The loneliest ship in the universe is about to return to Dave with six new episodes for fans to get their pointy felines into. Red Dwarf Series XI sees the crew of the six miles long mining ship back in action once again with a whole lot of crazy star-flecked space all around them. The good news continues at it’ll be coming your way later in 2016 with Cat, Lister, Kryten and Rimmer all back for more punishment in the cold of space.
Airing on Dave in September 2016, it follows on from the success of Series X, which blasted off back in 2012, and sees more random sci-fi fun coming back to Dave. The channel brought the show back to tele sets with three episodes in Red Dwarf IX: Back To Earth in 2009 after it parted ways with BBC 2 in 1999 after Series 8. Since then the crew have been doing pretty well and the new series would seem to indicate that they’re back to stay.
While we’re still holding out hope for a big budget movie adaptation, the next batch of episodes will be a pretty good consolation prize. However, there’s more good news, because in addition to this year’s escapades, they’ve also filmed Series XII, which will be arriving in 2017, with the two series filmed back-to-back last summer in front of a live studio audience.
The story for the 11th series picks up where things left off at the end of X, and it’ll see Lister getting to grips with the horror of body part abduction. When he wakes up to find that a rogue droid has run amok with him while he was asleep, taking vital portions of his general personage, he has to rally the crew to help to pull himself back together again.
If that isn’t enough space drama, Kryten also manages to have the robotic equivalent of a mid-life crisis and contemplates leaving the Red Dwarf team for a younger crew. The fab four then manage to find themselves trapped in an alternate America where future technology like robots and holograms are illegal, leaving Kryten and Rimmer well and truly stuffed.
There’s romance for Cat, who takes a break from his usual self-adoration to fall for a female Cat, but a secret threatens to keep the feline love birds apart. Rimmer has a run of good luck as he fulfills his lifelong dream of being made captain after saving the life of a Space Corps Officer, much to the annoyance of the rest of the crew. However, we’ll be very surprised if doesn’t all fall apart by the end of the episode.
Red Dwarf Series XI sounds like it’s going to be a return to the madcap adventures of the earlier series, so fans will undoubtedly be waiting with baited breath for September to roll around. With the prospect of yet another series planned for 2017, it looks like it’s going to be cold outside with no kind of atmosphere for at least another couple of years, which we’re pretty pleased about. Both series will be exclusive to Dave, but as with Series X, they should go on to be released on DVD following their initial air date.
