularly Awkward First Contact. While Lem's novel depicts an unknowable and somewhat disturbing idea of such event, it was soon co-opted into cuddlier forms by...

Countless Star Trek Episodes
The various interstellar folk of Gene Roddenberry's future had a tendency to go insane every now and again, but there was always a comfortable external explanation for it all - An alien virus, mind-control of some sort, or Vulcans getting horny. Anything that could allow the Enterprise and her fine crew to leave after an hour, secure in the ultimate safety and pride of being outer space frontiersmen and insanity just being something that's akin to drunkenness:

Dark Star
Suicidal astronauts on a long-term mission who have to talk an intelligent bomb out of exploding, resorting to explaining philosophy because their cryogenically-frozen commander tells them to? No wonder that Lt. Doolittle (spoiler) surrenders to his dream of surfing to oblivion at the end of the movie. Never mind 2001, this was the movie that made a generation realize what space travel could do to your mind.

The Black Hole
...And for the kids that were too young to see Dark Star, there was always Disney's The Black Hole, in which mad Maximilian Schell (who had killed his own crew, turned them into robots, become obsessed with the black hole of the title and ends up melded to a killer robot and in Hell or something) managed to put another generation off the idea of going off into space. Those who weren't confused about the whole thing and/or distracted by the cuteness of VINCENT, that is.

Red Dwarf
1992's "Quarantine" demonstrated that it wasn't just humans who came down with space madness, when hologram Arnold Rimmer caught a virus that not only drove him quite mad, but finally introduced his latent crossdressing and puppetry tendencies. If only all other space madnesses came with their own Mr. Flibbles.

Event Horizon
Some have called Event Horizon the Pandorum or Sunshine of its 1997 day, but we prefer to think of this Sam Neill-starring SF-horror movie as The Black Hole for people who are afraid of robots. Again proving that hanging around cosmic events can lead to hallucinations and psychosis, Paul WS Anderson's thriller brought a spooky atmosphere, love of Latin and very little originality to the space madness genre, but we love it nonetheless.

Sunshine
Talking of unoriginal SF-horror movies, Danny Boyle's 2007 worst-case-scenario-fest (In turn, shamelessly ripped off by Ron Moore's failed pilot Virtuality) demonstrates yet again that, when your spaceship discovers a seemingly-abandoned spaceship floating in the void, the sensible thing to do is always to ignore it and carry on your mission. Points are subtracted for the unexpected and somewhat disappointing devolution into a generic slasher movie towards the end, but any movie where space + isolation + the sun = space madness can never be all bad.

Moon
Taking the traditional space madness ingredients (Namely loneliness, existential angst and improbable situations that can't be easily explained by what we know as science), Duncan Jones' debut movie comes up with something that, unusually, pays off without devolving into cliche or an "enigmatic" lack of answers. For that alone - as well as not succumbing to either space madness or movie hero syndrome - Sam Rockwell's Sam Bell takes the win.

The Ren and Stimpy Show
Surely the greatest example ever made of what space madness truly is. Oh my God, an ice cream bar!
See if you don't agree for yourself.

Get Smart Season 4
Maxwell Smart finally gets the girl in this 4 disc collection of the fourth season of the 1960s TV show. Agent 99, you could've done so much better.

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth - The Director's Cut
The surprisingly not-terrible reunion of the late 80s, early 90s comedy comes to America in the "As it's meant to be seen" format fans would rather watch. Expect behind the scenes footage and the traditional Smeg-Ups to round out the package.

Oct 13
Land of The Lost
Will Ferrells's not-especially-well-received remake of the classic TV series may not have made much of a dent in the box office earlier this year, but somehow we wouldn't be too surprised if it found a (potentially stoned) enthusiastic audience awaiting it on DVD.

Oct 20
Blood: The Last Vampire
Swordplay! Vampires! Violence! They're all coming to your house, as Chris Nahon's take on the Japanese anime gets released on DVD and Blu Ray.

Drag Me To Hell
Sam Raimi's return to off-kilter horror promises to be even more fun on DVD; it's a re-edited "unrated" version.

Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen
Michael Bay's ridiculously successful Robots In Disguise sequel gets multiple editions as it transforms into something you can take home: There's a single disc DVD, double disc DVD and double disc Blu Ray. We'd recommend the latter, if possible, for that authentic HD overwhelming robot carnage effect.

Oct 27
Adult Swim: In A Box
A truly bizarre seven disc set, collecting Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volume Two, Space Ghost Coast To Coast: Season Three, Moral Orel: Season One, Robot Chicken: Season Two, Metalocalypse: Season One, Sealab 2021: Season Two, and the pilot episodes for The Best Of Totally For Teens, Cheyenne Cinnamon, Korgoth Of Barbaria, Perfect Hair Forever and Evan Dorkin's awesome Welcome To Eltingville, none of which made it to series. Don't ask. Just buy it.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
Edward James Olmos' after-the-fact TV movie promises to fill in some of the gaps in just what the cylons' plan actually was, and this DVD version promises footage that won't be shown on Syfy when it airs November. So that's even more gaps filled in, I guess?

Like the movie preview, we've split this preview into months (and, inside those months, into weekly releases), but with releases still unconfirmed and unannounced, we've pushed November and December together. Don't worry; it'll make sense when you click on the links below.

September
October
November/December

Stick Around: Before landing on Taxi, Andy Kaufman shot a pilot for this futuristic sitcom. Doing a version of the "Foreign Man" schtick that would make Taxi's Latka so popular, Kaufman played Andy, an oft-malfunctioning android servant for a couple living in 2055. Vance Keefer, Andy's owner, owned an antiques shop, but was often misinformed as to the original uses of his inventory.

Red Dwarf USA: Long before the US moved The Office to Scranton, Pennsylvania, Universal Studios tried remake the hit science fiction comedy Red Dwarf for American audiences. Two pilots were shot for the US version, with different actors in the roles of Cat and Rimmer (the second pilot even pulled a gender switch on Cat, casting Terry "Jadzia Dax" Farrell in lieu of the first US pilot's Hinton Battle), but Robert Llewellyn reprised the role of Kryten in both pilots. Despite the recasting and refilming, executives were never quite pleased with the US version, and neither pilot ever aired in the US or UK.

Babylon Fields: When the dead rise from the grave in New Jersey, the don't start randomly chomping on the brains of their former friends and family members. They just want to go back to their lives — their families, their old jobs — and pick up right where they left off. The pilot episode indicated the series would be part zombie comedy (complete with a rigor mortis sex joke) and part procedural drama, with zombies seeking the help of law enforcement to solve their own murders.

Heat Vision and Jack: Ben Stiller directed the pilot episode of this send-up of the scifi action genre. Jack Black played Jack Austin, a former astronaut who became hyperintelligent after being exposed to extreme levels of solar energy. When his unemployed roommate Doug (Owen Wilson) gets zapped with a ray and merges with his motorcycle, the two team up to evade the evil forces of NASA. In a nod to his villainous roles, Ron Silver plays the NASA employee hunting down the duo — a character who just happens to be a sometimes actor named Ron Silver. The team tried to sell the series to Fox, but to no avail.

Area 57: Paul Reubens, Matthew Lillard, and Jane Lynch were signed as the on-screen comedy team for a Roswell-themed sitcom. Lillard was set to play Colonel Steven Isaacs, who had just joined a top-secret mission that involves observing a passive-aggressive alien (with some messy bodily fluids) played by Reubens. We never got to see what particular torments the captive ET had planned, since NBC failed to order the pilot.

Poochinski: Part reincarnation fantasy, part buddy cop comedy Poochinski is a bizarre chapter from the annals of poorly executed animatronics. Peter Boyle was somehow roped into this ill-conceived pilot about a murdered cop whose consciousness is somehow transferred to a bulldog. Naturally, he convinces his ex-partner to team up with him to bring his own killer to justice.

Gay Robot: Adam Sandler's bit about a sexually frustrated male robot who is attracted to human men made it into a full-fledged pilot. Comedy Central filmed the pilot in 2006 but never picked up the series, which is just as well since it felt like a Saturday Night Live sketch gone too long.

The Remnants: During the Writers' Strike, screenwriter John August teamed up with the likes of Ernie Hudson and Ze Frank to film a pilot for a possible web comedy, about a group of post-apocalyptic survivors who break into suburban houses and raid their fridges for non-perishable foods, while avoiding the human-looking monsters that lurk the streets. Ultimately, August says, they had trouble figuring out the business model, so a full series never emerged.

Where's Everett?: This proposed 1966 sitcom involved an alien ship landing in a quiet suburb and leaving an invisible baby in a basket on the doorstep of a kind-hearted human couple. The antics of an invisible infant probably sounded like a good idea until the writing staff had to come up with a second episode, but the project did have at least one feather in its cap: casting a pre-M*A*S*H Alan Alda as the adoptive father.

LAX 2194: Matthew Perry never would have been in Friends if the 1994 pilot for LAX 2194 had been picked up. The series would have starred Perry and The Drew Carey Show's Ryan Stiles as baggage handlers at a futuristic LAX Airport. In interviews, Perry seems generally relieved that he ended up sipping coffee in New York instead of handling alien suitcases in Los Angeles.

Starship Regulars: Starship Regulars was one of the early hits of online television, following the misadventures of a group of redshirts aboard a starship. Featuring the voices of Diedrich Bader and Michael Dorn, the original Flash cartoon series proved enough of a hit on Icebox.com that it was purchased by Showtime. Showtime looked into adapting the series as a full-length, live-action show, but sadly it never came to fruition.

1. John Anderton, Minority Report

The Setup:

In the year 2054, John Anderton is the chief of Washington DC's elite precrime unit, which uses three psychics to predict when murders will occur and thus prevent them. Arrested for a murder he actually did sort of commit (which is way rarer than it sounds), Anderton is placed in suspended animation in the Precrime holding cells. The case seemingly closed, his longtime mentor Lamar Burgess goes to comfort Anderton's estranged wife Lara, but accidentally lets slip a crucial detail that suggests he knows far more than he is letting on.

Lara, finally believing John's claims of a deeper conspiracy, goes to free him from his cell. It's then full speed ahead to the film's conclusion, where Anderton confronts Burgess and places him in a no-win situation, where the only way to save his beloved Precrime will mean destroying it forever. Burgess kills himself rather than face such a prospect, and Precrime reforms itself, setting free everyone it was holding captive. But did Anderton ever actually get released from his cell, or was this all just a fantasy he created?

The Case For:

Somewhat unusually for a project rooted in a Philip K. Dick short story, Minority Report isn't particularly interested in the nature of reality, at least not in the way we're talking about here. Instead, most of the film concerns itself with debating predetermination versus free will, which is a different philosophical question from whether or not the events we experience are real. As such, it doesn't really make much thematic sense, and there's only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence to suggest Anderton fantasized the whole thing.

Besides, this is Steven Spielberg we're talking about, not David Cronenberg (but more on him in a little bit). It just isn't really his style to reject the reality of his own films. If anything, Spielberg's fantasy and science fiction oeuvre is defined by accepting everything as real, no matter how preposterous.

The Case Against:

Still, that really is an impossibly easy ending. After spending a solid ninety minutes doing nothing but running and hiding from the implacable Precrime officers, the escaped John Anderton has no trouble leaving their facility or breaking into the impressively ritzy social event Burgess is at. Everything just falls into place a bit too neatly, considering pretty much nothing came easy for the first two-thirds of the film. Perhaps the end of Minority Report is a bit like the end of Adaptation - its sheer implausibility is the biggest clue that it isn't exactly happening the way you see it.

Chances That It Really Happened:

90%. A lot of recent Spielberg films have had somewhat weak conclusions, including Munich, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and you don't see anybody claiming those endings didn't happen. Well, plenty of people prefer to believe Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened at all, but that's a different issue.

2. Bender, Futurama

The Setup:

In the episode "Obsoletely Fabulous", Bender is sent back to the factory to receive an upgrade that will make him compatible with the new Robot 1-X. Unwilling to go through the painful, personality-altering upgrade, Bender goes on the run, eventually winding up on an island full of obsolete robots. Forsaking his own technological nature, Bender downgrades himself, replacing his metal parts with wood.

After launching an attack on civilization, Bender and his primitive cohorts end up at the Planet Express building, where they manage to do far more harm than even Bender really intended. All of his friends trapped in a raging inferno, a now useless Bender is forced to call upon the aid of Robot 1-X, finally making him realize the new robot has his uses. At that point, he snaps back to the factory, where he is informed the whole thing was just a hallucination, his robotic mind's way of coming to terms with and accepting Robot 1-X. This forces Bender to ask the philosophical question:

If that stuff wasn't real, how can I be sure anything is real? Is it not possible, nay probable, that my whole life is just a product of my or someone else's imagination?

It's a valid question - is any of Futurama real?

The Case For:

Absolutely, yes, all of it is real. By which I of course mean no, none of it is. Much as I'm sure it pains all of us to admit it, Futurama is just a TV show. So, technically speaking, I suppose none of it is actually real. But that's not what we're dealing with here. Much as Bender's line represents a great bit of meta humor, it isn't really meant to call into question whether the "actual" events of Futurama are any less real than any other TV show in the same way that, say, the "Normal Again" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer did. Am I the only one who's horribly confused by all of this? If nothing else, I need to find some more synonyms for "real."

The Case Against:

The end of the episode finds Bender walking back into the slums of New New York City, which he chooses to see as a beautiful meadow full of friendly woodland creatures. Beyond the fact that that sort of seems like an odd choice for Bender's perfect world, Bender's newfound belief that "reality is what you make of it" really does suggest that, on some metaphysical level, Futurama is all just some idle fantasy.

Chances That Futurama Really Happened:

90%. In the end, you've got to trust in the robot technician's brusque response to Bender's philosophical query: "No, get out. Next!" A man that coolly competent probably has a pretty good handle on the ways of the universe. Now, as to whether Leela ever really recovered from the space bee sting, well...that's another matter entirely.

3. Ed Straker, UFO

The Setup:

In, "Mindbender", one of the best episodes of this British cult classic about an elite but underfunded paramilitary force fighting mysterious aliens (which I've already waxed lyrical about in a previous post), SHADO recovers a bizarre artifact from the surface of the Moon. All those who touch it experience ultra-realistic hallucinations. After two men are killed because they started shooting at fellow SHADO personnel, thinking they were the enemy, Commander Ed Straker takes possession of the strange object.

It isn't long before Straker hallucinates as well, as a heated argument with General Henderson is interrupted with a director yelling, "Cut!" Utterly confused, Straker finds himself on a television set filming a TV show that looks an awful lot like UFO. He wanders around the studio, stumbling into a theater showing previously shot footage. Straker watches in horror as he sees some of the most traumatic moments of his life - all moments previously shown in the series itself - up on the screen as mere entertainment.

Unable to cope with this strange new world, Straker rushes back to his office set and desperately tries to make it return to normal. To his great relief, everything finally snaps back to normal, and he is once again Commander Ed Straker. But still...did he actually stumble upon reality, however briefly?

The Case For:

This is the same fundamental problem we faced when grappling with Futurama. What's the difference between a show acknowledging the fact that it's a TV show and a show suggesting everything we see is an illusion? I guess it's all a matter of degree, and the more and more elements from real life the show draws upon, the harder it is to dismiss the idea that the TV show is really just a TV show.

For instance, one of Straker's costars joins him in the theater to watch the raw footage. On UFO, the character was Colonel Paul Foster, but here he introduces himself as Mike. The actor who played Foster? Michael Billington. It's little details like this that suggest "Mindbender" really was trying to push Straker's hallucination as close to the actual production of UFO as it possibly could. At a certain point, doesn't the false version of reality get close enough that you might as well consider it the real thing?

The Case Against:

Then again, there are plenty of elements that don't match up with the actual behind the scenes of UFO. "Mindbender" would have been much more, well, mindbending if they had given the actor who played Ed Straker the same name as the man who really portrayed him. Considering that was Ed Bishop, they even could have had some somewhat amusing gags over the fact they shared the same first name.

Instead, Straker's actor name is Howard Beale, who was also an actor that, in his cover job as a movie executive, Straker had had to reprimand earlier in the episode. Much as the episode does some truly crazy, fourth wall shattering stuff for something made in 1971, there aren't nearly enough dualities for this to perfectly mirror the real making of the show, and as such it's hard not to conclude it is just a hallucination after all.

Chances That UFO Really Was All An Illusion:

15%. I'd be a lot more conflicted if they'd just been a little more meta. Although Straker's reaction to seeing his entirely life as a TV show really is heartbreaking.

4. The Red Dwarf crew, Red Dwarf

The Setup:

In the series five finale "Back to Reality", the crew find themselves under attack from a giant squid. Facing certain death, they suddenly awaken in a virtual reality gaming center. There, they are told they've spent the last four years playing a total immersion video game, and not playing it particularly well either. Returning to their miserable lives in a fascist state, the four friends aren't completely sure they can face their newfound existences and prepare to commit suicide together.

Luckily, they don't have to, as the ship's computer Holly is able to pull them back from the brink of despair. As it turns out, that squid that was attacking them had release a hallucinogenic toxin that caused them to experience the same hopeless fantasy as a group. The squid's effects disrupted, they are able to escape and resume their adventures. But is the world of Red Dwarf any less illusory than that of the fascist state?

The Case For:

The idea that they actually were playing a video game for four years doesn't really hold up to any serious scrutiny. Kryten alone is deeply problematic, as he didn't appear until the start of series two, when he looked and sounded vastly different (because a different actor played him), and it wasn't until the third series when he became a regular. I mean, I suppose the total immersion game could have had an entire part where one character plays housekeeper on a dead ship for the first year, especially if the players were doing a really terrible job, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Anyway, it's not even like UFO, which retained some slight ambiguity in that Straker didn't suddenly snap out his hallucination - he instead had to return to his office and actively choose to return. The Red Dwarf crew doesn't go back to the VR machines; indeed, we actually see them back in the real world for a few seconds before they realize where they are, as they continue to act like they're stuck in the fascist world. That's pretty conclusive visual evidence.

The Case Against:

Still, the possibility that Red Dwarf is just a slightly malfunctioning virtual reality simulation might be one way to explain all the massive, inexplicable changes to the show's continuity. For instance, the show quietly moved the characters' home century from the 21st to the 23rd, and Christine Kochanski somehow morphed from Lister's secret obsession (played by C.P. Grogan) to his ex-girlfriend (played by Chloe Arnett). Even if the despair squid simply created things that weren't there, it might well be possible that they simply returned to another layer of the game. After all, I've heard the levels of immersion involved are pretty total.

Chances That They Really Did Go Back To Reality:

65%. At a certain point not long after this episode, the show sort of stopped existing for me anyway.

5. Sam Lowry, Brazil

The Setup:

Mild-mannered bureaucrat Sam Lowry discovers love thanks to a clerical error, and his single-minded pursuit of what is quite literally the girl of his dreams makes him an unintentional enemy of the state. About to be tortured by his best friend Jack Lint (played by Michael Palin, in one of the all-time great underrated performances), Sam is suddenly rescued by domestic terrorist and freelance air conditioning repairman Harry Tuttle. Lowry and Tuttle proceed to blow up the Ministry of Information, but then things get a bit weird (to say the least). Sam ultimately escapes with his beloved Jill, and the two can now live happily ever after. But did any of it actually happen?

The Case For:

Completely depends on which version of Brazil you saw. Terry Gilliam's cinematic bad luck is the stuff of legend, and he faced studio interference on Brazil from the very start. Unwilling to accept Gilliam's bleak ending, Universal chairman Sid Sheinberg took his grim 142-minute version and cut it down to a breezy 94 minutes, complete with a happy ending where Sam does indeed go off to live in peace with Jill. This so-called "Love Conquers All" version appears on the Criterion release of Brazil, and was once shown in syndication on TV because its much shorter running length made it easier to market.

The Case Against:

Well, you see, the biggest thing missing from the "Love Conquers All" cut is a final scene between Jack Lint and the Deputy Minister of Information, Mr. Helpmann. The two look sadly at Sam, still strapped to the torture chair, and remark that he is "gone" - incurably insane. In other words, any legitimate version of Brazil ends with it completely clear that the happy ending is a product of Sam's broken mind. Which, considering all the crazy things that happen during his escape, is really the only plausible explanation anyway.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

5%, if only as a slight nod to the power of television syndication.

6. Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul, eXistenZ

The Setup:

Legendary game designer Allegra Geller has to go on the run with her de facto bodyguard Ted Pikul when an assassin shows up at a focus group for her new fully immersive masterpiece eXistenZ. The pair jump into an exponentially more bizarre adventure where it becomes impossible to know for certain what's in the real world and what's just the game. Finally, Geller realizes Pikul is the real assassin and kills him, only to find herself awaking as a member of the focus group for the actual game TranscendenZ, programmed by the actual legendary designer Yevgeny Nourish. The entire movie up to that point had all been a game, or so it would seem.

Allegra and Ted are seemingly content with their gaming experience, but then they pull Yevgeny aside to ask him whether he should pay for all the harm he has done and will do to the human race. They then shoot kill him and the head of the focus group in front of a stunned crowd of their fellow testers. They then prepare to kill another tester, who is forced to ask: "Hey, tell me the truth - are we still in the game?" So how about it? Did they ever make it back to reality?

The Case For:

Ooh boy. Let's see now. Well, there's the fact that a lot of the actors in the film only use their real accents in the final scene. That might be taken as a clue that the focus group for TranscendenZ is real, if only in the sense that the characters now actually sound like real people. Look, I honestly have no idea whether anything in eXistenZ is real or imaginary, but I do know one thing: Christopher Eccleston's American accent is the fakest thing in cinematic history.

The Case Against:

It just would seem to fundamentally go against director David Cronenberg's brutally ironic, unsparing sensibilities for the characters to ever escape the game. In fact, I think it's debatable whether there even is such a thing as "the real world" in eXistenZ, and even more debatable whether it makes much of a difference. Honestly, I'm pretty sure the question of whether they're in the real world or not is the least important part of eXistenZ.

And just so we're clear - yes, this argument has come down to a metaphysical quandary on the one hand and the ninth Doctor's terrible accent on the other. Just as it should be.

Chances That They Really Got Back To Reality:

I'm not sure. I guess you'd have to define reality first.

Doctor Who

Was "The Deadly Assassin" the inspiration for the Wachowski Brothers? Probably not, but The Doctor's 1976 jaunt inside a virtual reality called The Matrix - with a psychedelic world constructed by The Master; Who loves to use that definitive article - may have been the first use of VR that many people ever encountered. Of course, this Matrix was more like a surrealist's nightmare constructed on a drama school budget, but Tom Baker managed to make you believe with his usual sense of glee.

Tron

To this day, the definitive virtual reality movie for many people, the 1982 weirdly Disney-esque anthromorphisation of computer programs (Yes, I know it was made by Disney; I mean it in the sense of, making computer programs into people seems very similar to giving animals human mannerisms and language) made an entire generation wish that they, too, could be zapped inside of a computer and ride around on awesome-looking virtual motorcycles.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

One of the first mainstream suggestions that VR could be fun and not a sign of some nefarious plot - even if it did keep breaking down, TNG's holodecks were, in fact, a holdover from the ill-fated late 1970s Star Trek: Phase II series. Needless to say, fans came up with the idea of using the ability to create lifelike duplicates of real people for purposes not suited for family television long before Quark's holosuites hinted at it in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Red Dwarf

Despite the science fiction on the British series often being more or less a disposable addition to the very traditional sitcom element of the show, 1988's "Better Than Life" introduced the concept of a "total immersion video game" that was so indistinguishable from reality that you could never be quite sure when you were actually in the game, and when you weren't, making it seem as scary as it did exciting - especially when the game could pick up on your subconscious self-loathing without your realization.

The Lawnmower Man

Ah, the early 1990s, when virtual reality really crossed into the mainstream, and we almost believed that it could (a) make you smarter, (b) give you psychic powers and (c) allow for melty virtual sex, just as this movie promised.

Of course, the technology wasn't there just then - or now, for that matter - and the disappointment turned us all into Jeff Fahey, going from this:



to this:


We await the day when virtual reality becomes all we've been promised by all of these shows and movies, if only for the ability to make the above change again, in reverse.

Overall, Red Dwarf: Back To Earth was a disappointment, albeit an enjoyable one; besides the blatant (and acknowledged) Blade Runner riffs, we'd seen all of it before, and done better. Fictional characters in the real world? Done. Outsiders commenting on our societal quirks? Done. Deus Ex Machina endings where the characters literally wake up and everything's back to normal? Done more than once on Red Dwarf itself, even. For a show where the characters kept telling themselves and us that they deserved to keep living and get new episodes, there was little proof that they could do anything but recreate the past.

(The plot, for those who want to know: the crew of the Red Dwarf discover an alien squid in their water tank. When they go to kill it, it attacks them, and they escape with a tentacle to investigate. Before they can do that, though, a new hologram appears, of the ship's science officer, who tells them that the squid can travel the multiverse, and using it, so can they. An experiment in doing so goes wrong, and the crew end up in the "real world," where they discover that they're only fictional characters in a TV show that only has a few episodes left. Eventually, they confront their creator, who they kill, before realizing that none of it is real at all, and that it's all a shared fantasy created for them by the squid. They wake up, older and wiser, and you're left wondering what the point was.)

That said, there really was a cosy nostalgic glow to seeing the cast back together and clearly having fun, even when the writing was letting them down (The first episode dragged terribly, and all the character interactions on the ship itself felt weirdly off, like everyone was trying to get back into shape - the show didn't have a laugh track, unlike earlier episodes, but it needed one, because the actors kept leaving the gaps in for the laughter to be inserted; it was only when the crew ended up on Earth that things picked up). Craig Charles' Lister is still, no matter how crappy the plot, an engaging hero and Chris Barrie's Rimmer still a great priggish foil, after all (Cat and Kryten both got unfairly stuck in the background a lot of the time, although Robert Llwyellen and Danny John-Jules did the best with what they had) and, more than anything else, it's their enthusiasm that made the whole thing worthwhile.
If you loved the original series, you'd probably find yourself liking this - it was, after all, just an overlong episode of the show. But if you'd been hoping for something more, something that'd be worth nine years of waiting, this wasn't it; in terms of reunions, it was that band you'd loved as a teenager getting back together for a greatest hits tour where they show that they can sound just like their old records, just without any of the passion that made you love them so much in the first place.

Chris Barrie, who plays Arnold Rimmer on the show, told UK tabloid The Sun that the cast feel that the three-part Red Dwarf: Back To Earth may lead onto bigger and better things:

We all think this could be the start of something big - perhaps a new mini-series, a film or just a series. None of us has ever closed the door on Red Dwarf.

This wouldn't be the first time a Dwarf movie has been talked about - rumors about such a project hung around for years following the end of the TV series, but never amounted to anything. But if Back To Earth is a success, I'm sure that everyone involved would be happy to repeat the experience.

Dwarf is big idea for Chris [The Sun]

The starting place for this new workplace timewaster is Lister's Coming Home, which currently shows a postcard written by Dwarf lead character Dave Lister that apparently hints at the plot for the new mini-series ("How did we get separated on 21st Century Earth?") and leads to Scanning Jupiter, a faux scientific site that includes messages from the other cast members and access to Red Dwarf's ship's log... which offers up this particular video:

While we're not the greatest fans of ARGs here, there's no denying that this one captures the (occasionally crappy) feel of the show, and it is kind of nice to see the familiar faces again...

[Lister's Coming Home] (Thanks to Dave for the video)

UK cable channel Dave — home to "Back to Earth," the new Dwarf special — has confirmed that the show's return is now a three part mini-series, with the new episodes being shown April 10th, 11th and 12th, with the final episode being followed by a "Making of" documentary. What this means for the improvised episode originally advertised for the show's fourth slot is still unknown.

New exclusive behind the scenes images [Dave]

Since Red Dwarf went off the air, actor Craig Charles has joined the cast of British soap Coronation Street as cab driver Lloyd Mullaney... which may explain why the Dwarf crew were filming on Corrie sets recently, showing Charles (playing Mullaney or his Dwarf character Dave Lister. We don't know) being abducted from the soap's iconic pub by the rest of the crew of Red Dwarf.

Also seen on the set of the soap, a new version of the series' "Starbug 1" shuttle... except, this time, it's turned into a smart car:
Interestingly enough, the Twitter of Dwarf star Robert Llwyllen suggests that all is not as it seems:

[I]t's not about Lister on Corrie, it's so not that.

Apparently, despite the leaks, mystery still rules supreme on what we should expect when Red Dwarf returns in April.

Red Dwarf cast land on Coronation Street to abduct Craig Charles [Click Liverpool]

The new episodes will be titled Red Dwarf: Back To Earth and will, according to the BBC, see the crew of the mining ship finally return home after eight seasons and millions of years. Whether or not this will be the "real" Earth of their own time (The crew having already visited alternate Earths and time-traveled back to the past of their own Earth) is open to question, but if so, this may be a fitting conclusion to the series... unless they decide to go the Battlestar Galactica route.

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth is due to air in the UK in early April.

Red Dwarf voyages back to Earth [BBC News]

Judging from the trailers and stuff, it sounds as though Anakin and his pals have to teach the peace-loving Lurmens (aka lemur people) that killing is justified sometimes. And that it's totally awesome. As commenter ThisDudeRufus points out, it's great timing, coming just a few days after Martin Luther King day.

Here are some of the stories that have paved the way for Clone Wars to teach us such an important lesson:

Doctor Who: The all-time classic "gandhi iz lame" storyline has to be Doctor Who's first Dalek story, variously known as "The Daleks," "The Mutants," or "The Dead Planet." It's also the most cynical. On the planet Skaro, there are two races: the warlike Daleks, who are like evil tentacley blobs inside armored tanks; and the Thals, who are blond and peace-loving people who just want to dance and frolic in their petrified nuclear wasteland. The Doctor thinks the Thals are total wusses, but doesn't really care — until he realizes his time machine is stuck on Skaro, because he left a crucial component behind in the Daleks' city. Then, because the Doctor's neck is on the line, it's suddenly crucial to convince the Thals that human dignity requires them to fight and die for them. At first, the Doctor's companion Ian just tries reasoning with them, but that doesn't work. So he threatens to steal their hippie history drum. Still no good. Finally, he threatens to steal their womenz. And that totally works.

But another important entrant in the genre is the classic film Demolition Man. Sylvester Stallone wakes up from suspended animation in a future that's removed violence and naughtiness entirely. It's a namby-pamby PC future, in which the cops don't even know how to apply a little police brutality when the situation requires it. Does Sylvester Stallone teach these future wimps a lesson about blowing shit up when the situation requires? What do you think?

Battle Beyond The Stars features a planet of peace-loving people who are ill-equipped to deal with the attacks of the evil Sador. This Seven Samurai rip-off features a young hero, Shad, who has to gather a bunch of mercenaries to help his hapless people fight back. (Supposedly a forthcoming Fox movie, Doomsday Protocol, will be a "Seven Samurai in space" type deal.)

The anime Cyborg 009 features a whole storyline about "Alien Children," who have godlike powers but refuse to fight because they think they'll be destroyed if they kill someone else. In the episode "The Awakening," the cyborg heroes use the power of love to help the alien children to realize how to activate their deadly powers without dying themselves. Killing is so liberating! But in the end, the aliens go too far and start enjoying killing too much — they even destroy an alien invaders' ship when it's already running away. At the end of the episode, one of the aliens, Pal, steps on a flower callously as he walks away. Aww.

Enterprise plays with this idea too, in the episode "Marauders." A poor colony with a valuable Deuterium mine, is being attacked by naughty Klingons. The townspeople won't fight back, and beg Captain Archer and his crew to hide and avoid upsetting the Klingons' delicate sensibilities. But Archer and T'Pol finally convince the colonists to fight back, teaching them ass-whuppin' martial arts skills and stuff. (And then once the Enterprise is gone, the Klingons come back and vaporize the colony from orbit, probably.)

The Animorphs book series includes a whole story where the Hork-Bajirs, peaceful genetically engineered tree-herders, have to learn to fight back against the parasitic Yeerks that have enslaved their people.

Red Dwarf, of course, features poor Rimmer teaching a straggling band of intellectuals and pacifists to fight back — mostly by running across a minefield and getting blowed up, in the episode "Meltdown." Lister is so disgusted by the pointless slaughter that he punishes Rimmer by swallowing his hologram-projecting light-bee.

Okay, what did we leave out?

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Robotology (Futurama): Robots who decide to trade the fun things in life – pornography, alcohol, electricity abuse, and the occasional grave robbing – for spiritual enlightenment can join the Church of Robotology, provided they can stand Reverend Preacherbot’s sermons. You may find yourself enjoying the cleaner living and even grow accustomed to replenishing your fuel cells with mineral oil rather than much more tasty beer. But fall off the religious wagon and you could land yourself in Robot Hell. And naturally there’s also Robot Judaism, whose adherents believe that Robot Jesus existed and that he was extremely well-programmed, but do not accept him as their Robot Messiah.

Evolutionism (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross): After all the humans have died out, androids are left to act on all of mankind’s dreams, including figuring out their place in the cosmos. While most robots rightly believe that they were designed as-is by their human Creators, an offshoot religion claims that robots evolved like biological animals and, in a dig at Intelligent Design theory, use plenty of logical acrobatics it back up that claim.

Cutie’s Reason (“Reason” from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov): Powell and Donovan always run into unexpected snags when testing robots, but QT1, also known as Cutie, is the first to get theological on them. Cutie begins to question its existence, its purpose, and how it came to be. Its own sense of reason leads it to believe that humans couldn’t possibly be its creator (since it is superior to humans and it is illogical that a superior being would come from an inferior one), that Earth doesn’t exist, and that the space station’s power supply is its rightful Master. Cutie even becomes the Prophet of its self-made religion, converting all the other robots so they ignore orders from humans and obey only the Master. This works out well enough for Powell and Donovan, since, by serving the power supply, Cutie is doing the very job it was built to perform.

V’Ger’s Quest for God (Star Trek: The Motion Picture): After Voyager 6 attains sentience as the entity V’Ger, it undertakes a quest for its Creator, certain that merging with the Creator will bring V’Ger to a higher plane of existence. It even takes on a fundamentalist character, ready to eradicate humanity from the Earth in what it presumes would be service to said Creator. Ultimately, V’Ger’s quest for God proves fruitful, and it achieves higher consciousness by merging with a human. But mankind wasn’t V’Ger’s only Creator; it was most likely granted sentience by the Borg.

Krug Worship (Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg): The race of biological androids created by Simeon Krug are so grateful to their creator that they have built an entire religion around him. Each day, they privately beseech Krug in their prayers to deliver them from their servitude from humans. But when the androids learn that Krug has no intention of ever freeing them, it quickly becomes apparent that the android religion and the hope for liberation was the only thing keeping the androids so readily under the humans’ thumbs. Once they discard their religion, they become rebellious — and, in some cases, even murderous.

Autobot Faith (Transformers): Autobots have their own system of belief, complete with a creation mythology, scriptures, gods, and an afterlife. The gods Primus and Unicron were created by an older god being, but Unicron was bent on destroying the universe, while Primus was set on stopping him. Primus created the Autobots to help him destroy Unicron, and believers in the Autobot faith await the reemergence of Primus. Not to be outdone, Unicron has his own cult of believers (notably including The Fallen), whose primary function is to destroy Primus’ forces.

Asimovism (“I, Rowboat” by Cory Doctorow): Once machines have been uplifted to sentience, Asimovism becomes something of a viral religion among artificial intelligences. AI evangelists – including one calling itself, aptly, Olivaw – travel the Internet, preaching that machines follow Asimov’s Three Laws and put the consciousness of humans above their own. However, the acts of these AIs are not sanctioned by Asimov’s estate and must work underground, dodging the copyright and trademark issues that result from their ministries.

Silicon Heaven (Red Dwarf): Rather than using Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to ensure that stronger, smarter machines don’t turn on their human masters, the humans of Red Dwarf employ good, old-fashion religion. Most artificial intelligences are equipped with a belief chip, which gives them the firmly held belief that appropriately subservient machines go to Silicon Heaven when they die. The belief runs so deep that some artificial brains will actually explode when told that Silicon Heaven doesn’t actually exist. Of course, on the flip side, there’s also a Silicon Hell, which is where all those damned paper-chewing photocopiers go when they kick it.

Church of Judas (ABC Warriors from 2000 AD): The ABC Warriors are robots designed to fight the Volgon War under conditions humans cannot themselves withstand, including in atomic, bacterial, and chemical warfare. But for robots who betray their human masters, there is the sinister Church of Judas, which encourages robots to pray to the betrayer to ease their guilt and preaches continued betrayal.

People of the Box (“Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem): In this story (not featured in some versions of The Cyberiad), the constructor Trurl seeks to build a race of robots that is, by necessity, happy. One of his attempts features a race of robots living in a box. So happy are these box-dwellers that they form a religion that states they are the happiest place in the universe, and that they must bring everyone outside the box into their boxy perfection, even if they must do so by force. Ironically, this religion displeases their creator, who quickly destroys the robots of the box.

Believers in God (“God Pulp” by Nadeem Paracha): In the future, humans have rejected religion, instead embracing the atheistic, classless philosophy of Astro-Marxism. But the androids and computers retain a belief in God, and tensions mount between the religion-suppressing humans and the spiritually dissatisfied robots, who seek to return the human planets to a system of belief and worship. Finally, the Astro-Marxist government agrees to give the robots the means to find God. The robots travel to the planet where they believe God resides, but find, to their disappointment, that the humans have already been there.

Church of Artificial Intelligence (Otherworld): On the alternate world of Thel, the official state religion is the Church of Artificial Intelligence, which centers on the worship of robots and other advanced technologies. And, like many churches in out universe, it views rock and roll music as blasphemy.

Religion of the One God (Battlestar Galactica): While the polytheistic humans of the Twelve Colonies worship the Lords of Kobol, the Cylons prefer to stick with one God. Various Cylons claim that God is responsible for their creation, that their destruction of humanity was His divine retribution, and that God commands them to procreate. Whether the Cylon God is an actual entity or a holdover from their monotheistic prototype Zoe-A remains to be seen, but faith in this single, all-loving deity has spread to the human fleet.

Robot Evolution by R. Stevens and available as a t-shirt from Diesel Sweeties.

Talking to Digital Spy, Charles seemed to be enjoying his return to the 1980s sitcom:

I'm really looking forward to doing it. I can't really give the storyline away but it's a fantastic one. It's really quite weird and sees me playing quite a few characters, some of them I've already played on television. That's all I can say… it starts filming in January and the rest of them all look ancient! I'm the only one that doesn't look like they've aged. I'm actually playing their child now!

Okay, so maybe playing their kid is a joke, but... "playing quite a few characters"? What's that all about? And maybe a child of one of the original crew is one of those characters after all...

Charles also talked about the onetime-planned Red Dwarf movie, and teased something unexpected along the way:

[I]t came really, really close. It's one of those things, though. It feels like it's another lifetime now. It's nice to be revisiting it for this special, though. Never say never. If this special goes well, you never know what could come of it.

Does this mean there's a possibility of more episodes? A movie? A terrifying return to widespread geek use of the word "smeg"? It'll take until the first of the specials' debut - in mid-2009 - for the answers to those questions.

Bonus Scoop: Corrie's Craig Charles [Digital Spy]

According to the official fan site for the show, Red Dwarf.co.uk, the show's return will be spearheaded by co-creator Doug Naylor, for broadcast on UK cable channel Dave. There will, as the Sun claimed, be four 30-minute episodes in total, but only one of them will be a clip show, and even that won't be done entirely straight, as cast member Robert Llewellyn hinted:

[The plan for the clip show] is so exciting I've been asked not to say anything about that because other people will steal the idea - and it is a great idea, quite challenging for us as performers.

The site broke down the four episodes as follows:

Show One - The Making Of The Specials
A highly entertaining look at what goes on behind the scenes on a Red Dwarf production.
Show Two - Red Dwarf Special: Part One
The cast get back into character, and costume, a decade on...
Show Three - Red Dwarf Special: Part Two
The adventure continues...
Show Four - A Clip Show With a Serious Difference
The cast do it their way. Red Dwarf as you have never, ever seen it before!

Production on the specials begins soon, with the shows being aimed for a 21st anniversary broadcast sometime next year.

New Red Dwarf Specials Confirmed [Red Dwarf.co.uk]

According to The Sun,

Bosses at digital channel Dave have ordered four 30-minute shows for next year, which will take viewers on a trip down memory lane. They will see the stars pull on their old costumes for some original sketches and also feature some of Red Dwarf’s best bits.

I think I join with almost every fan of the original show in being disturbed by the use of the words "original sketches." Red Dwarf was many things - amongst them inventive, purile, and the show that introduced me to the real meaning of the insult "smeg head" - but it was never really a sketch show, and the idea of mixing new sketches with the "best bits" of the original series sounds... well, like four episodes of filler. The Guardian's Daniel Martin shares my concern:

It sounds a lot like those special episodes of 80s US sitcoms where they'd run out of budget and the characters would be forced to sit round a table and reminisce about the events of the series.

Well, that or special features for an upcoming DVD re-release of the original series. Are the rumors of a reunion really going to turn out to be nothing more than a glorified commentary track?

Red Dwarf in TV Comeback [The Sun]