Talking Headcanons

I’m wondering what the difference is between a headcanon and a fan theory.

Anyway, my biggest headcanon is that I like to assume they managed to find Kochanski and figure out a way to get her back to her home universe in between Series X and Series XI. Because that’s a major loose end otherwise, and it’s pretty depressing to think of her out in deep space all on her own, and potentially dying alone too, considering how long they spend in stasis in Krysis. Obviously this is conditional on Kochanski not being brought back in new episodes, if new episodes ever happen.

A second one I have is that Kryten being revealed as responsible for the deaths of the Nova 5 crew in Ouroboros wasn’t necessarily a confirmation that the crash happened the same way as it did in Infinity, and that it was actually due to his crewmates convincing him to break his programming and take on more of a science officer/engineer type role, but he wasn’t fully ready for that kind of responsibility and ended up introducing a critical fault. I just have an extreme distaste for his novel stupidity.

And another one is a common one, which is simply that BtE and onwards is original Rimmer who came back in the nick of time to help save Rec Dwarf from chameleonic microbes, and that he did not merge with nano-Rimmer in any way.

the concept of “canon”, with all the religiosity it implies, was a terrible development for fandom.

and one of the reasons I like Red Dwarf so much it’s tradition of having a healthy disdain for that sort of thing, unafraid to change the details of the backstory when a better idea emerges and generally telling continuity to Sit Down And Shut Up when there’s a really good joke to be told.

That being said…

The process by which JMC crewmembers are added to the hologromatic archive allows their files to be constantly updated and “refreshed” — the Dream Recorder may be involved, or it may just be a similarly functioning system — so that any crew member who has to be revived as a hologram can pick up right where they left off.  Original Holo-Rimmer, for instance, seems to remember his own death first hand.  So the program’s running all the time, on everyone. THUS, when Rimmer leaves as “Ace” in Series 7, his file updates to whatever truncated version of the Hologram Projection machine is running on Starbug, until “Ace” hops dimensions or travels out of ping range to the machine and can no longer send updates.  So, BTE and onward Rimmer is a “new” Hologram but at some point the files for 1-7 Holo-Rimmer and the file for Series 8 living Rimmer were patched into the “new” hologram — a process that would be relatively easy as implied by the memory patch in Thanks For The Memory. Rimmer’s died 3 times (The End, Timeslides, Only The Good) but all the files are merged into One Rimmer going forward.

Annett-Kochanski got back to her original dimension somehow. 

Is the nanobot-resurrected crew officially listed as dead in BTE (haven’t seen it) or are they just written out?  Because the escape pods they fled in don’t really have much point in being there in the first place unless they had some “automatically take you to the nearest S-3 atmosphere” feature that escape pods in other episodes have, and thus have the ability to actually “save” the fleeing crew instead of just merely forestall the inevitable.  So I’d like to think they eventually relaunched the human race on some random breathable planet 3 million years in the future and, since, since it was Lister (through Kryten)  who brought them back to life in the first place, this means Lister is once again accidental Creator-God to a species.

Or maybe BTE explains the pods were crap and they’re all dead again, because Lister is supposed to be “the last human being in the universe” after all. [But Lister rebooting humanity and “turning out to be God” as prophesied by Timothy Spahl in Back To Reality is funny.]

Speaking of which, I want their “win conditions” in the Red Dwarf Game from Back To Reality to be a hint/spoiler of how they really end up whenever Red Dwarf does it’s final final episode.

I’m wondering what the difference is between a headcanon and a fan theory.

I’d suggest headcanon is filling in details or inconsistencies in a piece of work that leave some sort of hole and need an explanation, even if one is never forthcoming. How does something work for example? How or why is Rimmer’s hologram running but his disc and box are also hidden outside for example. Or taking Stasis Leak as mentioned, why have we seen a future that never comes to pass. Well, if it is the Out of Time future, which lines up with the 5 years we’re told has passed, that makes perfect sense as those Timeslides are then erased. Using what little info we have, we can resolve an inconsistency and make it our own head canon as to what happened there.

Whereas fan theory is putting forward an idea that is somewhat less “filing in plot holes” and more “well there’s nothing on screen that says otherwise so and it’s fairly inconsequential im going to suggest this”. I think the Kochanski finding a way back to her universe fits this nicely. 

For now, as far as we know, Kochanski is just “out there somewhere”. There’s no gaps or inconsistencies that need resolving but if you want to believe she made it home then you absolutely can as nothing on screen contradicts that. As soon as it does, your fan theory would be invalid and I presume you’d drop it entirely.

of course I could be needlessly over thinking this.

Is the nanobot-resurrected crew officially listed as dead in BTE (haven’t seen it) or are they just written out?  Because the escape pods they fled in don’t really have much point in being there in the first place unless they had some “automatically take you to the nearest S-3 atmosphere” feature that escape pods in other episodes have, and thus have the ability to actually “save” the fleeing crew instead of just merely forestall the inevitable.  So I’d like to think they eventually relaunched the human race on some random breathable planet 3 million years in the future and, since, since it was Lister (through Kryten)  who brought them back to life in the first place, this means Lister is once again accidental Creator-God to a species.

This is lovely, however they escaped in a fleet of Blue Midgets and Starbugs.

I don’t tend to mind some of the hanging plot holes, especially time travel related ones, as they can be waved away with ‘things changed when they changed the timeline’, or even just ignored completely as they aren’t things that happened directly to the characters in the main timeline.

Characters being left for dead when they leave the ship niggles me, though. The crew, for example, are a major one for me, and although there’s nothing to suggest that their plot didn’t resolve in the ten year gap, the entire thing of ‘there are a thousand of our contemporaries out there’ thing is a bit weird. Especially once you consider the original ending for Only the Good… where they’re basically left to die. 

On a similar note, I’ve never been comfortable with the Kochanski leaving plot. It works thematically in IX, but as a concept it’s appalling. Whatever her reasoning, Kochanski wouldn’t just leave the ship so she could float out there in space on her own for the rest of her life. Which probably wouldn’t be that long unless she took a shitload of supplies with her. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not headcanon, quite, but I’d prefer the entire plot to be part of the hallucination somehow.

Both of these are between-VIII-and-IX issues, and this is where my one and only proper headcanon comes in: Karnie’s Homecoming fanfic is how I think of the resolution to Only the Good… It ties together so many dangling plots, it also does it in a very, very satisfying way – even explaining the smaller ship and weird X drive room – and is also very funny and entertaining in the process. So unless it’s contradicted in official media at any point (don’t go there, Doug), then it’s my headcanon.

I think you could easily resolve the crew thing by saying that nanobot recreations of the dead are unstable or only temporary or something like that. Make it so they were never really properly back to begin with. And they’re gone again now.

Yes, that means somewhat undermining VIII, but I can live with that.