Krysis – Upon reaching the halfway point of his operational life span, Kryten develops symptoms of a human mid-life crisis. The crew attempts to show him how much he’s accomplished by reuniting him with an old Nova ship mechanoid but it doesn’t go as planned.
Last week saw the series indulging Rimmer’s smarminess and abuse of power. Now, this episode taps into a similar well-proven subject of applying human emotional situations to Kryten’s mechanoid state. There’s so much great humour derived from the subject matter from Kryten’s early revelations connecting musings over the meaning of life to ideals over cleaning; to his glorious sports car riffing red suit upgrade (Ironing Man?). It all provides Robert Llewellyn with plenty of great lines and opportunities for physical comedy. There’s also a good underlying emotional message as the attempts to make Kryten feel better by finding something worse than him only serve to make things worse: that the point becomes to accept himself for who he has become rather than what he could have been. There’s even a nicely subtle hint of guilt from Lister over implications that Kryten’s care duties have held him back. Using the crashed Nova 3 and mechanoid Butler serves this well on both comedic and dramatic fronts. It gives the episode and Kryten’s story a nice circular feel as this harks back right to his first episode and the Dwarfers discovering him on his crashed Nova 5. Then by making Butler incomprehensibly accomplished Kryten becomes the guy having a run in with his vastly more successful old school friend (who hasn’t been there). The guest staring Dominic Coleman (Trollied) helps this along well by making Butler come across as well meaning rather than smug or arrogant, allowing the emphasis to stay on Kryten’s distain at being horrifically upstaged.
Story-wise, it’s an episode that gets straight to the point with very little lead in; Kryten’s barely on screen before becoming the subject of the episode. This allows the rest of the events to flow well with no sense of rushing. However, the final set piece and conversations with Mr Universe (Serenity approves) feels very tacked on to the episode. Yes, it does serve as closure to the story in helping Kryten come to terms with things and extrapolating the wider theme to a cosmic entity is brilliant but it feels very out-of-place with the rest of the episode. However, the episode thankfully breaks the series' curse and finally gets the ending right. This time, the idea of fading out while things are unfinished plays perfectly into the episode; it makes for a satisfying final laugh rather than a sense of missing out.
I’m a sucker a good Kryten-led episode (Camille being a favourite) and while Krysis does bring the best of him in this case, it feels at the cost of the other cast members who become very circumstantial to the story. It’s a fun episode and educational over GELF dialects but it doesn’t quite match last week but series XI continues the cast having an absolute blast in playing their characters. It’s like their own mid-life crises a long behind them and they’ve accepted themselves in still playing the same characters.