Does anybody have the full image of this?

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Its a publicity photo of Chris Barrie as Rimmer from Series 1, its part of three as I’ve found (One is common and can be found easy on the internet as well as in the episode Back to Earth Part One, the second is another rare one and has Rimmer wearing a Red Dwarf hat he never dons in the show, third being this one)

You can see it on this Radio Times newspaper dating to Series 1 as well.

Does anybody have the full photo?

Topic

[bloodteller]

Pretty sure the only episodes in 1-7 that only feature the main characters and nobody else are Marooned, Bodyswap, Demons and Angels, Out Of Time and Duct Soup.

[Dax101]

Its more about how they are used i think.

You could count DNA as being one that features only the main characters since the DNA modifier had a voice but it wasn’t a character. the Curry monster was a thing but it wasn’t a character per say.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Pretty sure the only episodes in 1-7 that only feature the main characters and nobody else are Marooned, Bodyswap, Demons and Angels, Out Of Time and Duct Soup.

Future Echos … unless you’re counting future Lister and Jim and Bexley?

Me2? … again unless you’re counting the second Rimmer?

Thanks for the Memory? … or are we counting Lisa Yates?

White Hole? … no-one else there.

Blue? … unless Rimmer is at that point considered not part of the core cast.

Nanarchy? … although again, are we not counting Holy as core cast at that point.

I get what you’re saying re “only” featuring the main 4, but I think it stretching it a bit to count Lisa Yates as she is hardly a character and you could omit having those clips of her in the episode and the episode would still work.

Future Lister and duplicate Rimmer are basically the same person/character – and we we’re counting Demons and Angels (despite the highs and lows being very different characters played by the same actors) then we should definitely include Me2 at least. And Jim and Bexley are in it for mere seconds so for all intents and purposes that episode is really only the core 4 cast.

And in fact Body Swap does feature a female voice in Lister so if we are discounting brief extras like Jim and Bexley we should discount her and Bodyswap too.

I’m not really sure what my point is other than being a little pedantic.

[Dax101]

Well White hole had talkie toaster. its easy to forget he was there since he vanished as the white hole stuff kicked in.

[Pete Part Three]

>White Hole? … no-one else there.

Would anyone like any toast?

[International Debris]

Pretty sure the only episodes in 1-7 that only feature the main characters and nobody else are Marooned, Bodyswap, Demons and Angels, Out Of Time and Duct Soup.

Maybe I worded the statement slightly wrong, but in keeping with the rest of my point – episodes that don’t feature any ‘outside’ guests of any kind, i.e. extras that aren’t flashbacks/memories, alternate versions of the main characters, or things created by the characters. People, GELFs, droids, etc. that the main characters specifically stumble across. Episodes without:

Future Echoes
Balance of Power
Me²
Thanks for the Memory
Queeg
Marooned
Bodyswap
DNA
White Hole
Demons and Angels
Out of Time
Duct Soup
Blue
Nanarchy
Dear Dave
Mechocracy
Skipper

Parallel Universe and Dimension Jump are difficult as the alternate versions there are obviously very different people to the ones we’re familiar with – yet they’re still technically the same characters. Terrorform, too, doesn’t actually have any ‘real’ characters, simply embodiments of Rimmer’s neuroses.
VIII is difficult to judge, but if we count the whole crew of Red Dwarf as the ‘main’ characters, then Back in the Red I-III, Krytie TV and Pete I & II also fit the bill. BtE doesn’t really work as it’s only one story anyway.

Which just leave XI as the only series where they meet at least one completely new, outside character each week. Admittedly it’s only for a few seconds in Samsara, but even then we’re given half an episode’s worth of plot for them tying in with the main story.

[Lily]

I think since we’re talking about the perceived population of space, I would count episodes that they meet something new as populated, and ones where it’s duplicates of themselves, or flashbacks or time travel as unpopulated.

Series 1-3 : Space is empty, Crew are alone except for the eps Kryten, Polymorph and Last Day. (Backwards is time travel, Better than Life is VR etc.)

Series 4-6 : Space is populated. Crew meets new stuff actually in their bit of space in all except White Hole, Demons & Angels, Out of Time.

Series 7-9 : Space is empty. Crew are alone except for Stoke, Ouroboros, Epideme, Cassandra, Only the Good and BtE part 3.

Series 10-12 : Space is populated : Crew meets new stuff in their bit of space in all except Fathers & Suns, Lemons, Dear Dave, Mechocracy and Skipper.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Parallel Universe and Dimension Jump are difficult as the alternate versions there are obviously very different people to the ones we’re familiar with – yet they’re still technically the same characters

I’d say they’re different enough to be different characters that you count as “meeting someone knew”, though in DJ the only character our crew meets is Ace, and no-one would confuse him with our Rimmer.

Terrorform everything is created by Rimmer’s mind, so yeah it’s a bit tricky, but still relies on their being a monster/threat etc, and obviously the episode would be completely lost without the 2 semi naked girls oiling Rimmer.

[Warbodog]

Even though they’re not characters, coming across Space Corps derelicts every other week in VIII (and in Out of Time) makes space feel less empty than I-III where they only found Kryten. VII’s in the same RPG/Star Trek-style space as VI with Kinitawowi and prowling Simulants, just with weeks off.

[bloodteller]

I think the emptiness still works to an extent when there’s a fair explanation for what a ship is doing so far out into deep space, e.g. the Gemini 12 was sent on autopilot as far away as possible so nobody ever found the Time Drive, and the Silverberg also being sent on autopilot to get rid of Cassandra. Hudzen-10 was tracking Kryten so it makes sense he ended up in deep space, and you’d obviously want the Polymorph as far away from any human contact as possible.

When a ship is inexplicably just out there with no explanation e.g. the ERRA Station, the Samsara, it makes it feel more populated I think. What are they doing there? Why are they so far out into space?

[Dax101]

>When a ship is inexplicably just out there with no explanation e.g. the ERRA Station, the Samsara, it makes it feel more populated I think.

Well the show has done that quite a few times. The Nova 5 being the earliest example.

[Dave]

I liked that the novels tried to provide some explanation for the Nova 5 being all the way out there.

[Flap Jack]

I think we need to make it clear that “I can’t swallow that the Dwarfers would bump into so many other sentient beings out in deep space” and “I prefer the atmosphere and tone of the show when it seems that the crew are alone” are distinct complaints.

For the former, well, nothing about the show makes 100% logical sense if you dwell on it. You can decry how unlikely it is for Red Dwarf to meet other ships or settlements in the Dave era, but even in Series 1-2, when you consider how impossibly massive and empty space is, the chance that they would even stumble across a single moon is (ahem) astronomically small, let alone stumble across the Nova 5 or another ship that has an AI that Holly can play correspondence chess with.

So trust me, if you can accept that an entire species of humanoid cats can evolve from just a single pregnant cat over just 3 million years and within the confines of a spaceship, leaving just 1 or 2 members on the ship at the exact time that the radiation has become safe, then you can buy when they bump into the odd human.

As for the latter complaint… there’s only so many stories you can tell and make funny with just the main cast, the ship, and no outside influence. Perhaps there are still some places they could still go with that idea, but no way would the show have the longevity and broad appeal it has without GELFs, simulants, mechanoids, and yes, the occasional human. (Except the Enconium crew. Fuck those guys.)

Though really, if you’re part of Red Dwarf fandom now, your opinion probably isn’t so extreme that you want Red Dwarf to always be Series 1 style, you just want the ratio of busy to empty pushed the other way a bit. Fair enough I suppose.

Wait, where was I going with this?

[GlenTokyo]

Gordon came on a disc with the post pod.

[Dax101]

I don’t mind having guest character. but the show does feel abit dependant on them now for Comedy.

[Dax101]

These days anyway.

[Lily]

I think it goes back to something Dax said earlier. It’s not that the universe is more populated now, just that it’s friendlier.

Comparing 10-12 with 4-6 (which I believe are most similar to Dave era in style and stories), the earlier series only had two episodes with purely friendly/neutral guests, Ace Rimmer and the Holoshop crew. Demons & Angels and Meltdown had a mix and all the rest had something or someone trying to kill/imprison them.

In 10-12 there’s a lot more episodes where there’s friendly ‘people’, Lemons, Samsara, Krysis,Timewave all have little peril and just a nice jaunt out. Even if there is a villian, there’s often a friendly person balancing it out. Trojan, Entangled, Twentica, Give & Take, Officer Rimmer, Cured etc. There’s very few episodes where there’s just them vs evil.

So it’s not how many humans/whatever there are, it’s just that they’re all a lot nicer than before.

Is Doug getting soft in his old age? :)

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I honestly can’t believe that, in 30 years, Doug hasn’t once been tempted by the idea of stumbling across (at least some) of the Cat race. It would make for a proper decent Cat episode (that I guess we thought we’d get with Can of Worms). He might decide he wants to stay with his people, then realise that he has absolutely nothing in common with them or their society, and comes back to Lister et al.

Giving that, not long before Lister came out of stasis (presumably) there was a civil war amongst the Cat people (which was hundreds of years ago to them now) they could discover a settlement or tribe descended from the bloodiest of the warriors. Might get a little Klingon but would be interesting just to see SOMETHING of what happened to this entire species that is out there somewhere.

[Dax101]

Well the fact that in 30 years it hasn’t happened and when Doug get close to doing it then it just ended up being a polymorph… i dunno if Doug really wants to bring back the cat race.

Then again i can imagine it would end up similar to siliconia where Kryten finds alot of other krytens with several extras everywhere.

I say leave the Cat race alone sadly.

[Ben Saunders]

The One Where Everyone’s Cat

[clem]

> I honestly can’t believe that, in 30 years, Doug hasn’t once been tempted by the idea of stumbling across (at least some) of the Cat race

We nearly got Identity Within in VII, so we know Doug isn’t averse to the idea. Or at least he wasn’t as recently as 21 years ago.

[Pete Part Three]

>We nearly got Identity Within in VII

Bullet dodged.

[Dax101]

I can’t help but think Identity Within might have been a stronger Cat episode then Can of Worms.

[Lily]

>We nearly got Identity Within

I literally only watched that for the first time last night. I rip my DVDs and hadn’t bothered with that at the time. Looked it up again last night on a whim.

Seemed a great story to me and a far more interesting spin on a female cat than the Can of Worms version.

Interestingly, 45 minutes long, so would have needed some serious hacking about to get down to broadcast length. Makes me wonder how many other longer scripts have been brutalized to get down under 30.

[tombow]

I just remembered, 15 years ago, I stayed at a friends house who had an old Red Dwarf role playing book I’d never seen before, and I stayed up reading it. I had some really interesting mythos in it, like different animal-evolved people such as the rabbits from the ship the Captain mentioned (forgot name) who have become a super-competent engineer/tech race who all look like Tim Spall with big front teeth and overalls. I haven’t thought about that book in years.

[tombow]

add on – it’s this one http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Red_Dwarf_the_Roleplaying_Game

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Identity Within would’ve been a great episode tbh, better than most of VII I bet (and I like most of VII).

If I’d have to guess for what scenes would be cut to shorten it, I’d say the bit with Kryten and his wind-wipper nipples; though I do wonder if the storyboards just stretch the run-time than the show would regularly last.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I honestly can’t believe that, in 30 years, Doug hasn’t once been tempted by the idea of stumbling across (at least some) of the Cat race

Even weirder considering the outcry of fans wanting to see it happen, maybe Doug just wants to fuck with us.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Like the amount of ideas you could generate with the plot of the crew stumbling on the Cat race inhabiting a planet or something is astronomical

[bloodteller]

Yeah, I rather enjoyed Identity Within too. Seems like it would have been a pretty good episode

[Moonlight]

But the problem is it wasn’t funny. And later drafts would have traded Rimmer for Kochanski in what I can only imagine massively improved it on that front.

Chalk it up to the storyboard episode being a first draft without Doug’s refinement if you like, but I feel decidedly more underwhelmed by it than I do by even Duct Soup. The dialogue really does feel imitation-Dwarf in a way that’s off-putting wrong to my ears.

[tombow]

maybe they struggled to find a way to make multiple cats funny. Like one sharp suited pop star ish guy reacting with normal people is funny. But make a group of them and what can you do, other than they may be jealous of each other or something. Like when you have a group of pop stars together on a charity single they kind of don’t stand out anymore.

[bloodteller]

I thought “Oh, I thought it was purely ceremonial. Like the Gay Gordons” was a funny line, and that was from Identity Within. There are probably others but that stuck out to me as being rather amusing

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

maybe they struggled to find a way to make multiple cats funny

The answer to that is to not have them all like Cat. Make the species multi faceted. Especially after several hundreds of years since leaving Red Dwarf. Still have the cool and stylish element there, but give them more depth and have each character more individually different.

Also, they don’t necessarily need to be funny. Remember the good old days where the characters the crew met were played straight and it was the situation / reaction that was funny?

[bloodteller]

>Remember the good old days where the characters the crew met were played straight and it was the situation / reaction that was funny?

Yeah, but this is new-age Red Dwarf now, so if there’s a Cat people episode they’ll all have to be totally zany, act like utter fucking maniacs and behave in a manner that only cartoon characters would, and then abruptly be murdered at the end of the episode. And there’ll have to be some sort of attempt at irreverent social satire thrown in there for no real reason, too

[Dax101]

Well the Cat priest wasn’t zany and even the Cat characters in identity within were not zany either… but yeah i agree if Doug did it today there would be a room full of zany Cat people that Lister, Rimmer and Kryten just look at each other with confusion over.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Glad to see G&T is its same cynical self today

[International Debris]

Though really, if you’re part of Red Dwarf fandom now, your opinion probably isn’t so extreme that you want Red Dwarf to always be Series 1 style, you just want the ratio of busy to empty pushed the other way a bit. Fair enough I suppose.

Basically. Had Timewave been replaced with an episode that only had one or two guests (Give & Take, say), then XII would have got the balance right: a few small-scale guest episodes, a larger scale guest episode, and a couple of crew-centric episodes.

Identity Within really reminds me of Last Human, right down to the bustling planet and lack of jokes.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Last Human had jokes tho, even ignoring the recycled ones from episodes which all the novels did, there’s the bit with Kryten and the GELF Regulator where he says he imprisoned Lister for killing him, Kryten trying to fight back against evil Lister but can’t due to his programming (which may I add is some nice continuity that references how Lister hasn’t helped Kryten develop emotions in the novels like he did in the show), the national secret being known by everybody President Nixon talks to (which was later reused for Captain Hollister in Back in the Red)

You might not like the jokes but they’re there

[Pete Part Three]

Identity Within reminds me of Siliconia, actually. Right down to the stupid fight scene that doesn’t belong there.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I’d imagine a fight scene would look pretty choppy in storyboard form

[International Debris]

It’s been a very long time since I read Last Human, so there may well be jokes in there. My overriding memory of it is being epic and daring and not especially funny.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

It definitely is more focused on action, of course, so you’re not wrong in remembering it as mostly that.

[bloodteller]

I remember liking Last Human when it wasn’t just being directly copied-and-pasted scenes from the TV series

[Plastic Percy]

I understood that Cat was generally the opposite of the rest of Felis Sapiens, given they all seemed to live by Cloister’s sacred law of “Thou Shalt Not Be Cool” and stuff.

[Flap Jack]

Based purely on Cat’s “The Holy Mother? The virgin birth? No one believes that stuff!” line, I’ve always assumed that – while it obviously still had a lot of religiously devout folk – the cat race had become a largely secular society (or at least, a less orthodox one) by the time everyone abandoned Red Dwarf.

So it makes sense to me that a lot of if not most of the cat race would be similar to The Cat in terms of coolness and general mannerisms.

Though of course, there must be some things about The Cat that are unique if he was only one of 2 cat people to stay on the ship.

I think if Doug did a cat race episode now, he could definitely walk the line of having the other cats still he “cool” while also being clearly different to The Cat. Maybe they’d just be more intelligent, less easily distracted, more community minded, just a shade less egotistic, that sort of thing.

[Dax101]

Well its understandable the Cat race would have similarities since they are all cats and probably should have similar traits that doesn’t make them seem to normal… but when it comes to just how zany you could go with them i think how Doug handled the Cat lady (who was really a polymorph) in Can Of Worms could end up being abit too zany if thats the direction he took for all of them.

[Flap Jack]

It’s definitely possible Doug would ruin the other cats by making them too zany.

It’s also possible that the Cat Polymorph’s zaniness was only there because that’s what would seduce The Cat, and is not a fair indicator of how Doug would write other cat characters.

[GlenTokyo]

All he’d have to do is look at actual cats and apply that to people and attribute some human character to them.

There are some cats like Cat, quite aloof, don’t really pay much attention to their owners, stop to clean often.

Other cats are just lazy and slob about like Lister, some are violent, some are needy etc.

Just having bad impressions of Danny would be terrible when you look at the various character traits of an actual cat never mind a humanoid version who no doubt would be a lot more complex.

Done right I think it’d be really interesting.

[Hamish]

Yeah, go back to the drawing board and follow an actual cat around for a few days. Then write the cat race based around that.

[Author]

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