Red Dwarf: 11 Episodes That Never Made It To Air
4. Earth - Series 8 Episode 8
Intended as the final episode of the programme altogether, Earth (as the title suggests) would finally see the Dwarfers achieve their goal as Red Dwarf returned to Earth. The slime’s coming home. With a lot of collateral damage along the way.
Not a lot has been discussed about the episode as a whole but Doug Naylor had the final sequence pretty clearly mapped out. Upon its return to Earth; the small rouge one would crash through a number of historic landmarks, destroying most of the planet before coming to a stop. Lister would then emerge from the ship and try to swap insurance details with some of the surviving humans.
As you can probably guess from that description and the recurring reason for some of these episodes being scrapped, Earth just wasn’t possible on a BBC budget. Particularly since Series 8 had already suffered a lot of financial woes that meant Back In The Red (originally Episodes 1 and 2) and Pete (originally Episode 6) had to be stretched to additional episodes, with scenes that had been cut from Cassandra filling some of Pete’s runtime.
In the end, Earth never being made definitely turned out to be for the best since it has allowed for the production of the Back To Earth trilogy, Series 10 and 11, and next year’s Series 12. It’s pretty safe to say that twenty-one new episodes at the cost of losing one is a pretty good deal.