#S11 E2 Samsara

[deadkinwalking]

The premise of Samsara is horrific right off the bat. A morality drive that can force people to follow the morals set by a *company* by rewarding behaviour that the company views as "moral" and punishing behaviour the company deems "immoral" sounds like the wet dream of every late-stage capitalist, and the nightmare of every worker labouring under them. The potential for this system to be abused is astronomical. They could list joining unions, not accepting unpaid overtime, checking your phone on-shift, etc as immoral. Not to mention all the things people do in their downtime, and you are living on the ship. You literally can't escape the field of the Karma Drive even when off duty.

The episode as a whole was fascinating for me, and it has raised a few questions.

1) Why didn't the Karma Drive prevent Professor Barker from switching its morality? She was (presumably) unable to switch the morality back to its correct settings as she had planned, and the only reason she and Colonal Green were able to escape is because taking the only lifepod was an immoral action, and therefore allowed by the corrupted Drive.

I actually have a theory about this. When the Drive was functioning properly the rewards and punishments it doled out were minor, in the grand scheme of things. The taste of food, the quality of a makeover at the salon, things of that calibre. However, after Barker tampers with the Drive the punishments and rewards become far amplified, to a deranged amount. Stealing is rewarded with winning a jackpot, while charity is rewarded with the potentially deadly situation of Lister getting his dreads stuck in the waste disposal.

So it stands to reason that while functioning as intended the Drive was not powerfull enough to stop Professor Barker. There was probably a program written into the Drive limiting the scope of reward/punishment. This was either bypassed or overwritten by Barker's tampering, or else the Drive was affected by its own morality whereby doling out immoral punishments caused it to reward itself with more power.

I actually lean towards the latter possibility (the Karma Drive making itself more powerful). If you think about it, there is morality attached to rewarding and punishing people. A punishment can be moral or immoral. Does the punishment fit the crime? If it doesn't that is an immoral punishment. Rewards can be immoral too. Rewarding someone too much causes them to become spoiled. Once the drive had been tampered with the punishments and rewards it gave became disproportionate, and thus immoral, which created a positive feedback loop for itself.

2) How long did it take the crew of Samsara to realise what had happened, and how long did it take for them to degrade from insults and theft to murder, literal backstabbing, and public orgies?

I don't remember if it's revealed in the episode how long it was between Barker tampering with the Drive, and her and Green escaping in the pod. Regardless, the thought of the terrified crew getting more and more immoral in an attempt to save themselves over any period of time is horrific. And even after all that effort it still didn't work because the Drive flash-fried them all anyway. There must have been some crew members who refused to cast aside their morals, or who held onto the hope that they could fix everything, save everyone.

I know the orgy scene is played for laughs (duh it's a comedy), but for me that's the most disturbing part of the episode. All those desperate people trying to survive, forced to engage in acts that they never would if they had any real choice in the matter just to try and survive, only to be killed anyway. Absolutely messed up.

In my opinion Samsara is definitely the most fucked up scenario ever presented in Red Dwarf.

On a final note, I think it's interesting how the effects of the Karma Drive diminish as you get further from the source. When Red Dwarf first entered the Karma field Lister was rewarded for cheating at Mineopoly by way of Rimmer being incapable of rolling anything other than a 2 and a 1. This could also be seen as a punishment for Rimmer, who was following the rules of the game. Then, while on the Samsara, the punishments were much worse.

#Red Dwarf #S11 E2 Samsara