Lines That Don't Really Make Sense

[bloodteller]

What are some lines in Red Dwarf that you don’t think make sense?

Two I can think of are in Meltdown when Kryten states the matter paddle “converts an individual into digital information and then transmits him as light beams to another point in space” which would logically mean they travel at the speed of light. Yet they then go to a planet that’s 200,000 light years away and arrive in a matter of seconds.

The other one is in Demons and Angels when Kryten says “I think we can produce four, perhaps even five strawberries a week!”. How would you end up with five strawberries at any point if you’re using a triplicating device?

Topic

[Pete Part Three]

Argh: this is shit:

LISTER :You think all this sciency stuff’s really interesting, don’t you? I bet,at school, you were always the one with the right coloured pencils, and the impossibly neat handwriting. I bet even now you can probably tell us the average rainfall of the oil-rich coastal low-lands of Venezuela…

KOCHANSKI: No I couldn’t, I’ve no idea…Okay, three point four inches, so what?

Awful. Lister plucks a ridiculously obscure and verbose question out of his arse, and Kochanski answers it. She’s not doing it to be “funny”. She genuinely knows this obscure fact. Crap comedy dialogue. GAH.

[Dave]

Plus, she’s wrong, it’s actually three point six.

[tombow]

I had an idea for Timeslides. Holly didn’t actually bring Rimmer back to keep Lister sane, that was a lie he told to save face. He actually bought Rimmer because he needed help with the nitty gritty of the ship after turning around and Rimmer, despite his low esteem and mistakes, is the only crew member who knows where every plate goes etc. That’s why Rimmer remains in the “Lister got rich” timeline.

[bloodteller]

i always found it kind of cute how in the “Rich Lister” timeline in Timeslides, Holly still kept Rimmer around- out of a crew of 1,169 they could choose from, Rimmer of all people they choose to bring back. either she actually liked Rimmer (unlikely) or it was just that he’s good for making fun of and pissing off. either way it’s kind of sweet

[Pete Part Three]

Nanarchy. This is a bit long-winded:

KRYTEN : When we were on the Esperanto, just before we met the Despair Squid.

LISTER: That was ages ago; before we lost the Dwarf.

KRYTEN: That’s why I’ve given up hope of ever finding them.

LISTER : Let’s set a course back to the Esperanto.

[a scene or two later]

LISTER: Hang on a minute, we’re not there… where the smeg are we?

KOCHANSKI: The computer’s brought us out of Deep Sleep early, it must have picked up something.

[…]

KRYTEN : If you look to the port side, sir, that planet in the distance is the ocean world where we discovered the Esperanto.

LISTER: That was just before we lost Red Dwarf…

This scene is really clunky. The crew have set a course back to the Esperanto (we’ll overlook the fact that that was over 200 years away, and essentially means they’re giving up hope of ever finding Red Dwarf, or a way back to Kochanski’s dimension). They mistakenly believe they’ve been brought out of deep sleep early because Lister doesn’t know where they are… and then Kryten points out that the Ocean World (and thus the Esperanto) is in the distance. And Lister ponders the fact that this was just before they lost Red Dwarf, as if this is new information…but it’s the exact bloody reason they’re there.

Oh, and while I’m here:

LISTER: So Red Dwarf spent the last two years exploring strange new worlds in my laundry basket?

So, this two years would appear to be (most of) the the duration of Series VII. The crew seem to lose track of Red Dwarf around Rimmerworld/ Out of Time so Lister/Doug seems to be proposing that Nanarchy is two years *after* that (presumably discounting the time spent in deep sleep). Is this to allow the 18 months in the Ourborous flash-forward?

Not saying it doesn’t make sense, just mildly interesting.

[International Debris]

Yeah, VII seems to take place over two years. I’d imagine by that point, Kochanski had given up of ever getting back.

Meanwhile, in her dimension, Lister is still living without Kochanski and incredibly depressed and keeps trying to kill his holo-self. Fun.

[bloodteller]

i always imagined that in Kochanski’s dimension after losing her, a version of Rimmer somehow joined the team. because it’s a parallel universe, innit?

in the regular Red Dwarf world, they lose Rimmer and soon gain a Kochanski, so it made sense to me that in the parallel world when they lose Kochanski they gain a Rimmer. equivalent exchange

[Ben Saunders]

My memory is really vague here but isn’t there a line in either VII or VIII which states that something that happened six series ago happened “five years ago”? I always thought that was a little short (for no real reason I assumed one series = one year), but the line in question is in VIII then that makes the timescale of the adventures even shorter.

[Ben Saunders]

Also, a Rimmer from another parallel dimension suddenly joining the alt-crew at ’round about the same time is a bit neat – a bit like the Mirror, Mirror universe in Star Trek – where everything and everyone is completely different/evil, several key events all play out differently, and yet somehow everything is still vaguely the same and everyone is in the same place/rank whenever the two universe intersect. What happened to the butterfly effect?

[bloodteller]

>My memory is really vague here but isn’t there a line in either VII or VIII which states that something that happened six series ago happened “five years ago”? I always thought that was a little short (for no real reason I assumed one series = one year), but the line in question is in VIII then that makes the timescale of the adventures even shorter.

in Back In The Red, Lister says he’s been away for “five or six years, not counting Stasis.” which fits with established continuity as in Holoship it’s been “nearly four years” and by Out Of Time it’s been a full “four long years” and so if you add the two years VII takes place over, it adds up to six.

[Ben Saunders]

Nice. Well at least they’re consistent.

[flanl3]

It’s weird to think about, but VI really does take place over just a couple of weeks, maybe a month, doesn’t it? From the characters’ perspective, of course, not on an absolute timeline.

[Warbodog]

It feels like they’ve been on Starbug for months, even a year by Out of Time for the morale meeting to work. But it could be a lot shorter based on them already running out of supplies by Legion and losing everything in Emohawk. But they were restocking miraculously preserved supplies from derelicts all over the place in that annoyingly crowded region of space anyway.

[Ben Saunders]

Makes space seem even more crowded if it all happens within the space of a fortnight

[Warbodog]

You could watch nearly all early-90s Red Dwarf and not be aware that they’re supposed to be in the extremely distant future extremely far from Earth. I won’t have realised it until I read the book.

They mention millions of years in Psirens a couple of times (ice ages, three million years on the clock), but outside of that, I don’t think it’s mentioned at all in V & VI (maybe it is). Closest I can recall is the wax droids mentioning it in Meltdown.

[International Debris]

I always assumed VI took place over a relatively short space of time – maybe the six weeks it took to broadcast at most.

[Plastic Percy]

There’s a mention in ‘Legion’ that Lister found the peanuts he’s eating in the jacket of a corpse they found a couple of months back, so there’s at least eight weeks gap between that and ‘Psirens’.

Also, it wouldn’t necessarily take them 200 years to get back to the Esperanto as in the previous episode Epideme gave them the ability to increase Starbug’s speed by 300%.

[Warbodog]

The Christmas/liquid beast reference in Out of Time also feels like it’s about something that happened quite a while ago during their current predicament, rather than on Red Dwarf around 200 Christmases ago. It could have been more recently and Lister just didn’t notice the date, I guess.

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