At what point do the hullucinations start in Back to Reality?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I would assume most people would say they start when “Game Over” appears on the screen and they wake up in the AR suite.

However, directly before that they crash Starbug and explode. Given they’re not dead and Starbug isn’t destroyed, this must be a part of the hallucination.

So it would probably be fair to assume the entire scene the follows Lister, Kryten and Cat in the airlock when they are watching the SONAR scope, is a hullucination also.

Not all that important but watching the episode again now and it occurred to me as something vaguely interesting.

Topic

[Warbodog]

It sprays Starbug with the ink directly before that, which suggests the hallucination started immediately with the crash. Silly of them to leave a window open to let the ink in, really.

[By Jove its holmes]

Yeah, I wondered how the ink got into a sealed spaceship too…

[Warbodog]

And why it affects non-organic Rimmer but not Holly. (Well done DNA for establishing Kryten’s part-organic brain for future nitpicks). Back to Reality is a total bloody shambles, skip it.

[bloodteller]

I thought the hallucinations started right after the squid sprays them with the ink and Rimmer goes “Look out!” as right after he says this, the camera angle in the cockpit changes all of a sudden
despite there being no real need to do so. Like, I thought that was a visual indicator of sorts

[GlenTokyo]

The ink could have been ingested into the OG unit, you’d assume that Starbug has some kind of onboard electrolysis system if it’s able to stay underwater for extended periods. Pulls in the seawater and the ink with it.

As for Rimmer, maybe it’d affect all non-organic lifeforms but Holly escapes it’s effects due to her program being run remotely. Rimmer you assume runs locally from his light bee, Holly from Red Dwarf (which is why when Red Dwarf is lost, she ceases to exist aboard Starbug).

[Pete Part Three]

The End. (12:37)

Everything in the series is a dream that Lister is having while Rimmer covers his body with exam revision.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

It’s always seemed that Holly is running locally in whatever location she is in.

In Backwards for example, when Rimmer and Kryten crash, Holly is with them and then on Kryten’s chest monitor. Is she was being run remotely, you’d sort of expect her to disappear once they go through the time hole as Red Dwarf wouldn’t be able to maintain the connection. Or, if she is being run remotely, she’d be able to inform Lister and Cat what’s happened to Rimmer and Kryten.

But the only way for the, to lose Holly is with your explanation.

It’s almost as if Rob and Doug didn’t think any of this through and just wrote whatever was need for the plot.

[Dave]

I always assumed it was the initial physical contact with the ink while exploring the Esperanto that kicked everything off – that they were already on the way when Kryten starts explaining about the bouts of despair etc.

When they get back into Starbug, Lister is inhaling the mood stabiliser, which I’ve always assumed is part of the illusion as otherwise he would be fine. They don’t really use the mood stabiliser until the very end.

So they probably start getting into the hallucination just as they get back on board Starbug, with Rimmer being affected by the ink residue on Lister’s suit before the squid even attacks.

[Dave]

Also, I’d never really considered it before but Back To Reality’s idea of being pulled into a fantasy world so smoothly that you’re not aware of the transition is pretty similar to how Better Than Life is handled in the novels, isn’t it?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

That’s more or less exactly my point. At some point after boarding Starbug (and presumably removing their suits because they aren’t wearing them in the car chase scene later) they have transitioned into the hallucination, Rimmer being infected by the ink that is brought inadvertently on board.

It is a lot like BTL you’re right. It needs to be seamless otherwise they’d be questioning the sudden change more. The fact they wake up from a computer game after having just been discussing the fact there is a giant squid that can induce hallucinations would make you question things a little. But by the time that happens, they’re already hallucinating and the squid ink, taking full effect, is altering things for them so they don’t rush to question it or come to the right conclusion.

Same thing happens in Back to Earth. They immediately succumb to the affects of the ink and its a long while later that their reality is altered, so they don’t put two and two together. They just accept what is happening as real.

I’ve never really quite understood why the Joy Squid would induce an hallucination that they’re characters in a TV show as the optimum joy experience. Something more like Better Than Life would be better in that scenario.

[Dave]

I wonder how it all looks from Holly’s perspective. Do you think she just starts saying “you’re hallucinating” over and over, until we catch up with her when it cuts back to Starbug much later?

[Warbodog]

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about them getting emotional in the airlock, I was just thinking of the radar scene itself. You’re right, it’s somehow gradual and elusive.

Definitely seems like an attempt to re-do BTL after the novels improved on that episode, even writing off its original presentation as the failed 1.0 version of the game where you can just wish for things to appear, like they wish they’d done it differently. So they did something similar but different.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I wonder how it all looks from Holly’s perspective.

It’s possible she doesn’t realise they’re hallucinating until they start to believe they’re taking off, flying through the water, and then crashing. Everything before that (stood around the SONAR scope etc) they may have been doing for real as well as part of the hallucination, so she wouldn’t suspect anything until they is a sudden deviation from what is actually happening.

You could really mine some gold from doing little spin offs of episodes just from Holly’s perspective. Like Queeg, having a full on 30mins of Holly rolling around setting up all the little games he has planned for them, seeing him come up with the idea for Queeg and then watching the crew slowly lose moral as he starts to boss them around.

Or even Me2 – he isn’t in it much but what if the second Rimmer was controlled by Holly all along?

I’d love to see what Holly gets up to when he/she isn’t on screen. Doing his star charts, and decimalising music. Could have a whole sitcom of his/her own

[Plastic Percy]

Given that Rimmer’s light bee can replicate a sense of smell, presumably it’s able to pick up traces of something in the atmosphere and relay it into his system. So maybe breathing in the ink also has hallucinatory effects.

If there’s a fault in the episode then it’s Rimmer being able to affect the crate he’s sat on. I guess it’s a holocrate.

[si]

If there’s a fault in the episode then it’s Rimmer being able to affect the crate he’s sat on. I guess it’s a holocrate.

It’s not real, it’s an hallucination.

[John Hoare]

Also, I’d never really considered it before but Back To Reality’s idea of being pulled into a fantasy world so smoothly that you’re not aware of the transition is pretty similar to how Better Than Life is handled in the novels, isn’t it?

I touch on this a little here. Rob and Doug have been doing this as far back as the original Cliche series:

Better Than Reality

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I touch on this a little here. Rob and Doug have been doing this as far back as the original Cliche series:

https://www.ganymede.tv/2017/07/better-than-reality/

Just reading through the start of this, and Dr Hypnosis and the novel version of BTL read like a sort of Twilight Zone or Black Mirror episode. As harrowing as the BTL stuff in the books is, I’d never really considered it that way and it would be interesting to see it fleshed out on screen in that way.

[GlenTokyo]

To be fair to Rob and Doug on the Holly running remotely Vs locally thing, if they’d foreseen cloud based VMs they’d have been in the wrong line of work haha

[clem]

> Everything in the series is a dream that Lister is having while Rimmer covers his body with exam revision.

Alternatively, the last ever episode is a rip-off of Newhart:
Captain Butler wakes up having dreamt all of Red Dwarf.

[Author]

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