Back in the Red: Part Three – It Just Bugs Me

[Pete Part Three]

It’s shit.

Topic

[Ridley]

Well, since the only decent story idea in VIII is a rip off of Future Echoes?Probably not.

Of series VIII’s flaws, the plot bunnies aren’t amongst them. ;)

Having just come off watching the full hour Pete (the episode), I only just noticed the vending machine lady gets her food then teleports to the back of the queue.

[Squeaky Gibson]

yeha I spotted that yesterday, though I was watching the 2 parter with Commentary track on. boy she must have been really hungry. a possible reason could be that because they reshot Cat being attacked by Baxter. i’ll have to watch the original version and see if she is behind Kryten and Kochanski then. most probably they called her back for the reshoot and forgot that she had aleady had her food, either that or she was very hungry!

[pfm]

Only The Good… was supposed to be a 2-parter, wasn’t it? With Earth being the second part. Having 6 episodes with Earth being one of them probably would have saved VIII. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. But here we are anticipating a new Dwarf episode so it’s not all bad.

For YEARS I preferred VII to VIII then suddenly it hit me that I actually like Krytie TV as an episode. Then the DVD version of BITR changed my mind (to a degree…) about that too. I fucking despise Nanarchy and I can’t say that about any VIII episode (perhaps BITR 3 but that doesn’t count anymore). I hate the self-indugence of Blue as well, despite some of obviously being funny – I think at the time I did literally wet myself (urine) at the Rimmer/Lister snog.

[Danny Stephenson]

Having 6 episodes with Earth being one of them probably would have saved VIII.

Yeah they thought to get a little bit more out of the DINOSAUR, instead of doing that episode…

[Ben Paddon]

I thought Earth was supposed to be the series VIII finale.

[Andrew]

Doug had an idea for Earth – a climax episode that, after the events of Only The Good left the guys alone again, would have seen them take Red Dwarf back to their home planet…and crash into it. But it was dismissed relatively early on. No script was written because it was blatantly going to be too expensive to make.

While Only The Good had various endings, none were related to making ‘Earth’ happen (or not). By then it was off the table.

[pfm]

Andrew, FFS stop butting in with real information!

[Jonathan Capps]

Tsk, you can proove anything with facts, can’t you?

[Antipodean]

You don’t even NEED “Earth” to make “Only the Good” into a good two-parter (as in an Epideme-Nanarchy style two-parter where they’re linked but separate). Everything just seems rather rushed in it as it is anyway. There’s a thing about Lister pranking Kryten then Kryten pranking Lister… then they’re escaping! Then a microbe (or virus? They say both, but they’re different things) is eating Red Dwarf! Then the rest of the crew is evacuating! Then they’re going to a mirror universe! Then Rimmer’s in the mirror universe! Then Rimmer’s back in the real universe and Red Dwarf is breaking apart! The actual plot seems to be skimmed over in favour of the jokes.

Think about it, really: “Only the Good” can easily be divided into two halves – the first half is a prison thing with the prankings and the attempted escape, and the second half is the mirror universe story. Done in separate episodes I reckon both could be done more justice. I mean, why didn’t we see them making their escape? How did Talia fit into the whole thing? What happened with the thing with Baxter? How did they come up with the mirror universe idea so quickly? How did they build the mirror universe portal machine? What are Lister, Kryten and Holly like in the mirror universe? (This one in particular is a huge lost opportunity – we only saw two scenes set in the mirror universe which only showed a tiny part of the mirror Red Dwarf). What about the other prisoners left behind? Even if “Only the Good” had gone ahead with the original “happy” ending – which I prefer – these still would’ve been big flaws in the episode which could be fixed if both stories had been given room to breathe.

[ChrisM]

I agree (and I quite like series 8, but that last episode is really all over the place.) It’s like Doug Naylor and a few ideas and gags left over after the other episodes, and he crammed them altogether in the last one.

That being said some of the happenings of ‘Only the Good’ were very amusing.

[John Hoare]

The thing with Only The Good is that it does feel a bit too much like Doug saying “Shit! I’ve run out of ideas for the prison stuff already! Let’s put them on parole!” (But they still have to use the prison bunkroom, because… erm, that’s the set they’ve got handy…)

And the worst thing is, despite the many problems the episode has, I do think it has a better atmosphere than the majority of VIII, at least partly because of that.

I wrote this ages ago which explores this, actually:

http://www.ganymede.tv/indepth/free-agents

[Author]

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