Red Dwarf: 11 Episodes That Never Made It To Air
With the crimson short one back our screens, we look at the episodes that never were...
If you want to lie shipwrecked and comatose while drinking fresh mango juice, you’re in luck. Because Red Dwarf is finally back for a full series for the first time in four years. And with Series 11 now being broadcast and Series 12 already filmed, Red Dwarf is back to a relatively smooth schedule production-wise for the first time since the 1990s. I'm as surprised as you are to be honest.
Red Dwarf seems to constantly have its feet held to the fire, battling against every conceivable problem you can think of. From a constant lack of budget to the oddly specific issue of just how long an actor can legally perform in a chimpanzee costume, things never run entirely smoothly. And because of that, there are quite a few episodes that failed to get past the early development stages and ended up as dead as A-line flares with pockets in the knees.
But, rather fittingly for Red Dwarf, death wasn’t the end for all of these episodes and some lived on in other ways. Step things up to red alert (and yes, it means changing the bulb) because these are eleven episodes of Red Dwarf that never got off the ground.
11. Bodysnatcher - Series 1 Episode 2
The first of these lost episodes comes right from the very beginning, being from such an early stage that Alfred Molina and Alan Rickman were said to have used the script for their auditions to play Lister and Rimmer. The story itself was largely concerned with Rimmer coping with his death and trying to build a new body from parts of Lister’s. It also put a lot more focus on their interactions than other episodes, whilst the Cat and Holly were mostly background elements.
A major rethink from creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor after considering the episode unworkable led to the decision to drop the unfinished script in favour of Me2, while a number of jokes and smaller plot points were moved to other Series 1 and 2 scripts. Eventually, the idea of Rimmer trying to build a new body was brought out of mothballs and used for a brief gag in the Series 4 episode DNA.
Almost twenty years later; Grant and Naylor collaborated for the first time in a over a decade to finish the script, and the episode was animated with storyboards for release on DVD along with the remastered versions of Series 1 to 3 as part of The Bodysnatcher Collection. As far as things brought back from the dead go, it’s much more tolerable than Rimmer.