GoodBad

We're all capable of great good, and great evil. The potential for both extremes lies buried deep within us, sometimes beyond our perception. We make the decision which self we let out in any given situation. Free will allows us to listen to the Demons & Angels on our shoulders.

I wish I could say that I was a connoisseur of culture, that I regularly watched public television in my youth for intellectual enlightenment. The truth is, my parents didn't have cable and an unattractive geek often found himself surfing UHF stations on lonely Friday nights, in hopes of catching a glimpse of a breast. Sometimes he did, other times he just found stations with an abundance of attractive females. Occasionally he'd flip past and linger on something called Red Dwarf. He wasn't sure what it was, if it was part of a sketch comedy show or something else. Some of the character's accents were harder to decipher than others, and it was odd to watch robots and space ships and hear a laugh track. Eventually, he became hooked, and found himself watching the show every Friday at 10:30PM. This sad loser told me about the show, and I took a break from my busy social life to....what's that? I already made it obvious I was talking about myself when I used the phrase “my parents”? There's no point in continuing this charade, or trying to pull off the proper voice in the written word? I should gracefully move on to the next paragraph?

Red Dwarf stopped airing here at some point. There was talk of a movie but it's been pushed back so many times, that it's seeming less and less likely. Some of the stars have shown up in American movies in recent years, with Danny John-Jules appearing in Blade II and Chris Barrie showing up in Tomb Raider(as well as its sequel. I haven't been totally devoid of this cult favorite though. For the past three years, the show has been coming out on DVD, two seasons a year. Every season has been loaded with commentaries, bonus features, easter eggs, trading cards, and episode synopses booklets. Series V and VI have recently made it to my collection, and I've been making may way through V this week in between work and television. Though I was sure I'd seen every episode, I didn't remember Demons & Angels. I certainly remembered other episodes from this series, especially The Inquisitor which mixed some great hard SF and time paradoxes in to a goofy sitcom and cemented me as a fan. I have a feeling my local station would preempt episodes for specials, and simply skip them. There were also episodes that ALWAYS fell on a night when I'd be performing in one of my Summer concerts.

However it happened, last night was the first time I saw this episode. I was stunned to see the ship DESTROYED in the first five minutes, even though I knew they spent the subsequent season in Starbug(looking for RD though which, as I recall, had been stolen by nanoprobes). As a result of an experiment gone wrong, two duplicate Dwarfs were created, each with duplicates of the crew. One ship was in perfect working order, and the crew were selfless and idealized. The other was a rundown hellship manned by sadistic lowlifes. It was a great episode in which each cast member was at times playing three different aspects of himself. It really demonstrated their range and talent, and blended humor and philosophy.

It was interesting to see each character, even the android Kryten who was becoming more capable of breaking his programming and demonstrating human emotion, at their absolute best and their absolute worst. Most fictional tales, especially but not limited to comic books, present us with extremes. Heroes. Villains. It seems you can't have one without the other. The truth is, most of us fall into a murky middle ground. A good student might just as easily go home and look for nudity on television. It's farfetched I realize, but it could happen. We're all GoodBad sometimes.