Let’s face it, Blade Runner is passé. Countless films have borrowed its neon-lit, gritty metropolis, its rain-soaked landscapes. But where others have aped, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth patently steals (and does so with a wink and a smile). Entire scenes are ripped verbatim from the Ridley Scott film. It’s pastiche, of course, but of the highest homage. In one cameo, writer and Red Dwarf co-creator Doug Naylor gushes to the cast, “Blade Runner is the film which inspired both your creation and your death.” And like Roy Batty, contemplating his own untimely demise, the characters of Red Dwarf, a decade after we’ve last seen them, come to contemplate their own mortality in ways both meta-fictional and literal.

Nine years have passed since we last saw Dave Lister (Craig Charles), the slovenly, curry-loving sole survivor of the human race, as he travels through deep space inside the mammoth mining ship, Red Dwarf. The usual suspects are present: the priggish Arnold J. Rimmer (Chris Barrie), hologram of Lister’s dead bunk mate with a Napoleonic complex; Cat (Danny John-Jules), the vanity-obsessed descendant of a kitten Lister smuggled on board the ship three million years prior; and Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), the box-headed mechanoid who finds nothing more pleasurable than ironing socks.

Notably missing in this new series is Holly, the ship’s daft computer, who has been switched offline because Lister apparently left a bath running in the officer’s quarters for nine years, flooding her mainframe. (I suspect that Hattie Hayridge and Norman Lovett, actors who both played Holly, were unavailable for filming.) Though noticeably older and possibly botoxed, the cast looks not too shabby after a decade hiatus.