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

[clem]

Lee Mack did the Areola = Spanish goalkeeper gag from Dear Dave on WILTY tonight.

[Warbodog]

Kind of similar ‘silent’ comedy scenes in back-to-back episodes.

[Ian Symes]

What’s going on here? In Epideme, Delta 7 was a planet, and when they got there it had been completely torched. In TPL, Kryten’s “the” implies that it’s a ship or a space station, and the impression you get is that it’s a fairly recent salvage job – and indeed that there’s stuff there to salvage. So it can’t be the same Delta 7, and it seems unlikely to be a deliberate back reference. So has Doug just separately come up with the same cool sounding combination of Greek letter and number twice, 23 years apart?

[clem]

At least he didn’t name them Frank. 

[Unrumble]

[Dave]

The plot thickens.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

[Warbodog]

[clem]

[clem]

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

[RunawayTrain]

OH MY GOODNESS I’ve just realised why Bodyswap feels SO much like a IV episode – because DNA starts with them at the same console!!! 

I may have just done the world’s biggest facepalm for not realising that before.  Hoo boy, that’s a relief anyway.

[Unrumble]

Don’t know if I’ve clocked this before (though many will have), but just noticed while getting this gif for something else, that Danny is standing too close to the ‘join’ between the two shots, so you can see part of him fade out as Rimmer does.

[Jonathan Capps]

I sure hope someone got sacked for that blunder.

[Unrumble]

[Jenuall]

The little look down Danny does now feels more like a check for the mark on the floor and realising he’s not over it rather than him reacting to what’s happening to Rimmer

[Rudolph]

Don’t know if I’ve clocked this before (though many will have), but just noticed while getting this gif for something else, that Danny is standing too close to the ‘join’ between the two shots, so you can see part of him fade out as Rimmer does.

Should have asked split-screen join avoider maestro Craig for some tips.

[Ridley]

The little look down Danny does now feels more like a check for the mark on the floor and realising he’s not over it rather than him reacting to what’s happening to Rimmer

He’s reacting to his arm disappearing.

[Unrumble]

[Unrumble]

The little look down Danny does now feels more like a check for the mark on the floor and realising he’s not over it rather than him reacting to what’s happening to Rimmer

Yeah, now you’ve said that, it looks like he does an extra little side-step after he looks down, a fraction before they exit.

[Dave]

[Nick R]

[loadoftottnumb]

Ace didn’t lose it but break it/lose use of it. Napoleon made a brief appearance too. 

[desbug]

[Hamish]

I suppose it is easy enough to headcannon as just being a visual distortion of the light as it passes through the fading Rimmer projection.

[Warbodog]

It’s somehow only just occurred to me that Kryten ‘retroactively’ becoming more servile again in series VI, and Lister’s ‘out of character’ encouragement, is a direct result of them not having food dispensers any more and needing to manually prepare all their food, Lister’s idealism surrendering to his laziness.

(“I’m not doing my own smegging ironing” is still too much though, if taken seriously. Why would Lister even care about ironing?)

The notion (at least mine) of the ‘definitive’ Kryten characterisation & performance is also extremely narrow compared to the rest of the cast, since he showed up later and then took a while to settle down. It only really spans IV-VI, and some of IV is still rusty, and each of those three series has a bit of a different take, making his more independent development by V more the outlier. At least the other three cast members have at least half of perfect Red Dwarf to their credit, sometimes more.

[International Debris]

On the whole he’s probably the least consistent character in the show. At times he’s shown to dislike cleaning, while at others his idea of heaven is cleaning up.

It’s a good point about VI, though, and it ties in with one of my observations from the recent rewatch, which is that in many ways, VII feels like a continuation/expansion of where the show was going in V – darker, more dramatic, more character-baaed, Lister and Kryten becoming closer – with VI being more of the outlier between them. 

[Dave]

Just noticed this as I was posting an image to the Smegadrive randomiser thread – in Stasis Leak, Rimmer seems to be reading a retro late-1980s magazine about Amstrad PCs.

I can’t work out exactly what it is – the other shots are a bit too grainy to offer any clues.

[Warbodog]

Never noticed that stuffed donkey type thing under the banana either.

It’s like a Fifth Young One.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Never noticed that stuffed donkey type thing under the banana either.

It’s like a Fifth Young One.

What the actual fuck?

Fifth Young One? It’s like discovering the Red Dwarf opening theme has lyrics. 

[Dave]

Yeah I always enjoyed the callback in Gunmen.

[Nick R]

Didn’t you know? It’s hidden somewhere in every episode, like the hare in Inside No. 9.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Everyone pretend I made a The End Remastered but replace the Skutter at the start with that stuffed donkey 

[Warbodog]

[clem]

[clem]

[Warbodog]

[Stephen Abootman]

No idea where to put this so this’ll do. Boxer Tony Bellew recently commented as follows:

““Remember Red Dwarf? Remember H, the guy who had a ‘H’ on his forehead? Well David Haye had a pound sign, like ‘H’ had, to me. That’s how I looked at him.”

Any H fans in the forum?

[Flap Jack]

[Dave]

Edit: Flappo simultaneously posted the same idea but made it even funnier.

[Flap Jack]

Ah ha, great minds.

[Warbodog]

[Unrumble]

[Stephen Abootman]

[clem]

[clem]

[Warbodog]

[Dave]

[Frank Smeghammer]

[International Debris]

 

[Author]

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