It's Dead, Dave.

In my opinion, the latest Red Dwarf three episode stint was so bad, so mind numbingly awful, that Rob Grant has died simply to perform the act of rolling in his grave.

Lets wind it back.

Red Dwarf was a British TV comedy series following the story of Dave Lister, a general slob and the lowest ranking member of the crew of the big red mining ship that gave the series name. As punishment for bringing an unquarantined animal - a pregnant cat - onboard, Lister is put into cryostasis for 18 months.

However, due to a shoddy repair job on a reactor plate by the man one rank above him (Arnold J. Rimmer) the entire ship is flooded with radiation. The ships computer throws Red Dwarf into deep space to avoid contaminating the solar system until the radiation dies down to a safe level.

Three million years later, Lister is woken by the ship computer (an AI with an IQ of 6,000 by the name of Holly) and informed of the situation.

In order to avoid Lister falling into madness, Holly creates a hologram of Rimmer using his personnel profile. Holly had deducted that Rimmer, being the exact polar opposite to Lister, would be the best choice to avoid insanity. As holograms take up a lot of power, Red Dwarf could only run one at a time. Rimmer starts out as a "soft light" hologram - one that cannot touch anything. Later on in the program, he gains a hard light drive from a super advanced holographic lifeform which allows him to do everything he used to.

Also joining Lister and Rimmer in the first episode, is Cat. A creature that has evolved from the original litter of Frankenstein, the cat that landed Lister where he was. Come third series, they were also joined by Kryten, a "mechanoid" who was programmed to serve (and had been serving a collection of very dead crew members for hundreds of years when they found him).

Lister's struggle with being the last human in the universe (as Holly correctly pointed out, no known race of creatures had ever lasted a million years, let alone three), Rimmer's struggle with his past, Kryten's constant search for humanity and Cat's constant indecision over what suits to wear became good watching over the first six seasons, with great comedy writing from Rob Grant and great science fiction writing from Doug Naylor complimenting eachother.

Then the partnership came to an end. At the end of series six, the crew of Red Dwarf were destroyed by their future selves - please don't ask me to explain it. This was supposed to be the end of Red Dwarf and it was a fitting end indeed. 

However, Naylor wanted to continue with more series, something Grant was against. Naylor eventually got the go ahead to make a seventh and then an eighth series - without Grant - using some time paradox to explain why the crew were not dead.

The general consensus is that while Naylor is a competent writer, he is not a competent comedian and as such the series suffered a great loss when Grant departed. By the end of the eigth series, the entire crew of Red Dwarf had been brought back to life by Kryten's repair nanobots, which had also mutated a little and forced a full evacuation of Red Dwarf.

The final scene of the series was of Rimmer, who had been left onboard, punching the Grim Reaper in the crotch.

Naylor pushed for a film to be made, and had support from all the actors, however nobody would fund it for various reasons - one company that stands out would only fund it if the characters were played by Hollywood actors rather than the original cast, for example.

Ten years past with them trying to get funding for this film, and all hope had been lost. Then, the British TV channel Dave, who had been running re-runs of the original series to good ratings, decided to fund a three part special to celebrate 10 years since the end of the last series.

The title was soon released as "Back to Earth" and while fans were dubious, we had hopes. We thought that maybe, possibly, they were using the plot from the film and putting it into episodes. We thought that we would finally be getting a just end to the series that ended on a cliffhanger.

Instead, what we got was the red Dwarf crew breaking the fourth wall. Hell, smashing it into millions of little pieces. We even had Lister speaking to Craig Charles (the actor that plays him) and then calling Charles a smeg head for being an actor. The jokes were bad, with it only managing to draw one laugh from me in the whole 75 minutes total screen time.

The kicker? In the end, it turns out the whole episode is an illusion brought on by the female version of the Despair Squid - a creature found by the red dwarf crew in series 5 (a personal favourite episode of most the Red Dwarf fanbase). 

This is the Red Dwarf equivalent of the main character waking up at the end of a horror film to find it was all a dream, and whats worse they use one of the most popular episodes in Red Dwarf history to explain it.

I had hopes, silly as they were, that the episodes would finally tie up the story of the Red Dwarf crew. Instead, we got zero closure from the series 8 cliffhanger, zero closure for the entire world of Lister, and 75 minutes of poor writing and bad story.

Naylor managed to kill a classic series in three episodes. The worse thing? If the response to this travesty is good, Dave will consider funding a ninth and tenth series. If the writing of the latest episodes are anything to go by, I'd rather it stayed buried.

It's dead, Dave, all of it is dead.