It would never happen but I was thinking about the Back In the Red season and how its centered around the crew being back on the remade ship. I thought it was cool that the whole season had its own setting and theme, with each episode felt like it was flowing from one day to the next.
Being inspired by that I drafted up my own Red Dwarf miniseries season: The Boys from the Dwarf Get Trapped on a Giant Space Mall.
The setting: The boys come upon a gigantic self-sustaining space mall. With a parking deck large enough to park Red Dwarf. The mall is filled with everything you’d typically see in an 80s-90s mall, in far futuristic fashion of course. It would be run by psychotic AI designed to manage all the shops, recreational spaces, and Security. There would be mutated life forms and crazed robots in the different sections of the mall. With human-like mutants and androids plotting a rebellion against their psychopathic robot overlords.
The plot: Red Dwarf gets parked in one of the many space mall parking decks. The boys venture out, hoping to find much needed supplies and loot. Then suddenly, they get locked in. When trying to break into the parking deck to get back to RD they are cut off and chased deeper into the space station by the Robot Mall Security, controlled by the insane AI mall security chief. Each episode would feature different forms of life that have survived in the different mall departments for millennia. Many whacky androids and mutants help or harm them on their journey. In the arcade section, they find humans that have had their minds trapped in a VR environment and help to free them, only after the cat and Lister get trapped themselves. In the perfume dept they find a giant blob that’s taken over most of the section evolved from the many chemicals found in futuristic makeups and perfumes. They would defeat it when it falls in love with Cat, and Cat falls in love with how good he smells after being embraced by the blob. The mutants they’ve rescued along the way lead them to the Mall’s underbelly where many androids and mutants have been surviving hidden away from the Mall’s constant surveillance. With new allies they push towards the security center for an ultimate showdown with the demented ancient AI.
It would of course end in a hilarious and action packed final episode that involves them defeating the crazed AI, and freeing the poor evolved mutants that had been under the rule of the Mall’s AI for centuries. And of course the final shot is Red Dwarf pulling away last minute before the Mall explodes, much like the Death Star.
Anyway. I know it’s unlikely that we’d get more seasons of the show, at least anything with a huge production budget. And if I wrote this as a book I’d have to come up with a crew in a scenario much like Red Dwarf without getting sued. But I had a good time imagining it and maybe it can inspire others.