Red Dwarf does 'Life of Brian', and ends up with, well, the lemon of the series so far. Now, I'm not the sort to get offended by light-hearted digs at Christianity. I figure Jesus is man enough to take a joke, but I guess there may be those who disagree, and might find the episode in bad taste. (Actually, some of it was in quite bad taste, irrespective of the subject.)
So while I wasn't offended by it, I was disappointed by the lack of originality at times - like resorting to how many wars Christianity has caused. There were some nice one-liners, but on the whole the humour was forced, and I'm not sure setting the thing in India worked in historical terms.
As far as Red Dwarf is concerned, the whole episode had pretty much been done before, often better, in earlier seasons. It does raise some interesting questions though: how many of the ten commandments did God break, and what would Jesus have done if he had known what would later be done in his name, just off the top of my head.
There is, of course, a lot more theological discussion that could be had riffing off this episode, and if anyone cares to comment on any of them, please do. I'm not going to go into any more detail now - maybe once I have the DVD and a chance to watch it more thoughtfully!
One point it did raise, however, and that is worthy of comment, is that Jesus is obviously still fair game for comedy; presumably Doug Naylor wouldn't have risked offending the Muslim population in a similar way...
Final word goes to Lister though, as he said to Jesus:
So some stupid people did some stupid things in your name. It's not your fault. You make a lot of people happy.
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