Home Forums Ganymede & Titan Forum Do you know who the Series 8 Rimmer is?

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  • #221408
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    He’s another shot at the deleted Me2 Rimmer.

    He is horrible and I am glad he is gone.

    #221418
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    I can answer this one – Series VIII Rimmer was played by Chris Barrie, who in the 90s was a fairly well-known actor and impressionist. He previous appeared in the sitcom The Brittas Empire, and also appeared as the butler in the two Tomb Raider movies before hosting shows on Discovery about vehicles.

    Little known fact: Barrie has appeared in Red Dwarf before! He played the alternate “Ace” Rimmer in the Series V classic “Dimension Jump”, and more recently played some of the Rimmers in “Office Rimmer” – seems like he’s GNP’s go-to Rimmer duplicate!

    Hope this thoroughly answers your question.

    #221423
    clem
    Participant

    Really? I thought it was Mary, Queen of Scots.

    #221440
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    Ah yes, I was drunk when I started this thread, but I wanted to make the Series 8 and Me2 connection; Series 8 gives us a ‘rebooted’ Rimmer that we didn’t get at the end of Me2. In the first series, the message was that Rimmer progressed with the Red Dwarf team and softened into a more likeable character. The rebooted version of Rimmer was deleted and we moved on from there. It’s weird to think that without a gap of several years – let’s say if Series 9 had come out a couple of years after Series 8 – we’d probably have been left with the rebooted Series 8 Rimmer forever. It wouldn’t have felt right.

    Just an observation, not an interesting one.

    #221441

    And yet the Me2 and VIII Rimmers couldn’t be more different.

    Well, they could, but you know what I mean.

    #221443
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    I do know what you mean. I think that’s because the technology didn’t exist in the late 1980s to make all the characters into broad, pantomimic stereotypes.

    #221444
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    I can’t wait until I reach Series VIII in my re-watch and either begin to agree with you people, or largely enjoy my experience and come here to call you all cunts

    #221447
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    If you are watching Series 8 immediately after Series 7, you should build your hopes up first with the Star Wars parody trailer for Series 8 that makes it look good. Tell yourself “Chris Barrie is back, Norman Lovett is back, the studio audience is back, and Doug Naylor has spent a lot of time studying the first three series for the Remastered project, so the characterisation will be spot on. What could possibly go wrong?”

    #221470
    Hamish
    Participant

    You know, I just watched that trailer, having been not all that familiar with it before, and I have to say it actually captures Series VIII rather well. I also do not find it to be all that funny.

    #221473
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    The trailer gives the sense that it’ll be dramatic and exciting, though. Especially (perhaps only) when you haven’t actually seen Series 8 yet.

    It’s logical to presume from the trailer that Series 8 will build on the dramatic elements of Series 7, but with a live audience there to make the performances less dull, and writing that’s sharper due to Naylor’s revisiting of Series 1-3.

    It was definitely a shock in 1999 to go from expectations created by the trailer to Series 8 itself – the insanely raucous audience, and performances that are pitched more for a Bottom Live theatre type of audience than a television audience.

    #221476
    bloodteller
    Participant

    speaking of, isn’t that bit in VIII where Lister taps morse code on the pipes lifted directly from the Bottom Live show where they go to prison?

    #221481
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    I hope not, I love the wrong number punchline

    #221489
    Hamish
    Participant

    Yeah, because the (awful) lines “some things were never meant to make sense” and “may the farce by with you” imply such high drama. I am sorry, but I am still not seeing it. Maybe it is just almost twenty years of hindsight getting in the way.

    I would also say in VIII’s defence that Back in the Red and Cassandra do fulfill most of the dramatic potential shown in that trailer, with the only dodgy bit being the implication about Miss Kochanski that does not really pan out. You also do see a real CGI dinosaur.

    It does not leave me feeling deceived.

    #221492
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    I didn’t say “high drama”. It’s a combination of the music and the understandable assumption after the more filmic Series 7 that Naylor would continue pushing Red Dwarf in that direction.

    And I’m talking about before we’d seen Series 8. When you’ve already seen the series and you know the scenes that all the clips are from, you’re bound to have a different reaction.

    #221493
    Hamish
    Participant

    Thinking on it though, I will grant that by the end of Series VII a momentum is built up where, in spite of all of the dodgy bits that came before it, I at least do start to feel that the show is finding its feet again, and you want to see it carried on from there. This is a feeling I take with me into Back in the Red right through to the end of Cassandra, before dying a terrible death once I hit Krytie TV.

    So there is a problem that you need to manage your expectations with VIII, no doubt.

    #221515

    I remember discussing the VIII trailer with friends at school and everyone being excited at how big and dramatic it seemed. It seems like an exciting situation, in a “how are they going to get out of this?” kind of way. The reality was “they don’t get out of it, they just mill around and make jokes about genitals”, sadly.

    I do recall thinking, on the main cast’s escape from the ship in Back in the Red Part 3, that the rest of the series would be them trapped on Blue Midget trying to survive. Despite a lot of dodgy jokes by that point, I still had hope for the rest of the series.

    #221519
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    Yeah, it’s a bit odd. The series opens with a 3 parter and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that the stuff with the crew might be confined to this single story, and the show might revert to the status quo. Maybe they’ll be another accident, maybe the nanobot recreations of the crew are unstable and they all die, and Rimmer is revived as a hologram.

    But no, there’s another 5 episodes of this shite.

    #221524
    Me Own Stunts
    Participant

    The prison subplot was entirely unneeded too. How much more interesting it would have been for Lister to have been forced back into the Red Dwarf hierarchy after years of adventure, nobody believing a word of what he says, a metaphorical prison rather than a literal one. It would have been the writers’ opportunity to explore the pre-accident crew in a way they regretted never doing, as well.

    #221528
    Ian Symes
    Keymaster

    Yeah, I totally assumed at the time that the prison stuff was just one story, and that the remaining five episodes would be in the same vein as III-V (but with Norm instead of Hattie). I was so confused and disappointed by the end of BITR3.

    #221529
    clem
    Participant

    > The prison subplot was entirely unneeded too.

    Doug tried to have his cake and eat it with the prison setting. Puts them all in prison, then invents the Canaries as a way of having them be allowed out to explore derelicts and have adventures.

    > How much more interesting it would have been for Lister to have been forced back into the Red Dwarf hierarchy after years of adventure, nobody believing a word of what he says, a metaphorical prison rather than a literal one.

    I think that could have worked, especially if more was made of Rimmer being the resurrected, pre-accident Rimmer. A twist on that could be the ship coming across something hostile the crew have no idea how to deal with, being so far away from where they’re supposed to be in time and space, and Lister and the rest of our crew end up saving the ship. Maybe as a series finale, or maybe it keeps happening throughout the series, but Hollister and the officers take all the credit. Come to think of it, that would be quite a lot like The Admirable Crichton.

    #221543
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    The Admirable Kryten

    #221545
    cwickham
    Participant

    The Admirable Cloche-ton

    #221546

    There’s so much more inherent scope in that idea than in the prison idea, as almost every prison episode wasn’t about being in prison (other than Krytie TV). Meanwhile you could have an episode purely about Lister trying to cope with being back on shift, one where Kryten and Cat are subjected to various tests and such due to them being from the science crew’s future, an episode where the crew come across their first derelict, an episode where they come across some Simulants who can’t believe their luck at finding a thousand humans to kill, a weird warped time episode where Lister finds himself back alone aboard the ship again… the possibilities are incredible.

    I don’t like Krytie TV, but at least it uses the prison scenario to actually drive the plot. For the rest, the prison scenario bulked out the show with unnecessary characters and absurdly convoluted plots to try and make something actually happen.

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