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

[Podey]

[Podey]

I’ve also taken the liberty of transcribing the next very thing Hawking says in that segment.

[Moonlight]

Now that we’re all super used to it, what does everybody think about the Dave-era Red Dwarf mothership? Everyone felt it looked lopsided when it was first seen, but I honestly dig the weird proportions of it. I think it adds a nice degree of unique weirdness that’s very welcome given the pencil ship always felt more generic sci-fi than the original design. It doesn’t feel like an aesthetic choice that would happen organically if you were designing from scratch, but in a good way.

[loadoftottnumb]

Yeah I really like it, it feels much more in tune with the show than the pencil design. 

[Dave]

I think it’s mostly fine, but the ram scoop is way too big.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I think it’s mostly fine, but the ram scoop is way too big.

Yeah this is my only issue. Since the ship is cut down the scoop has this sense of being the size of the main body. 

But otherwise I like it. Good, modern (even if built in 1998) take on the original ship/model

[Warbodog]

The scoop looks too much like a hungry gob, but maybe only because I’m used to the modest original. It theoretically needs to be much larger to actually work.

[clem]

Yes I agree the scoop is much too big, and the ‘RED DWARF’ name looks too small. Also it might just be the way it’s lit but the ship looks like it’s a duller red than the old model. It’s almost Burgundy Dwarf. 

[Dave]

[Captain Bollocks]

They changed it to military red from the dowdy, old, nasty ocean red. Or was it the other way around? 

[Captain Bollocks]

In Stasis Leak, does it simply never occur to Lister or Rimmer that they could theoretically go back in time and fix the faulty drive plate?

Is it not damaged yet? Is it took risky to attempt to fix it so close to the accident? Will somebody notice (our) Lister fixing it when (past) Lister should be in stasis? (I guess if it breaks after Lister goes into stasis then (past) Rimmer would report him for trying to help.) 

If Lister realises he could go back in time and fix the drive plate, does he then have a massive existential crisis about it? Would the Cat, having travelled through the magic door, continue to exist, or would fixing the drive plate essentially condemn him to certain death? Is one life more valuable than the entirety of the crew?

Does it create a paradox where (our) Lister ceases to exist and is therefore unable to travel back to fix it? Does Lister cease to exist but the drive plate remains fixed? Does there end up being two Listers on board since he already left the version of Red Dwarf that now no longer exists? How do they break the news to Kochanski that there’s two of them? One for the week and one for Sunday best? 

Does hologram Rimmer moan that, even though (old) Rimmer will continue to be alive, hologram Rimmer is now not only superfluous, but also outranked by McIntyre and therefore destined to be switched off regardless? 

COME ON ROB AND/OR DOUG, WRITE A ONE-UNIVERSE-TO-THE-LEFT NOVEL ABOUT THIS, PLEASE. 

[Podey]

Speaking of timey wimey stuff, I’m sure I’m not alone in hating that Doug changed the resolution to Out of Time so that the future Starbuggers were the ones who destroyed the time drive and not old iron balls, even though we literally saw him fire a bazookoid at it.

Rimmer wuz robbed!

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Speaking of timey wimey stuff, I’m sure I’m not alone in hating that Doug changed the resolution to Out of Time so that the future Starbuggers were the ones who destroyed the time drive and not old iron balls, even though we literally saw him fire a bazookoid at it.

Rimmer wuz robbed!

The timelines are unstable and the realities have merged.

But yes it does rob Rimmer a little bit.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

In Stasis Leak, does it simply never occur to Lister or Rimmer that they could theoretically go back in time and fix the faulty drive plate?
Is it not damaged yet? Is it took risky to attempt to fix it so close to the accident? Will somebody notice (our) Lister fixing it when (past) Lister should be in stasis? (I guess if it breaks after Lister goes into stasis then (past) Rimmer would report him for trying to help.) 
If Lister realises he could go back in time and fix the drive plate, does he then have a massive existential crisis about it? Would the Cat, having travelled through the magic door, continue to exist, or would fixing the drive plate essentially condemn him to certain death? Is one life more valuable than the entirety of the crew?
Does it create a paradox where (our) Lister ceases to exist and is therefore unable to travel back to fix it? Does Lister cease to exist but the drive plate remains fixed? Does there end up being two Listers on board since he already left the version of Red Dwarf that now no longer exists? How do they break the news to Kochanski that there’s two of them? One for the week and one for Sunday best? 
Does hologram Rimmer moan that, even though (old) Rimmer will continue to be alive, hologram Rimmer is now not only superfluous, but also outranked by McIntyre and therefore destined to be switched off regardless? 
COME ON ROB AND/OR DOUG, WRITE A ONE-UNIVERSE-TO-THE-LEFT NOVEL ABOUT THIS, PLEASE. 

It never occurs to them to just stay either.

They seem to be operating on the basis that they can’t drastically change the past, and that their current lives stuck in the future are somehow fixed.

[RunawayTrain]

It never occurs to them to just stay either.
They seem to be operating on the basis that they can’t drastically change the past, and that their current lives stuck in the future are somehow fixed.

They’re not aware what genre they’re in, and at that point I don’t know that they’d necessarily know very much about time travel.  Before that there were the Future Echoes, which wouldn’t give them any reason to think their future *wasn’t* fixed.

[Podey]

If Lister sees that his future self is married to Kochanski, does that not give him motivation to preserve the timeline as it is? 

[Captain Bollocks]

It does, but that also means he still has to allow the meltdown to happen and kill the crew, albeit made easier to digest by the fact he presumably hasn’t thought to do that.

In fairness, it also took me the best part of 35 years to realise it too, so I can’t really blame him. Lucky it still hadn’t occurred to him before they got to Justice World – imagine the Justice Field overloading itself trying to comprehend Rimmer and Lister sharing the same guilt over somehow separately being responsible for the same 1,167 deaths. 

Which has led me to a further query – Is there only one light bee? In Justice, after Lister, Cat and Kryten are allowed to leave, why don’t they just go back to Red Dwarf, turn Rimmer off, then reboot him again back on the ship? Is that aiding and abetting a criminal escape?

And hell, why is the Justice Field trying to convict a hologram? It’s not like the hologram did it, the actual guy is already dead! And it obviously knows what a hologram is, since “that has been accounted for”. Maybe it was just poorly programmed, or it was such an unlikely eventuality that nobody thought of it? 

[Podey]

Given his “hologrammatic status has been accounted for”, I’d presume the technology within his prison boots are able to trap his projection within them (and subsequently the colony), otherwise they wouldn’t be fit for purpose.

I dunno, I honestly don’t think that it’s a dilemma for Lister when you’re talking about something that has already happened. I mean, given that it has “happened” happened and not just “will have going to have happened” happened, actually.

[Flap Jack]

That is definitely one of the many flaws of Stasis Leak’s time travel storytelling for me. It feels like there should have been a conversation about the implications of the time portal, what was possible/advisable and what wasn’t. Instead we skip to Lister acting as if he already knows that he can’t do anything to change history and he also can’t just sneak off the ship in the past and go home, and only with some prompting does it occur to him that he could save Kochanski via stasis booth. Yet nobody thinks they can try anything more ambitious than saving 1 person, even saving them in a way that allows them to not be frozen in time for 3 million years, for no real reason. All it needed was a few lines from Holly saying that the stasis leak only allows them to stay in the past temporarily, and also that preventing the radiation leak or compelling any crewmembers to abandon Red Dwarf would cause too big a paradox.

Future Echoes did give them compelling reasons to think that the course of time could not be changed, but the fact that they do try to save people they know died shows that they didn’t really take that to heart (and Timeslides later makes it even less ambiguous).

If Lister sees that his future self is married to Kochanski, does that
not give him motivation to preserve the timeline as it is?

That explains why Lister let it be at the end, but not why he didn’t have any more ideas throughout the episode.

[clem]

I’m sure I’m not alone in hating that Doug changed the resolution to Out of Time so that the future Starbuggers were the ones who destroyed the time drive and not old iron balls, even though we literally saw him fire a bazookoid at it.

Rimmer wuz robbed!

Even though the exact moment Rimmer fires isn’t in the recap in Tikka, I’ve never really seen it as a retcon and always thought that what causes Starbug to explode is meant to be ambiguous, because Rimmer’s shot at the time drive and the future crew’s shot at Starbug hit at almost exactly the same time. The cliffhanger is a much better ending than the unused urine-recyc scene, regardless of how it was eventually resolved. 

[Dave]

I’ve never really seen it as a retcon and always thought that what causes Starbug to explode is meant to be ambiguous, because Rimmer’s shot at the time drive and the future crew’s shot at Starbug hit at almost exactly the same time.

Yeah, same. I think you’re meant to be unsure exactly what happened. 

[Podey]

Oh I agree, the ending of Out of Time is one of all my all time favourite Dwarf moments, it’s the recap at the start of Tikka to Ride that annoys me.

Lister: We were no match; they killed us, and destroyed everything on board ship – including the Time Drive, which meant there was no Time Drive for them to have in the future, to bring back into the past, to destroy the future of their past selves in the present.

[Stabbim]

In Stasis Leak, does it simply never occur to Lister or Rimmer that they could theoretically go back in time and fix the faulty drive plate?
Is it not damaged yet? Is it took risky to attempt to fix it so close to the accident? Will somebody notice (our) Lister fixing it when (past) Lister should be in stasis? (I guess if it breaks after Lister goes into stasis then (past) Rimmer would report him for trying to help.) 
If Lister realises he could go back in time and fix the drive plate, does he then have a massive existential crisis about it? Would the Cat, having travelled through the magic door, continue to exist, or would fixing the drive plate essentially condemn him to certain death? Is one life more valuable than the entirety of the crew?
Does it create a paradox where (our) Lister ceases to exist and is therefore unable to travel back to fix it? Does Lister cease to exist but the drive plate remains fixed? Does there end up being two Listers on board since he already left the version of Red Dwarf that now no longer exists? How do they break the news to Kochanski that there’s two of them? One for the week and one for Sunday best? 
Does hologram Rimmer moan that, even though (old) Rimmer will continue to be alive, hologram Rimmer is now not only superfluous, but also outranked by McIntyre and therefore destined to be switched off regardless? 
COME ON ROB AND/OR DOUG, WRITE A ONE-UNIVERSE-TO-THE-LEFT NOVEL ABOUT THIS, PLEASE. 

Well, it’s not jut Cat’s life, it’s all of Felis Sapiens, wherever they are.  And Lister already feels bad enough about what has happened to them an account of his laundry list and the color of the cardboard hats.  I’m willing to accept he is unwilling to unmake their entire collective existence (even though he apparently is in Timeslides, but whatever). So perhaps he’s not picking 1 life over 1,169, but millions.

Other than that I suppose you’d have to accept that there’s no way for Lister to actually experience the alternate timeline this creates: the stasis leak only allows travel in that 3 million year increment, so the saved crew would still all be long dead anyway and he, too, would instantly expire upon stepping back through the leak, because he and Kochanski/Rimmer would’ve been let out of the stasis pods at the normal time, 2,999,999 years ago and lived out their lives on Titan, Io, or wherever. [And that Lister realizes this somehow, I guess].

[International Debris]

It’s something I’ve pondered myself during one of my many “where did it all go wrong?” moments – if I could go back in time and change something so my life went in a very different direction, would that be a form of suicide? I’d effectively be killing the me that has existed since that moment, and I would never appreciate the difference in how my life went. 

Morbid thinking for 6:45AM.

[Dave]

It’s something I’ve pondered myself during one of my many “where did it all go wrong?” moments – if I could go back in time and change something so my life went in a very different direction, would that be a form of suicide? I’d effectively be killing the me that has existed since that moment, and I would never appreciate the difference in how my life went. 

I think that an interesting twist on this kind of story would be: what if you already did? What if you’re living the alternate reality right now?

Imagine a version of the Inquisitor where ‘our’ Lister and Kryten are the ones who show up to rescue Rimmer and Cat from these weird alternate versions who claim to be the original. Or a version of Timeslides where someone else pops into Lister’s life to tell him that it should have gone differently but has been meddled with (Lewis Pemberton?).

I think there’s a potentially interesting story there.

[Warbodog]

I think that an interesting twist on this kind of story would be: what if you already did? What if you’re living the alternate reality right now?

Total Recall kind of does it via amnesia, when Quaid discovers he’s “”really”” a dick.

[Dave]

Ah yeah, that’s a good example. I suppose Back To Reality also plays with that kind of idea (I’d never made the link to Total Recall but there are quite a few similarities).

[Dave]

Also, I guess any time-loop grandfather-paradox story (like the original Terminator or indeed Ouroboros) implies that the characters are living altered lives that are the result of time-travel meddling, although the nature of time loops means that it isn’t always clear whether there was an original that was overwritten or it’s always been the same looping continuity.

[Warbodog]

[Dave]

[Warbodog]

[Podey]

I’ve only just learned today that Stephen Hawking was in the news this month for Epstein-related reasons, totally passed me by so apologies if anyone thought that reference to him above was inappropriate…! 

[Captain Bollocks]

All it needed was a few lines from Holly saying that the stasis leak only allows them to stay in the past temporarily, and also that preventing the radiation leak or compelling any crewmembers to abandon Red Dwarf would cause too big a paradox.

I could imagine a scene where Lister says he’ll just go back into the past to fix the drive plate, only for Holly to remind him that he’ll not only cause a massive paradox that could potentially destroy the universe, but at the very least he’ll wipe out the entire cat race (Rimmer – “well that’s hardly a big loss!”). Lister defeatedly asks “So there’s nothing we can do then?” and Holly says “Well, you could always put someone in that spare stasis booth and bring them here”. “But wouldn’t that cause one of those paradox things?” “There’s not much difference between being dead and being missing for three million years, so I wouldn’t have thought so.” And thus, Lister has no cause to prevent the meltdown, but has the goal of saving Kochanski. 

Although, presumably they must know it’s a fruitless mission, otherwise Holly would have already detected the other stasis booth being occupied? Unless he can’t since it’s a none-event mass with a quantum probability of zero. I suppose he’d have to not be able to spot a stasis booth being active anyway, since he would surely be alerted of it in the past when either Kochanski or Rimmer uses it (and of course, Rimmer has been using it in secret in the novels, so presumably it’s not on Holly’s radar). 

It also feels like there’s a potentially heartbreaking subplot, where Lister doesn’t see his future self with Kochanski, can’t fix the drive plate, and is resigned to not being able to bring her into his timeline, so chooses to save her life by convincing her to go AWOL, believing she’ll live a full and happy life but having to live the rest of his life knowing she’ll have likely ended up with someone else. Which is pretty bleak, though I suppose she’s already met future Lister before present Lister has even gone back through the stasis leak. 

I suppose the next question is why don’t Lister and Cat just stay on Ganymede? Lister avoids being detected on the ship  when he should be in stasis, he and Cat avoid the meltdown and live in a place populated by more than just themselves, and Rimmer is condemned to being stuck alone with Holly three million years in the future, who probably just switches him off anyway. Or, they end up meeting Kryten, and it’s just the three of them until all of their batteries finally go flat. (I think the answer probably goes back to – because Lister sees his future self with Kochanski, that’s his motivation to return to the ship.) 

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

I’ve only just learned today that Stephen Hawking was in the news this month for Epstein-related reasons, totally passed me by so apologies if anyone thought that reference to him above was inappropriate…! 

There’s a genuine image floating around of him at a scientific conference held on one of Epstein’s islands – because not every do there was a rich nonce orgy – and because of that there’s some fake news circulating that he took part in some of those orgies and was allegedly named in the court documents. The supposed excerpt detailing his exploits isn’t in the actual document, and fact checkers are all pretty convinced it’s a forgery. But even besides that – it’s Stephen Hawking. Use some common sense, people. He needed assistance with virtually if not literally everything. I don’t even think he would’ve had the body strength to survive an orgy. I mean, he looked pretty frail. There was no muscle mass there. Just look at the pics of him from his space trip. He’s like a twig.

[RunawayTrain]

^ AP News says the list is of people mentioned in court cases for any reason, even in passing during depositions, prosecutors, journalists present, etc., so being on the list means literally nothing.  And apparently the reason SH is on there is he “was one of many scientists who attended a five-day conference in the Caribbean funded by Epstein.”

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-misinformation-epstein-haley-tmobile-58498098b4dacfa7863b1416fbcac6a6

[Not that I wish to derail the thread, and I know we’re all capable of doing Google searches and discerning which sources are reliable.  But just in case anyone was concerned what kind of thing they might find!]

[International Debris]

(I think the answer probably goes back to – because Lister sees his future self with Kochanski, that’s his motivation to return to the ship.) 

This is a fairly good reason for Lister not using any ‘get back to Earth’ route up until series six. Except Timeslides fucks that up.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Timeslides clear shows Lister so depressed he’s willing to forgo his own mortality around wealth, and abandon his friends (and genocide an entire species) just to get out of it. He clearly isn’t himself.

[Podey]

Do I need to apologise for inadvertently implying I might have thought Hawking was guilty of anything, now, too…? 😜

[Jenuall]

[Unrumble]

What the hell did Rimmer do to the lamb for everyone to mistake it for cheese? 

[Dave]

What the hell did Rimmer do to the lamb for everyone to mistake it for cheese? 

Filled it with cheese

[tombow]

Frankenstein and her descendants would still have existed in the rich Lister timeline though. Maybe they’d have been better off evolving off dwarf.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Frankenstein and her descendants would still have existed in the rich Lister timeline though. Maybe they’d have been better off evolving off dwarf.

You’re assuming they survive wherever they are and don’t get run over or eaten by dogs or something. Also assuming that they would evolve if they are around humans. Who is to say they only evolved because they weren’t. 

Arguably locked in the hold on Red Dwarf was the safest place for them. And maybe the environment they needed to evolve. 

[tombow]

I got the novelisation of Alien – Covenant and read a little of it, I haven’t seen the film but in the novel the captain has worry balls like Rimmer in Rimmerworld. I can’t think of any more sci fi characters with worry balls. I wish I’d seen the film now as that would have made me laugh.

[Renegade Rob]

So apparently the first level of the old Star Wars game Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight (the one with the infamous live action cutscenes), is the Rimmer’s Rest Cantina on Nar Shaddaa (which has a bitchin neon dragon sign). One imagines that’s more a reference to Outer Rim denizens, but I don’t often hear them being called “Rimmers”, so the the thought occurs if whoever came up with that name was doing a Red Dwarf shoutout in some way, like how in the original Sim City, neighboring cities would sometimes be called Lister and Rimmer. 

[Podey]

Looks like another cast reunion is going to happen at Liverpool comic con as Craig, Danny and Chris have been announced this week. Presume Robert is to follow.

[Podey]

Just a thought…. does the existence of space weevils negate the idea that no alien life exists in the RDU? Presumably the fact they’re called “space weevils” imply they are not from Earth? 🤨

[Dave]

No, they’re just weevils that thrive in space.

Think of the name as being more like water buffalo. 

[Podey]

Yeah but water is *on earth*. It’s not like they’ve found water buffalo on mars. 

….. yet.

[Moonlight]

Space weevil strikes me as either a GELF or an arthropod that evolved in the three million years since the present.

[Author]

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