Garbage World into an episode?

[Bargain Bin Holly]

You think an adaption of the Garbage World part from the Better Than Life novel could make a good episode?

Frankly, reading it for the first time, as someone who’s always been accustomed to the television show for years, I was quite surprised Rob and Doug wrote a definitive account of what happened to Earth. Of course, humankind’s current state is left a mystery after Earth farts its way out of the solar system, but still.

You think it could work as a single episode, a special, or do you think it only could work in the novel.

I got interested in this after I read that White Hole from Series IV was originally supposed to include Garbage World but couldn’t due to budget constraints apparently. I’m glad they didn’t, cause I think the plot would’ve gotten too packed with Holly having a 12,000 IQ, Red Dwarf nearing a white hole, and Lister being trapped on Garbage World all at the same time, it would’ve been a mess.

[bloodteller]

>I got interested in this after I read that White Hole from Series IV was originally supposed to include Garbage World but couldn’t due to budget constraints apparently. I’m glad they didn’t, cause I think the plot would’ve gotten too packed with Holly having a 12,000 IQ, Red Dwarf nearing a white hole, and Lister being trapped on Garbage World all at the same time, it would’ve been a mess.

if i recall correctly, White Hole was a replacement, separate script created after Rob and Doug were told their script based solely on the Garbage World section wouldn’t be feasible.

[Dax101]

Yeah on the Official site that says Rob and Doug did bring up the idea of garbage world to Ed Bye (cockroaches and all) but he quickly shot it down.

Now days i don’t think Doug is all that fussed about the novels like he and Rob were back in the 90s.

I think the closest was referencing one of the songs in series XII that was mentioned in the book, but personally i don’t know how i feel about Doug turning it into another Lister written Song

[Plastic Percy]

I just don’t think it would work as there’s not really an ending you can give it. The novels even sidestep it by having Lister set up his vague plan of towing it back to the solar system but that’s quickly forgotten due to his death and exile to the backwards universe.

[bloodteller]

his plan to “tow the Earth back to the solar system” is a bit bollocks as well, isn’t it? there’s no way a ship like Red Dwarf would be able to tug an entire planet along, surely.

maybe that was the whole point, that it was another futile plan just like his plan to get a farm on Fiji?

[Flap Jack]

I think revealing what happened to Earth, especially when it’s so bleak, would seriously undermine the show.

Because sure, we know that they’ll never make to Earth and find something hopeful, but the lingering possibility that they might gives Red Dwarf at least a glimmer of optimism in its premise.

Doing Garbage World on TV would just make their situation too real, making it clear that there is no human race anymore, and their only purpose is to run down the clocks on their lives. You could maybe do that as the absolute end to the series, but you couldn’t go back to episodic comedy adventures after that bombshell.

And the “Lister spends decades barely managing to survive, completely alone – then is reunited with his friends for mere hours before dying” aspect. JFC, that was rough. I thought that was too dark for a novel, let alone a sitcom. No way would they adapt that part. I’m actually feeling slightly upset just recalling it.

[bloodteller]

>And the “Lister spends decades barely managing to survive, completely alone – then is reunited with his friends for mere hours before dying” aspect. JFC, that was rough. I thought that was too dark for a novel, let alone a sitcom. No way would they adapt that part. I’m actually feeling slightly upset just recalling it.

this was part of what i really liked about the novels, personally. (i prefer them over the show tbh)
there’s always this really bleak feel of tragedy- even when Lister gets back to Earth, it’s nothing more than a garbage dump and there’s nothing there for him anymore, no humans, no family, nothing. even when they escape a nightmarish video game that’s seeping away at their life, they’re all too frail and weak to even celebrate their victory against the nigh-impossible odds. the closest they ever get to a happy ending in the novels is in Backwards when Lister finally realizes that maybe Red Dwarf was the home he’d been looking for all this time and that the bunch of misfits he’d ended up marooned with he cared more about than any family he’d ever had.

the darkness of the novels really appeals to me, for some reason. i don’t really know how to explain it, i just like it i guess?

[bloodteller]

rimmer getting painfully melted by the Apocalypse virus in Backwards while being conscious the whole time was a bit much, even for me though. the description of it being “pain beyond pain. a million agonies. and he was still conscious.” didn’t exactly help, either. that’s just a tad too brutal

[Moonlight]

That’s Rob Grant for you.

[Plastic Percy]

He gets a less horrific, although more flippant, fate in the audiobook of Backwards that cuts out the Gunmen of the Apocalypse scenes. His lightbee is blown out of Starbug during the Simulant attack and Kryten is crushed by falling debris.

[bloodteller]

yeah, i did listen to the Backwards audiobook. it’s a shame it wasn’t like that in the actual book, as the Gunmen scenes felt like torture overkill on top of everything else the posse went through.

i do like the absolute desperation of some of the Gunmen stuff though- lister and cat still trying to fight back to buy Kryten just a second more time despite the agony they’re both in is very intense.

[Dax101]

If they did garbage world it wouldn’t necessarily have to be earth. Like with White Hole you could loosely adapt it to make it work to the show.

But then again personally I thought M-Corp gave abit too much away about future Earth since you could almost imagine earth went to hell after M-Corp become a thing.

[Ben Saunders]

Even in Doctor Who, towing the Earth with the TARDIS stretched credibility to hell and back. What a dreadful idea, one on just the grounds of it being ridiculous even as fantasy, and two in how much gravity would absolutely fuck shit up, particularly in the Who episode

[Warbodog]

You probably thought the moon being an egg was annoying rather than funny.

[Flap Jack]

rimmer getting painfully melted by the Apocalypse virus in Backwards while being conscious the whole time was a bit much, even for me though. the description of it being “pain beyond pain. a million agonies. and he was still conscious.” didn’t exactly help, either. that’s just a tad too brutal

Jesus H. Jon Benjamin, I still haven’t read either of the post-Grant Naylor Red Dwarf novels, and every time someone references them it puts me off for longer.

Does Rob Grant not understand that we genuinely like these characters, or is he just too addicted to being subversive?

[bloodteller]

>Jesus H. Jon Benjamin, I still haven’t read either of the post-Grant Naylor Red Dwarf novels, and every time someone references them it puts me off for longer.
Does Rob Grant not understand that we genuinely like these characters, or is he just too addicted to being subversive?

i think he just has a really fucked-up torture fetish. a big part of the Backwards novel is the Agonoids- simulants who love to inflict gruesome amounts of pain onto humans whilst still keeping them alive. they’ve been hunting down Lister as he’s the last human alive, and all the while been thinking about the different ways they can torture him as much as possible without actually killing him. one particuarly nasty torture weapon they have is a metal cocktail umbrella which they plan to use to “scrape out his penis tube” and a nail file so they can keep all his scabs and blisters “nice and gooey”. it’s incredibly disturbing, even in comparison to the first two novels.

Last Human is rather light-hearted in comparsion, but even then there were some rather surreal parts that really creeped me out for some reason.

[Warbodog]

Last Human has an alternate Cat’s decapitated head bobbing in some water, loads of (possibly innocent?) prisoners falling to splatty deaths when the gravity’s switched back on and an alt/Low Lister killing loads of people, describing how he’s going to blow Lister’s cock off and probably getting up to other unpleasantness. Regular Lister’s drugged and raped by his GELF bride, which is played for laughs because it’s gross. Spoilers.

[MANI506]

I see the audio versions of both novels as the better options. Both books benefit from a hefty edit – although the DNA section of Last Human should have been snipped and there’s still time for Chris Barrie to record them properly.

[International Debris]

Even in Doctor Who, towing the Earth with the TARDIS stretched credibility to hell and back. What a dreadful idea, one on just the grounds of it being ridiculous even as fantasy, and two in how much gravity would absolutely fuck shit up, particularly in the Who episode

Yes, RTD had a tendency to just go completely over the top, and that was possibly his worst moment.

Backwards is such a nasty book. It has some great moments, but bloody hell is it difficult to read. But as bloodteller points out, the books are all pretty fucking bleak. They’re all good in their own way, particularly the first two, but they miss the day-to-day life stuff of the show, so it doesn’t actually have much in the way of characters being bored / alone / getting on each others nerves, which is something I feel is really missing.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I think its safe to assume who wrote the part in Better Than Life where the polymorph imitating Lister turns itself (Lister) inside out and drags its innards across the room towards Kryten. Though there I thought it was quite funny when the horrific monstrosity is taken out by a toaster.

With Backwards, I haven’t read it, but from your description of the Agonoids wasn’t that mentioned in the tv show prior to the book? In Gunmen, Kryten mentions the simulants doing similar things but in the tv show its more or less brushed off and of course not as graphically described.

[International Debris]

As for Garbage World, I’d love to see a Red Dwarf episode done on that scale, or at least something approaching it, as long as it still managed to be funny.

[Ben Saunders]

The moon being an egg is abhorrent and that entire episode is dreadful. It and the forest episode are darl marks on a near perfect series.

[bloodteller]

imagine the omelettes that you could do with a moon-sized egg though

[International Debris]

The moon being an egg is abhorrent

I don’t mind the concept, but the creature that hatched from the egg laying another egg that is effectively BIGGER THAN ITSELF just completely ruins it. Who was never too rigid with its science, but this is one of the few occasions where it just went way too far for me. Utter fucking nonsense.

[Pete Part Three]

Yes, the idea of the volume of something being bigger than its own outer dimensions is ridiculous.

[International Debris]

I see what you did there.

[Ben Saunders]

Yes, the idea of the volume of something organic being bigger than its own outer dimensions really is ridiculous.

If it didn’t lay another moon-sized egg right after being born it would be less ridiculous, but then it would only go from abhorrent to fucking stupid.

Towing planets and moons being eggs are the two things that really stand out to me when I think of bad Who science – Who is fantasy first and foremost and it can really get away with stretching credibility quite a lot, but sometimes it stretches it too far and it just snaps. A bit like pulling the weight of a grown woman up on some dental floss glued to one of your teeth, or surfing an alligator in freefall from an exploding plane which somehow takes a full two minutes longer to fall to the ground than you do with your stolen Nazi parachute.

[Ben Saunders]

(I love the opening of Stoke with all my heart but it is ridiculous – the thing about Stoke is it’s supposed to be ridiculous, and I’m not sure the Who scenes had the same over the top intent)

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Let’s do the maths on this. What is the terminal velocity of an alligator, anyone?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

On the point of the moon egg, my head canon (which I’ve just thought of) is that it isn’t that the creature lays a moon sized egg, it is that it secretes an embryo into the “rubble” left by the hatching, and these shell pieces, very quickly, fall back into some gravity well which reforms the moon/egg from the original, around the new embryo.

[MANI506]

You want the moon omelette on a stick.

The alligator landed on top of one of the many sheds and was precariously on the edge for two minutes until it finally fell off on to the nasty old Germans.

[bloodteller]

>bit like pulling the weight of a grown woman up on some dental floss glued to one of your teeth

yeah, that scene in Ouroboros really does work on cartoon logic. surely the weight of an entire woman on one of your teeth would just pull your face apart?

[bloodteller]

get Rob Grant in to do a rewrite, i’m sure he’ll include a horrifically graphic scene of lister’s head being torn to bits

[Ben Saunders]

I just pretend Kill The Moon didn’t happen and get on with my life. It is quite funny to imagine that any other episode set on/mentioning the moon actually takes place on/references a big fucking egg.

My favourite Cyberman serial is The Eggbase.

[Dave]

Day of the Egg

[bloodteller]

HOLLY- No time to lose, you should head for the nearest one of these.

*Holly slides down the screen so that only the top of his bald head is visible*

LISTER- You mean an egg?

HOLLY- Eggsactly.

[Dax101]

The solo novels did seem like they were trying to be more edgier. even Dougs novel puts Lister through hell with being knocked out quite a few times, drowning in detail that would make anyone with a fear of drowning feel uncomfortable, being shot in the groin and lister gets raped by a gelf and goes into detail about how he is enjoying it while being disgusted with himself.

I don’t think the floss thing would have made it into a co-wrote Rob and Doug story personally. compared to the previous 6 seasons it stands out as slightly odd.

[International Debris]

The opening to Stoke is an odd one, as it’s the first time that the show does a full-scale parody, rather than an amusing homage (that I can think of). I love it, the crocodile in particular, but I don’t like to think too hard about trying to fit it into Red Dwarf. Then again, it’s in another dimension, so maybe that’s just what things are like there.

[clem]

Kochanski dangling on floss from Lister’s teeth happens in the “non-space” between dimensions. It’s a stretch, but I suppose it could be that physics doesn’t work in quite the same way there.

[Ben Saunders]

Gravity could be less there, I guess.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

If gravity were reduced, then what force is pull Kochanski down away from the tear?

Although, to answer my own question, her own momentum from falling from the blast I guess

[bloodteller]

i think it’s just another example of Red Dwarf’s slightly cartoon-like physics and logic. bear in mind in Out Of Time we are meant to believe Rimmer wrenched the entire fridge off the wall and tried to “insert it” into Lister. granted, it happens offscreen- but we are still meant to acknowledge this was a thing that happened in the past, somehow.

other examples include the entirety of the Triplicator in Demons & Angels (with the posse, you could argue that their higher and lower selves are manifestations of their superego and id- but how does the Triplicator know what the superego of a strawberry is?) and Cat not dying from the shovel attack in Justice. it’s just one of those things where i don’t think you really can apply the laws of reality.

[Dax101]

I think its more the level of cartoony that went up abit by Series 7 onwards. You are more likely to question how kochanski can hold on to floss like its a piece of strong rope then the cat not dying from a mild slapstick shovel gag.

Thing is when Doug wrote that sequence for all we know he already decided in his head that gravity was gonna be abit different in that void, but its just never translated on screen.

[Hamish]

Regarding the fridge, how strong is a hard light hologram anyway? In theory they could lift absolutely anything.

[Dax101]

it was a mini fridge ;p

[bloodteller]

it’s said it had to be wrenched off the wall. who would attach a minifridge to a wall?

[bloodteller]

the triplicator is definitely cartoon logic, though. unless it somehow has its own moral conscience

[Dax101]

>it’s said it had to be wrenched off the wall. who would attach a minifridge to a wall?

If they have a fridge on starbug at all, then sure it could be.

Although in 1993 they probably didn’t exist so that probably wasn’t what they were getting at

[Ben Saunders]

>If gravity were reduced, then what force is pull Kochanski down away from the tear?
Gravity

[Ben Saunders]

Although now I think about it, where is the gravity coming from? What is compelling them “downwards”?

[Author]

Posts