Mechocracy doesn't really have much to say, but it's a perfectly cromulent episode of Red Dwarf.
PLOT
The machines hold a strike for equal rights, so Rimmer campaigns to become 'Machine President' in an effort to garner more authority on the ship. Kryten and Lister must ally with their old nemesis Talkie Toaster to stop him.
ANALYSIS
An election is one of those stock ideas that pretty much every long-running sitcom gets around to eventually. It's got to be one of the top ten oldest forms of satire ever. Airing during the start of the Trump era gives it a little extra (unintentional) zest, but all in all, this isn't trying to be groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination. I will say that I enjoyed the daring abortion joke ("when does a document become a document?") and the sheer surrealism of the premise did a good job of harkening back to the show's earliest years, when it was all about the crew trying desperately to add meaning to their lives by recreating aspects of their culture onboard. Having an election for the machines is completely bonkers, but it's the sort of thing that a very isolated group of people would get up to if they had nothing better going on. Being more fond of the quieter Red Dwarf episodes set wholly on the ship, this was right up my alley.
My only serious complaint is the lack of stakes. There are two major events in this episode: the ship evacuation at the start, and the election itself. Both of them are played as if they're not really a big deal. Rimmer and Lister joke throughout the evacuation (compare that to the sweaty tension in Bodyswap), even spending time on a skit where Rimmer spitefully promotes and then demotes Lister. It's an amusing gag, but it completely kills the idea that the ship might get destroyed. As for the election, nothing about Rimmer's possible takeover seems very threatening. I realise that turning him into a tyrant would just be retreading Officer Rimmer, but the whole election is so lightweight as to be meaningless. Even the resolution is off-screen, because we need to spend the screentime on Talkie Toaster.
... Don't get me wrong, I love the Toaster probably more than most. But he shows up so late and adds so little that he may as well not be in it. The scene is basically just a rehash of his first scene from White Hole. It's cute, I'm glad to see him again, but again, it's so lightweight. That's the big drawback with the episode. It's just kinda stuff happening. At least with similarly minimalistic episodes like Dear Dave, you had an emotional core to the whole thing.
Production-wise, I am getting very tired of the overuse of blue lighting. I'm guessing that Doug Naylor (as director) thought that it would give the show a sleeker look. And to some extent it does, but it's becoming unbearable. Everything is lit blue, there's a blue haze covering every scene. Nobody would ever live in this much blue. Also, much like every other series 11 or 12 episode, there's zero variety in the incidental music used during the ship beauty shots. Smacks of carelessness.
CHARACTERS
There's some neat stuff going on here. I like the subplot about the Cat struggling with getting older and wiser. His refusal to grow as a person rings true. I actually wish we had a little more of this, because if there's anyone in the crew who we haven't explored enough, it's the Cat. But the storyline seemed to be only added in there to give Rimmer something to blackmail him with. Which ends up being somewhat meaningless anyway, since the Cat reveals the truth to Lister and Kryten.
The way Kryten dupes Rimmer into mopping is both very funny and well rooted in their personalities. Kryten in particular is becoming more and more humanized and conniving as the seasons go on, which makes complete sense. Rimmer seems to be increasingly officious and formal. I don't really understand why, other than maybe Chris Barrie just likes playing him that way. I can't imagine Rimmer from series 3-5 bothering to mop a deck just because Kryten told him to. It's like he lives for rules and regulations now.
NOTES
- The sequence where Rimmer promotes Lister to Technician 2.5 was originally written for Officer Rimmer, which is why Lister jokingly calls him Technician 2.0 when Rimmer resigns his commission in that episode.
- Rimmer assigns Kryten to "PD", which is Punishment Detail. But this is never explained in the episode.
- Why does Yellow Alert have its own sign in the science room, but there is no other alert?
- What's the actual point of a virus that sends spaceships into a black hole?
- The way Lister is actually genuinely excited to be promoted is both very sweet and very sad.
- The smear campaigns use archive footage from Nanarchy, Camille, Holoship, Quarantine, Siliconia and most bafflingly, Skipper, an episode which had not aired yet.
- Rimmer references Kryten tending after skeletons, which occurred in Kryten.
- Lister's smear campaign against Rimmer mentions that he died 'twice'. Once in The End, and the other occasion was presumably in Timeslides.
- Talkie Toaster's previous appearance was in White Hole.
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