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

[Rushy]

If we don’t appreciate the comedy value of breasts, we might as well give it all up. Pie in the face? Just nibble on it in silence. The inconvenient arrival of rain? Wear a poncho. This is how laughter dies. With the sad whimper of trivia. 

[Moonlight]

It’s really meta that this conversation has become distracted focusing on the breast size of the new computer.

[Doomitron]

Doug Naylor to his casting director:

[Warbodog]

[Flap Jack]

If we don’t appreciate the comedy value of breasts, we might as well
give it all up. Pie in the face? Just nibble on it in silence. The
inconvenient arrival of rain? Wear a poncho. This is how laughter dies.
With the sad whimper of trivia.

Hey, I appreciate the comedy value of breasts as much as it’s feasible to without getting labelled as a weirdo, but it does actually have to be a joke, not just a fact. I hadn’t actually considered that I might be killing comedy itself by not finding the fact that a woman has large boobs inherently funny. If so, I can only apologise.

[Ben Saunders]

I also research the cup size of the actresses in the stuff I watch

[Moonlight]

Going to be repeatedly turning to my brother during the 85th anniversary screening and saying this.

[Frank Smeghammer]

I also research the cup size of the actresses in the stuff I watch

Funny enough I wanted to look this up for myself to see if Rushy was making a factual point or just being uber-weird about Rebecca Blackstone. There is only one reference to her cup size on the Internet. A Redditor a year ago posted an appreciation thread about her and made the same remark that Doug had deliberately cast someone with this chest size for an inside joke. The same guy who said it here. But it’s enough for Google AI to consider it factual now.

Now that’s what I call creepy research

[Frank Smeghammer]

Anyway, let’s not get too heavy. Here’s a topical Smegadrive meme to lighten things up (WAHEY!)

[Professor Flibble]

I never thought it was a joke specifically about Rebecca Blackstone. In fact I thought it was a set-up totally disconnected from what Pree actually looked like because the frame only shows her shoulders anyway, and I always assumed she was a brunette maybe because of how dark the lighting is on her hair.

Was it the Space Corps Survival Guide that had a drawing of a blow-up doll with big boobs (Rachel?) being used as a make-shift parachute? God knows why I kept looking at that page when nobody else was in the room. I was an odd boy.

[Technopeasant]

They made sure we saw her chest.

Slightly concerned about how we apparently know Blackstone’s exact cup size.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Ok, bus do we know which cast member has the biggest penis?

[Rushy]

Ok, bus do we know which cast member has the biggest penis?

Well, there’s a certain inside joke about that… 

[Ian Symes]

I don’t know if it’s just because Rebecca is one of those Dwarf-related people who I’ve accidentally become friends with, but this is a very weird and slightly uncomfortable conversation.

Having said that, apparently Craig is hung like a horse.

[Dave]

Having said that, apparently Craig is hung like a horse.

Well obviously, that knowledge is essential to get this joke.

[Warbodog]

I always wondered why they bothered to include that scene, but now it’s the second funniest joke in the entire series.

[Dave]

Now of course, to understand this joke it’s essential to know the following:

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Having said that, apparently Craig is hung like a horse.
Well obviously, that knowledge is essential to get this joke.

When I was a kid I always assumed that was Rimmer reacting to Lister’s green urine. And may it is. 

[Unrumble]

[Flap Jack]

Based on the way Rushy was speaking I did think that Rebecca Blackstone’s actual bra size was mentioned in We’re Smegged or something and I just forgot about it. But it sounds like people just assumed it matched the one in the joke based on nothing, then Doug was given credit for ingeniously referencing it, even though he wasn’t doing that at all. Have I got that right?

Oh, by the way guys, did you know that Football: It’s a Funny Old Game was an actual book written by Kevin Keegan, it just wasn’t ever published, and only a few close friends and family ever knew of it? There, now that I’ve revealed this definitely true fact to you, that joke has become approximately 350 times funnier.

[Warbodog]

[Frank Smeghammer]

Based on the way Rushy was speaking I did think that Rebecca Blackstone’s actual bra size was mentioned in We’re Smegged or something and I just forgot about it. But it sounds like people just assumed it matched the one in the joke based on nothing, then Doug was given credit for ingeniously referencing it, even though he wasn’t doing that at all. Have I got that right?

Yes, that’s almost right. Except you said “people just assumed it matched” but it’s actually just one person who has ever tried to credit Doug with this and he’s done it twice (twice = two) on separate websites completely unprompted

[tombow]

I’m starting to see why the BBC didn’t want to attract us anymore – and wanted to move up to the kind of fan that classy stuff, like The Office and Gavin and Stacy, would bring.

[Professor Flibble]

This is perhaps the most bizarre conversation I’ve seen on the site so far.

[gerrydelasel]

Agreed

[Frank Smeghammer]

I fear we have strayed far from the mundane and entered the downright absurd

[Rushy]

Based on the way Rushy was speaking I did think that Rebecca Blackstone’s actual bra size was mentioned in We’re Smegged or something and I just forgot about it. But it sounds like people just assumed it matched the one in the joke based on nothing

I based the assumption on her appearance in Twentica. 

And I agree this discussion has gotten rather out of hand. 

[Flap Jack]

So either you’re a bra fitting savant who can tell women’s cup and band sizes just by looking at them on TV, or you’re saying that Doug was a genius just for naming a vaguely large bra size in relation to Pree when the actor playing her also had large breasts.

[Rushy]

So either you’re a bra fitting savant who can tell women’s cup and band sizes just by looking at them on TV, or you’re saying that Doug was a genius just for naming a vaguely large bra size in relation to Pree when the actor playing her also had large breasts.

[Technopeasant]

[Moonlight]

This is too many sexy details for my taste. Let’s talk about lukewarm oatmeal or a Ken Burns documentary.

[Ben Saunders]

The backwards audience laugh at the things the Sensational Reverse Brothers do after they do them which is wrong. They should laugh beforehand.

[Ben Saunders]

The backwards audience laugh at the things the Sensational Reverse Brothers do after they do them which is wrong. They should laugh beforehand.

I thought about this some more and now my head hurts.

[Dave]

The more I think about the weird Backwards-but-sometimes-forwards logic of that episode, the more I respect it for just following whatever will be funny rather than caring about whether it really makes sense.

[Flap Jack]

The Amazing Reverse Brothers started a fight in the bar, got fired, and then went out and did a show.

[Dave]

The Amazing Reverse Brothers started a fight in the bar, got fired, and then went out and did a show.

They also apparently do many shows after that one. Seemingly they get fired just before their debut performance.

[Unrumble]

[tombow]

Unless we saw events in a different order to what they experienced? I’m not sure if that could work

[Flap Jack]

Van guy picks up Lister and Cat at the pub, never asks them where they’re going, drops them at a random spot, gets out and gestures for them to get into the van, says he knows of the pub he just brought them from and tells them to hop in, then Cat and Lister try to explain that they want to go to the pub, then they walk away and get on a bike that happens to be there and start riding it. Then they ride the bike past its owner, who shouts at them to return it. The bike owner then spontaneously stops paying attention and goes to sleep, and Cat and Lister walk the bike backwards and leave it beside the sleeping owner.

[Dave]

A man punches Lister because he is angry that Lister and the Cat have eaten his food, which is still intact and uneaten on the table.

[Ian Symes]

Then they did a jigsaw.

[Unrumble]

Lister and Cat flag a taxi into the city. Lister gives him a small tip, walks away from the taxi, the driver than shouts at him to come back, Lister then pays him the fare, and then the journey begins.

[Flap Jack]

Here’s a thought: what if the reason TARB do a bunch more shows after they get fired is that they didn’t actually get fired?

If you reverse the footage to decode what the manager’s really saying, it’s just a bunch of deluded nonsense about how someone will reverse what he says and what a pathetic person that someone is. Clearly this pub manager guy has serious mental problems and just went to the dressing room to vent about whatever his current paranoid fantasy is.

Kryten interprets it completely wrong, so he must have just been pretending to understand backwards speech and was actually bullshitting his way through the entire time.

[Warbodog]

Backwards is always analysed as if it’s just a normal universe in reverse, but the newspaper Kryten reads isn’t just a normal newspaper back to front, it’s full of prophetic language and nonsensical job ads where people are deliberately dirtying dishes, not just cleaning them backwards, and returning money to banks on purpose. It’s just a crazy non-linear place.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Backwards is always analysed as if it’s just a normal universe in reverse, but the newspaper Kryten reads isn’t just a normal newspaper back to front, it’s full of prophetic language and nonsensical job ads where people are deliberately dirtying dishes, not just cleaning them backwards, and returning money to banks on purpose. It’s just a crazy non-linear place.

Maybe Kryten is translating it into something that makes sense to Rimmer 

[Technopeasant]

Given my understanding that the Big Crunch was invalidated by universal acceleration, Holly’s entire hypothesis is bunk anyway.

[Dave]

Given my understanding that the Big Crunch was invalidated by universal acceleration, Holly’s entire hypothesis is bunk anyway.

Personally I’m starting to question whether any of it was real.

[tombow]

meanwhile in Reddit-tattoo-land…

[Author]

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