Blu-ray Review | Red Dwarf: Complete Series I - VIII

Not to be confused with the controversial 1990s Red Dwarf Re-Mastered project, this long-awaited release presents the series’ initial eight-season run in its original form along with the Xtended alternatives to “Tikka to Ride”; “Ouroboros”; “Duct Soup”; “Back in the Red”; and even a cobbled-together edition of “Pete”. Whilst the show’s fifty-two episodes and their variants have all been upscaled, arguably even enhanced, for the Blu-ray format, you won’t find the backs of Doug Naylor and Ed Bye’s heads crudely imposed onto funerals or rogue blue-screen skutters distracting from the simple comedy of an early Lister / Rimmer spat here.
 

A veritable one-stop shop for the series’ BBC era, this nineteen-disc set includes almost all of the highly-regarded supplementary material from the groundbreaking noughties’ DVD releases, which together with Doctor Who really set the bar for the medium. However, these special features haven’t been upscaled, or even transferred onto Blu-ray disc – instead we’re essentially presented with a copy of each bonus DVD as was. Whilst this gives rise to a lot of unnecessary disc-swapping, it’s hard to grumble about when we have so much quality programming gathered together in one set. Even the once-exclusive content from the hard-to-find Bodysnatcher Collection has been ported over, Re-Mastered commentaries and all, with only the Re-Mastered episodes themselves conspicuous in their (nonetheless welcome) absence. You could be forgiven for missing “Bodysnatcher” and its superlative selection of special features (the Series I and II retrospectives amongst them), though, as for some reason it is hidden in a newspaper-giveaway style cardboard slipcase and buried beneath the box set’s booklet, which contains the only real clue as to its existence. It’s a bizarre design decision that reeks of afterthought, in some respects summing up both the strengths and weaknesses of this release in one fell swoop.

Above: Animation fuses with Chris Barrie’s energetic narration to bring “lost” Dwarf to life

 

The box set itself is attractive enough, and sturdier than I had expected, but the overall effect is underwhelming – particularly if you have an eye for detail. A botched logo and a puzzling penchant for pixilation – surely the exact opposite of high-definition? - are the least of the problems evident on close inspection. Even the booklet, the inclusion of which should always be singled out for praise in these increasingly digital days, is but a glossy ghost of the DVDs’ detailed offerings; instructive but lifeless. Compare this box set’s offering against one of those from the recently-released and luxuriant Doctor Who Collection releases and note the difference. The Blu-ray menus are plagued by a similar lack of effort, with Series II even managing to get one of its episodes’ names wrong. Thanks…

The episodes themselves, for the most part, look better than they have ever done – if you watch them on a ten-year-old TV. Blown up well beyond their intended proportions on a contemporary 4K TV, though, they look much as they always did, warts and all, only bigger – any gains made in upscaling are lost to the larger canvas. But if I watch them on the 26” TV now relegated to our bedroom, they do look far better than the DVDs ever did on there – particularly the filmic Red Dwarf VII. The built-in problem with this type of release is that we’re never comparing like for like, and so we’re always destined to be disappointed. You can’t invent resolution. You can’t create fidelity. What this box set does is provide us with the best possible means to carry classic Dwarf into the next era of television, looking much as it always did – which is, I’m afraid to say, a bit rubbish.

Because I held out for a while before picking this up, I was fortunate enough to receive the corrected edition, but if you notice that Series III and V look even less impressive than the rest of the episodes, then you’ve probably received discs from the original pressing in which certain episodes had been mistakenly deinterlaced (effectively losing half of the information in the picture and significantly reducing the quality). If so, you can obtain replacement discs from the BBC by clicking here.

Overall, the lack of quality control on this release is lamentable, but equal to its pricing. To be able to pick up the entire BBC run of Red Dwarf for less than a couple of seasons would have cost you on DVD back in the day is a genuine gift – unless, of course, you already own the DVDs and don’t have a massive telly, in which case all this box set would really save you is a bit of shelf space.

Today’s cheapest retailers for the Red Dwarf: Complete Series I - VIII Blu-ray are Zavvi and Amazon, who each have it listed for £30.98 inclusive of delivery.

Blu-ray Review | Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season Three

Ira Steven Behr succinctly sums up the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“TNG”) in the (below) quotation that opens this Blu-ray’s flagship three-part documentary, Resistance is Futile: Assimilating the Next Generation. Though far from being the show’s strongest showing, Season 3 saw the show transition from being a po-faced imitation of the original series (“TOS”) into a genuinely thought-provoking and frequently action-packed series infinitely superior its forerunner. TOS-style, allegory-driven planet-hopping gave way to much more subtle morality plays built around individual characters. The rigid rules of Roddenberry were forced to bend as the show finally acknowledged its past and embraced its future.

This particular season is one that I look back on with intense affection as it was the first full season that I was on board for, having beamed aboard just over half-way through the previous run. After being transfixed by the unnerving “Q Who?”, I religiously videotaped every episode of the show from “Samaritan Snare” onwards, revisiting Season 3 highlights such as “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “Who Watchers the Watchers?” ad infinitum as the mounting Memorex threatened to entomb me.

Many of my favourite Trek moments lurk in the midst of this great season – how brave and inspired was it to have Worf refuse to give blood to save a Romulan’s life? Of course he wouldn’t, dramatic convention be damned. How devastating is it to watch Tasha Yar help to lead the Enterprise-C to its certain destruction at Narendra III, all to restore a peaceful present where she’ll die a meaningless death? Can you really sit through the last ten minutes of “The Offspring” without tears welling up, convinced that you’re seeing emotions on Brent Spiner’s face that just aren’t there?

However, revisiting these adventures so many years later has been a rather sobering experience as I’ve been painfully reminded that for every inventive and unsettling effort like “The Survivors”, there’s a “Ménage à Troi” lurking just around the corner like a predatory Ferengi, poised to make light of abduction and rape. To get to “The Defector”, and franchise veteran James Sloyan’s thrilling turn as Admiral Jarok (still Trek’s most compelling portrayal of a Romulan), you’ve got to first endure Will Riker wading cock-first through a tired old blood feud in “The Vengeance Factor”. Even the enthralling LeVar Burton / John Snyder two-hander, “The Enemy”, literally has its “Price” - particularly for those who used to buy the old two-episodes-per-tape VHS releases at £10.99 apiece rather than wait for Sky 1 or BBC2.

This season’s vastly variable quality reflects the turmoil behind the scenes, much of which is now well-documented in both Resistance is Futile and, less formally, the 71-minute writers’ roundtable moderated by super-fan Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, The Orville). The latter is very well-placed on this third-season release as many of its contributors first wrote for TNG during its third year, and as such much of the discussion focuses on how they came to do so, and how the reality measured up against the dream. Maurice Hurley had left the show at end of the previous season, and his replacement, Michael I Wagner, lasted only a matter of weeks in the post. Former studio executive Michael Piller eventually stepped into the breach as the new show-running executive producer, penning the season-opening “Evolution” and quickly instigating a number of radical policies that would instantly renovate the show. His appointment of Ira Steven Behr to help run the writers’ room led to a near instant uptick in quality, but it was his open submissions scheme that would have the greatest effect.

 

Particularly from today’s perspective, the notion that a show the calibre of TNG would even accept spec scripts, let alone solicit them and set up the infrastructure to have each one looked at, is absolutely incredible. Yet Piller made it one of his first orders of business, and as a result episodes the calibre of “The Offspring” were borne out of the slush pile. Though René Echevarria is the first to admit that he “screwed the pooch” with his script, and the credit for its success rests with Melinda M Snodgrass and the other staff writers who inherited it, the original idea for “The Offspring” brought  Echevarria into the fold, and he would go on to deliver some of the series’ most emotionally-charged scripts. More crucially still, a set tour organised by Ronald D Moore’s girlfriend led to the commissioning of “The Bonding”, Moore’s first-ever script for television, the success of which saw Piller bring Moore onto the staff to rework “Yesterday’s Enterprise” before appointing him as executive story editor from “Sins of the Father” onwards.

This is a significant development in the history of TNG as, if there was one clear turning point for the show, it was the transmission of “Sins of the Father”. Moore took two hopeful Klingon spec scripts and merged them into a story that unwittingly launched the series’ inaugural long-running story arc – a rich, Shakespearian epic that still stands up against Trek’s most renowned examples of world-building and storytelling. In less than forty-five minutes, Worf gained a brother (Tony Todd’s Kurn) and defended his family’s honour, only to tragically lose both in a fourth-act twist that left viewers reeling. For the first time in TNG – no, for the first time in Trek - the toys didn’t go back in the box at the end of the story. Worf was left stripped of his honour, his road to redemption waiting patiently to be walked.

Before long, all the toys were coming out to play. Mark Lenard returned to the role he first played in 1967’s “Journey to Babel” episode for TOS, bringing Sarek aboard the Enterprise-D for a touching episode grounded in pride and regret. Exploring dementia in televised drama was a bold enough conceit for 1989, even in a Vulcaned-up emotional form, but temporarily transferring its affects onto the captain of the ship was even ballsier . The risk paid off, though - “Sarek” plays like a Patrick Stewart highlight reel as his character is suddenly forced to bear the strain of centuries of repressed emotion. Thankfully Ira Steven Behr browbeat Rick Berman into allowing the mind-melded Picard to cry out, “Spock!” in his delirium, in so doing explicitly tying TNG to its forerunner while putting a beautiful exclamation point on Spock’s father’s unspoken sorrow.

And whilst the season saw the obligatory returns of John de Lancie’s riotous Q (in the surprisingly pensive, if somewhat on the nose, “Déjà Q”) and Majel Barrett Roddenberry’s Lwaxana Troi (in the abovementioned “Ménage à Troi”), it also introduced us to new recurring characters. Within the space of a season, the show had a given rise to a sprawling mythology – one that would evolve over the next four seasons and into the movies, as well as sideways into Star Trek: Voyager (“Voyager”) and particularly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (“DS9”) and even backwards into Enterprise. Andreas Katsulas made his first appearances as Picard’s Romulan foil, Commander Tomalak, during this run, while “Sins of the Father” introduced us to Charles Cooper’s fat Klingon Chancellor K’mpec and Patrick Massett’s loathsome Duras in addition to Worf’s big scary bro. Meanwhile, my favourite-ever Star Trek character, Colm Meaney’s Chief O’Brien, began to feature more heavily ahead of his elevation to near series regular status in Season 4, and the unforgettable frolic “Hollow Pursuits” introduced Dwight Schultz’s (The A-Team) Reginald Barclay – a brilliant engineer but socially feeble holo-addict who served as a walking, talking slap in the face to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of utopia. Fortunately for the ailing Gene – and, indeed, Patrick Stewart, who was famously keen to get into some “fucking and fighting” – balance would be restored by the unashamedly Kirk-like “Captain’s Holiday”, which introduced the lovely Jennifer Hetrick as Picard’s reckless lover, Vash, in a mad treasure-hunt romp that, unaccountably, managed to emphasise the captain’s ubiquitous uptightness rather than see it shed.

Of course, by far the most outstanding aspect of the third season is its finale, which, intended or otherwise, announced to the world that the show had arrived. Single-handedly written by Michael Piller, whose tribute piece graces this set’s bonus disc, “The Best of Both Worlds” remains much more than a mere fan favourite - it’s a famous piece of television history that I discuss in greater depth here in my review of its own Blu-ray release. Following the completion of its 1080p regeneration, CBS separately released a feature-length edit of both the third season finale (included in this set) and fourth season opener (included in the next set) on Blu-ray as well as giving “The Best of Both Worlds” a limited theatrical run.

The downside to this approach was that those who didn’t intend to purchase “The Best of Both Worlds” Blu-ray, or indeed any TNG two-parters turned features, found themselves missing the next instalment in the Blu-rays’ in-depth documentary series - the final instalment of Resistance is Futile ends on almost as much of a cliffhanger as “The Best of Both Worlds” itself. This trend would continue with the North American-exclusive stand-alone releases of “Redemption”, “Unification”, “Chain of Command” and, most markedly, “All Good Things…” – a release only made worthwhile even to hardened collectors by virtue of its bonus material. Whilst I don’t applaud CBS’s money-spinning approach, I do respect it – TNG’s restoration project was exorbitantly expensive for the company, and it had to recoup that expenditure somehow, otherwise the even costlier high-def remastering of DS9 and Voyager would never have a chance of getting off the ground. With the complete TNG box set now struggling to sell even when it’s offered for less than fifty quid, it’s little surprise that we’re now almost five years on from the release of TNG Season 7 with no word on when, or indeed if, we can look forward to the first season of DS9 on Blu-ray.

Yet whilst Regeneration: Engaging the Borg is notable in its absence, all of the special features that accompanied the third season on DVD are preserved in this set, albeit in their original standard-definition format. The various LCARS-framed mission overviews, departmental briefings and selected crew analyses included here are all perfectly adequate, even a good deal more exhaustive than most contemporary releases’ bonus material, but they are now completely outshone by the quality – and candour – of the new features. Resistance is Futile: Assimilating the Next Generation is divided into three half-hour instalments: “Biological Distinctiveness”, “Technological Distinctiveness” and “The Collective”, with the first two focusing primarily on the writers’ room before the show’s stars join to share their reminiscences in the final part, with especial emphasis on Jonathan Frakes who talks at length about how “Paramount University” prepared him to take on directorial duties. Compared to the interviews used in the DVD special features from more than a decade earlier, there is a marked shift in the tone of the contributors here, who are just as quick to condemn the failings of the studio; their colleagues; and even themselves as they are to accept the plaudits for show’s many successes. Not only is this approach more enlightening for those of us watching, but it helps us to appreciate how much of a triumph TNG really is.

Above: Inside the Writer’s [sic] Room with (L-R) Ronald D Moore, Brannon Braga, Seth MacFarlane, Naren Shankar and René Echevarria

Inside the Writer’s [sic] Room, Seth MacFarlane’s sit-down with many of the TNG writers, runs for almost as long as the three-part documentary and covers much the same ground. However, the roundtable is a much more informal affair; there is a palpable sense of fun as four old friends (Ronald D Moore, Brannon Braga, Naren Shankar and René Echevarria) reunite to celebrate – and, occasionally, slag off – their former working environment. What’s evident from this feature that isn’t so much from Resistance is Futile is the camaraderie that existed between TNG’s “next generation” of writers – a family feeling that was clearly transposed onto the small screen through their depiction of the Enterprise-D crew.

The collection also benefits from a number of commentaries on select episodes – the Okudas are joined by the episodes’ respective writers on “The Bonding” and “The Offspring”, with visual effects designer Dan Curry also joining them for “Sins of the Father”. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” boasts two well-deserved commentary tracks – the first is a lively affair featuring Ronald D Moore, Ira Steven Behr and the Okudas; the second features director David Carson alone with his memories. The set is rounded out with the usual assortment of episodic promos, the obligatory gag reel and, this time, a couple of tributes: one for the late, great Michael Piller; another for guest star David Rappaport, who took his own life during the making of “The Most Toys”.

As with both preceding releases, the visual quality of the show is out of this world. The third season looks even better in 1080p than the first two seasons did, as the renovated set and improved uniforms can be better appreciated – there is more detail to see. Now, when I watch Patrick Stewart execute the so-called “Picard Maneuver” – a visual cue that is as much synonymous with great television as it is impractical costume design – that red really pops, and that black is... not quite as black as the great expanse of space outside, but as black as it should be. The soundscape is, if anything, more striking still. TNG has always sounded good, even in its original, rumbling 2.0 Dolby Surround form, but with eight channels now being fully utilised, it’s hard to imagine the show ever sounding any more immersive than this.

There is no argument about it, TNG’s third season put it on the map. True to its new executive producer’s mandate, every single episode – except “Ménage à Troi”, obviously – was about a character’s growth, and every single episode was “about something”. The BBC wouldn’t broadcast “The High Ground” as it dared to explore terrorism from both sides. “The Hunted” served as a damning indictment of society’s failure to help war veterans return to society – a particularly prescient issue on the eve of the Gulf War. “The Defector” and “The Enemy” turned the Romulans from faceless adversaries into relatable foes with wives and children, yet without undermining the threat that they posed. “Hollow Pursuits” addressed hiding behind technology decades before it was a thing; Reg could just have easily been living through his iPhone and watching virtual-reality porn as hiding in the holodeck. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” took a trope as well-trodden as time travel and slammed into another – that of the parallel world – yet still managed to tell a simple, moving story about a lost soul falling in love. Trek at its best.

Discommendation. Assimilation...

Recommendation.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three Blu-ray is still available to buy, with today’s cheapest retailer being Base who have it listed for £19.29 with free delivery. Alternatively, The Full Journey Blu-ray box set, which includes all seven seasons (but omits the separately released TV movies and their bonus material) is still available. Amazon are currently cheapest at £65.00 with free delivery, but if you are in no rush to buy, it’s worth bearing in mind that the price often drops to almost half that.

The season’s remastered HD episodes are currently streaming on Netflix, and digital copies are available to buy from both iTunes and Amazon Instant Video for £2.49 each or £39.99 for the whole season. The Blu-ray’s bonus material is exclusive to the physical release.