Mundane observation dome

[Warbodog]

Do you have any miscellaneous insights on the series that may be worth contemplating for a few seconds before moving on with our lives? Here are some of mine.

1. The four regulars have names that can work any way around, though this would have been more obvious if David Ross had stayed and wouldn’t work if Chris Barrie used his real name.

2. The series’ lax attitude to continuity extends to the setting. Outside of Holly’s distress calls, I don’t think three million years is mentioned all that much after series I and before VI (not sure about later years). Instead, we get the extremely fudged “dead for centuries” and “travelling for thousands of years” – not actual retcons, but suggesting a more conventional setting for casual viewers tuning in and the sort of stories they’re telling. It’s only millions when they need it to be.

3. 200 years of stasis between series V and VI means that the earlier series took place in their equivalent of the early 19th century by comparison (e.g. Blackadder the Third). Since they didn’t run into a long-lived Camille or one of her great-great-etc grandchildren, it didn’t come up.

4. Although Lister is routinely slagged off in the series, he’s spared the level of seemingly authoritative character assassination that Rimmer gets, because the audience is aligned with Lister’s viewpoint most of the time. For example, we see Kochanski Camille belittling Rimmer’s interests, but we don’t get the equivalent of Hologram Camille reacting to Lister’s pickup lines, we’re left to form our own opinions on those. This flimsy point has not been considered much beyond this single example.

5. Cat’s costumes are overwhelmingly referenced more than anyone else’s in the series, but the least discussed by fans.

6. Ace Rimmer and Duane Dibbley were so seemingly ubiquitous in canon and tie-in merchandise through the 90s (Smegazine strips, T-shirts) that they still feel overused today, even though it’s been over 20 years since they appeared. Maybe they’re allowed back after all.

7. Only series III & V and maybe XI & XII (not as familiar with those) don’t have any sense of an arc whatsoever (though IV’s minor Kryten disobedience arc was already fucked up by episode shuffling). Series III is just about the only series where no episode directly references any previous episode, but it still has the Backwards scrolling text and general references to Rimmer having died and stuff.

8. One of the series’ most famous and quoted scenes – everybody’s dead, Dave – is a straight-up 2001: A Space Odyssey homage and would have been received that way at the time, but doesn’t work like that for most people coming to the episode later on or new viewers who are young or don’t watch old films.

9. Sometimes dismissed as lightweight and gimmicky today, Backwards was designed as an innovative interactive experience to reward extracurricular effort. As well as inviting fans to work out the backwards events and filming logistics, Arthur Smith’s eugolonom is teasingly long and “you scoundrels” is clearly a cleaned-up translation gag even before you’ve heard it. Unfortunately, by the time technology caught up with the intent and the ability to reverse media files properly on home computers became commonplace, Backwards Forwards came out and everyone just cheated with the walkthrough.

Imagine the quality of the musings I left out!

Topic

[Dave]

Bump

[Unrumble]

I’ve hyperbolically mimicked this on occasion, like if a car makes a worrying noise.

[Ben Saunders]

I have an irl friend who was just promoted from Technician III to Technician II, so he’s Rimmer now.

[Moonlight]

That’s a real rank????????? I thought it was some bullshit Rob and Doug made up. Is this my fault for being American?

[Rushy]

Is this my fault for being American?

[Ben Saunders]

That’s a real rank????????? I thought it was some bullshit Rob and Doug made up. Is this my fault for being American?

He’s American too, so you need to find something else to blame. There’s no Technician I though, it’s Senior Technician.

[Moonlight]

Chris delivers every third line doing this face and these movements in Series XI and XII.

[Rushy]

I wish I had the receipts, but I could swear there was an interview where Chris talked about Rimmer feeling more comfortable in the body of an older person, because he had always been a young man trying desperately to be seen as mature. 

[Moonlight]

We’re streaming Doug’s BtE commentary in the server and it turns out the solution to “is BtE Series 9?” was hiding on the DVD the whole time.

Doug calls it “season 8 and a half.”

So the chronology of Red Dwarf is Series 1, 2, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, Red Christmas, VIII½, X, XI, XII, AA, TPL.

[Warbodog]

[Moonlight]

I’ll be real, not that I don’t want the audience, but it feels like a crying shame that we didn’t have an entire series of single camera Dwarf in the Dave era given how well BtE and XI/XII’s location scenes are shot. I think Give & Take suffers a bit for how much better the location work looks vs. the multi-cam studio scenes. It feels like the more filmic location scenes don’t mesh as well with the studio scenes as they do in the older episodes. The Inquisitor has great single camera location shooting but it doesn’t look like a different show from the studio shoot.

[Rushy]

Chris Barrie’s hair seems to reach its peak bouffancy in Thanks for the Memory

[clem]

It might be so voluminous there because it was dishevelled when he was pissed earlier in the episode. 

[Rushy]

For a brief moment today, I confused Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for the brothers that run Channel Awesome (Rob and Doug Walker).

I did wonder why they would dislike Rachel Zegler, but assumed she must’ve snubbed Red Dwarf or something. 

Coincidentally, the Walker brothers are fans of the show I’ve heard. 

[Dave]

the Walker brothers are fans of the show I’ve heard. 

The sun, sun, sun ain’t gonna shine anymore

[Warbodog]

Is Doug Walker more or less entertaining today than when I last watched one of his videos in 2007?

[Rushy]

Is Doug Walker more or less entertaining today than when I last watched one of his videos in 2007?

I would say yes. 

The Nostalgia Critic is just a brand nowadays. Doug no longer plays him as a character outside of intermittent skits, but instead reviews the film in a light-hearted video essay style, where he tries to find the positive and negative in each film and work out the filmmakers’ intentions. 

He has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome since COVID, and I think it caused him to go through a period of emotional growth, as it coincides with him becoming noticeably more patient and understanding with fans.

[clem]

Is Doug Walker more or less entertaining today than when I last watched one of his videos in 2007?

I would say yes.  

[Rushy]

[Flap Jack]

I used to quite enjoy the NC, but I went off it definitively when the Walkers and Mike Michaud were so catastrophically shit at managing their site that they pushed almost every other contributor to leave it in protest.

[Moonlight]

I loved NC when I was a young teen. It was some of the first movie review content I ever watched online. Every time I go back to one of the old episodes for (ironically) nostalgia, it’s a crapshoot whether I’ll go “I can see why I liked this so much” or “Oh god this is embarrassing.”

Although granted that’s pretty much the deal with any online content I liked when I was in high school or younger.

[Rushy]

I used to quite enjoy the NC, but I went off it definitively when the Walkers and Mike Michaud were so catastrophically shit at managing their site that they pushed almost every other contributor to leave it in protest.

It’s more complicated than that. 

Quite a few of the contributors were unhealthy narcissists who exaggerated or even invented many of the issues to get back at Doug. Much of the document they presented as a list of complaints was completely debunked (such as Doug not providing food and water on set, or firing someone for being a few minutes late). 

It’s definitely true that Rob and Michaud were unprofessional managers, but it’s far from a one-sided thing, there were a surprising amount of internal politics. And many of the people who subsequently left did so only to protect their own careers from fallout once the ball got rolling. Angry Joe, for example, never said a word against them. He just moved on. 

[Flap Jack]

You simply don’t get to the “mass exodus” stage without doing things disastrously wrong as a business. “Internal politics” does not get you that far.

Even allowing for the likelihood that people opportunistically put exaggerated or false claims into the exposé document, or that some people just left because everyone else was doing it, a majority of the contributors still ended up agreeing that the situation was untenable. At the time of the event, it was still hugely beneficial to both the contributors’ profiles and their purses to not rock the boat and remain on the site, so if things were even halfway acceptable it would not have happened. And the fact that contributors who left the site years prior gave their own testimonies, for no real benefit to themselves, is a pretty solid sign that the problems were real.

[Warbodog]

It feels like any subsequent series would have made some effort to actually depict the ants.

But it always felt like this one should have bothered too. I’ve never felt they’re a convincing threat.

[Dave]

Re-Remastered:

[Ian Symes]

[clem]

[Dave]

[Podey]

[Ian Symes]

[Unrumble]

[Dave]

[Nick R]

[Podey]

[clem]

[clem]

[Ian Symes]

Podey’s is sensational.

[Moonlight]

Chris Barrie’s hair seems to reach its peak bouffancy in Thanks for the Memory

Obviously mine is much longer, but this is the kind of crazy my hair gets the morning after taking a shower and going to bed while it’s still wet.

[Dave]

[Ben Saunders]

Remember when they made a movie about the Alien Autopsy story starring Ant & Dec? I’ve watched that at least three times.

[Author]

Replies