Everybody needs good Paradroids.

I’ve just learned that concept art exists for the Red Dwarf movie that was never made and wanted to highlight these illustrations. They show an alien-inspired cyborg creature labelled “Paradroid”, and that’s about all the information we have. There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of online discussion regarding the Paradroid, not so much as a wiki page, so I thought I might as well create a reddit post for them.

There are sources that have alluded to “Homo Sapienoids”, which would have been cyborg antagonists who have exterminated most of humanity and now inhabit deep space hunting for survivors. This is a near identical concept to the Simulants from the main show, and in fact the Simulants featured in “The Beginning” \[s10e6\] may have been recycled from the Sapienoids concept.

The Paradroid appears to be something different, however, despite also being another iteration of the warrior-cyborg concept. It goes without saying that it’s design suggests a fundamentally combative creature, being covered in guns and armor plating. It actually reminds me of the Space Pirates from Metroid Prime; a videogame that, coincidentally, was in development at the same time as the movie.

I’m interested in speculation about their possible role in the film. Perhaps they were a warrior race that fights on behalf of the Sapienoids? Or perhaps the Paradroids replaced the Sapienoids in a later rewrite of the script? Perhaps only a single Paradroid was planned to appear, a unique and extremely threatening enemy for the crew to fumble their way out of being killed by. But the most interesting question is this; given that Doug reused elements from the film in later series, why didn’t he reuse the Paradroid?

Unfortunately we will probably never know the answers to these questions, but that won’t deter a content starved Red Dwarf addict like myself from speculating.