Let’s Talk About Skipper (on Dave) News Posted by Ian Symes on 16th November 2017, 09:00 Hello there, Dave viewers. The time has come. After tonight, you won’t be Dave viewers any more, and the other lot won’t be UKTV Play viewers – we’ll all be one glorious whole again. The final episode of Series XII airs at 9pm tonight on Dave, after which we can finally retire the longest-serving Spoiler Policy in Red Dwarf history. But until that moment comes, this is the thread for non-spoilery discussion of Skipper, and we’d ask that anyone who’s seen the episode already should please be careful not to give anything away until it’s been on the telly. When we’re finally all on the same page again, you might want to catch up on the Play-paced discussion thread, or listen to the epic and somewhat emotional final Live DwarfCast of the series, or read the in-depth written review of the episode, provided by yours truly. But save some room for pudding, because after the episode airs tonight, we’ll be releasing a bonus DwarfCast containing an Xtended interview with a member of the Skipper guest cast. Take one last look at that Spoiler Policy graphic, folks. *salutes*
I don’t get it. Everyone was saying this episode was a huge nostalgia trip for the classic fully occupied Red Dwarf, and yet: – No Canaries – No Kill Crazy – No Warden Ackerman – No Pete – No Blue Midget dance – No prison basketball tournaments – No voyeurism – No Archie – No Kochanski getting back together with her ex-boyfriend Tim, according to Kryten – Yes alive Rimmer – Yes giant rat That’s only 2 out of 11 key nostalgia points hit! Terrible.
Maybe we were right. That season was a bit batshit. Let’s review: – The crew started becoming good pals with ADOLF HITLER. – The crew got lured and brainwashed into joining a cult. – Doug went insane while writing an episode. – All the machines were important, except for Snacky – Lister gets can’t even see anything and gets old because money. – An episode manages to be good while having little-to-no running plot. It was a fairly wacky series, we might just have been expecting it too much and been disappointed. Those episodes all felt like episodes from XII, and I’m not sure what I think about that.
I think people were expecting full on acid trips and unreality bubbles, when really it was just a Bit Weird
It just hit me that ‘Skipper’ CAN be seen as a reference to Ace’s nickname for Lister, seeing as he does become captain of Red Dwarf in the last alt universe. While I do love the idea of Rimmer throwing it all away just because he can’t stand Lister being more successful than him, another great reason for him to leave that last universe would have been Ace showing up, calling Lister ‘skipper’ etc. and Rimmer immediately leaves. I think you could get away with the ‘skipping’ Rimmer and Ace being in the same universe.
