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

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

That’s a bit of a bloody stretch

oh, that was in reply to “maybe they grew a child in a lab whilst they were all in stasis” comment

[Flap Jack]

It’s possible they went into stasis (or rather deep sleep) for some or all of the 18 months, but I can’t think of any particular reason why they would.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Hang on. Are you trying to tell me Red Dwarf hasn’t quite got its continuity right?

[Formica]

It’s possible they went into stasis (or rather deep sleep) for some or all of the 18 months, but I can’t think of any particular reason why they would.

I think you’ll find they chose to go into deep sleep in Nanarchy in order to be alive when they returned to the Esperanto/the last known site of Red Dwarf (this is what I was referring to in my last post)

[Flap Jack]

Right, I wasn’t saying they never have any reason to go into deep sleep, just that the times we know about do not cross over with the period they would have had a embryo/foetus/baby Lister on board.

[Dave]

Clearly they just hopped over to the Parallel Universe dimension so that Baby Lister would grow at an accelerated rate just like Jim and Bexley did, then they hopped back and popped Baby Lister under the pool table. The whole thing probably took about twenty minutes. (The “Eighteen Months Later” caption was talking about Baby Lister’s relative age.)

[Warbodog]

The caption is relative to the first 2155 flashback and reveals that the baby Lister abandons is unrelated to the first.

[Jonathan Capps]

I sometimes wonder if the original creators of the PIP feel like Oppenheimer.

[Renegade Rob]

[cwickham]

In the Lister/Kochanski goodbye scene (before he realises he’s his own dad) Lister refers to putting the tube into the “uterine simulator” in the lab. The show pretty clearly states that Kochanski doesn’t actually carry the pregnancy.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

In short – we’re all idiots and this was a complete waste of time.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

In the Lister/Kochanski goodbye scene (before he realises he’s his own dad) Lister refers to putting the tube into the “uterine simulator” in the lab. The show pretty clearly states that Kochanski doesn’t actually carry the pregnancy.

I don’t think that’s been up for debate has it? Just, where did the 18months come from/go?

Maybe it’s from baby Lister’s perspective from the moment of conception, and he is gestating in the lab all through series VII.

Lister, after putting the sample in the simulator then takes the time drive and jumps into the future and does a Tikka to Ride Xtended on the kid and takes the fully grown baby and buggers off somewhere else for a bit before taking him to Liverpool in the 23rd century and then returning on his own to his own time ready for the events of Duct Soup.

[Flap Jack]

I wonder if Kochanski’s crew also had an altercation with their future selves that resulted in absurd “dimensional anomalies”, or if in that scene she’s secretly thinking “Uterine simulator… ? It’s a shuttlecraft???”.

[Warbodog]

I wonder if Kochanski’s crew also had an altercation with their future selves that resulted in absurd “dimensional anomalies”, or if in that scene she’s secretly thinking “Uterine simulator… ? It’s a shuttlecraft???”.

Kochanski’s crew were still on Red Dwarf rather than stranded in Starbug, according to unused effects shots:

We don’t know if our Starbug has a synthetic womb aboard that they used, but let’s face it, it does.

[Flap Jack]

Maybe it’s from baby Lister’s perspective from the moment of conception, and he is gestating in the lab all through series VII.

The reason it probably isn’t that: if Lister was gestating throughout the series, surely there would have at least been a mention of “Is the uterine simulator still OK?” whenever Starbug got into trouble, which happens in all 3 episodes after Ouroboros. And it can’t really have been happening during Epideme either, even with a time travelling Lister coming to pick himself up afterwards, unless there’s inexplicably like a year long time skip between Epideme and Nanarchy.

[Flap Jack]

Kochanski’s crew were still on Red Dwarf rather than stranded in Starbug, according to unused effects shots:

Oh! That’s surprising. I guess if they had actually properly exchanged information as alternate Kryten suggested, pertinent questions would have been “What did you do differently that meant you either didn’t lose Red Dwarf, or already found it?” and “If you didn’t lose Red Dwarf, why did you end up going into deep sleep for the same period of time as we did, and why did you end up going the same way we did, including (probably) a visit to Legion?”

We don’t know if our Starbug has a synthetic womb aboard, but let’s face it, it does.

I guess it needed to at least have IVF facilities, because if it didn’t, then Lister and Kochanski would have actually needed to have sex in order to create Lister. That would have affected the Will They?/Won’t They? thread in Series VII, surely.

Then again, I would have thought them discovering that they’re mother and son would have affected it too, and it didn’t, so what do I know?

[Renegade Rob]

There’s no way this is right, but follow me on this…

How many subjective months in-universe was it between the end of Ouroboros until the end of Nanarchy (not counting stasis)? Was it around six? Because weren’t the Dwarfers in prison for about a year by the time of Only the Good…?

Maybe we’re watching a post-VIII Lister, having recovered the Time Drive and having finally gotten around to delivering his baby self to the past, a baby which perhaps they hadn’t even gotten around to completing the IVF/gestation for since Kochanski joined the crew and was around anyways. (And through timey wimey tech, it may have been possible to grow the baby really fast, so it wouldn’t take additional months beyond the 18-month period covering the end of VII and all of VIII.)

But I’m sure this is wrong and will be justifiably contradicted immediately. 

[Dave]

Kochanski’s crew were still on Red Dwarf rather than stranded in Starbug, according to unused effects shots:

Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

[Flap Jack]

There’s no way this is right, but follow me on this…

That’s an interesting possibility, but as they set up the Lister embryo in Ouroboros itself, it’s weirder the longer they wait. It could be that the frozen embryo they create there isn’t actually the Lister embryo and they create another one later, but it would still mean the time drive had to survive the Back in the Red Starbug explosion.

Which is plausible, given Rimmer was able to retrieve confidential documents and positive viruses, but again you’d think in the wake of the explosion Lister would have expressed some concern that he might be about to Back to the Future out of existence. Maybe he’s just going around with Arthur Dent level confidence, assured that he, Kochanski and the time drive are immortal as long as he keeps putting off his own creation.

[International Debris]

That’s surprising. I guess if they had actually properly exchanged information as alternate Kryten suggested, pertinent questions would have been “What did you do differently that meant you either didn’t lose Red Dwarf, or already found it?” and “If you didn’t lose Red Dwarf, why did you end up going into deep sleep for the same period of time as we did, and why did you end up going the same way we did, including (probably) a visit to Legion?”  

Kryten handwaves it away in a deleted scene by saying “long story” about 18 times.

[Unrumble]

I guess if they had actually properly exchanged information as alternate Kryten suggested, pertinent questions would have been “What did you do differently that meant you either didn’t lose Red Dwarf, or already found it?” and “If you didn’t lose Red Dwarf, why did you end up going into deep sleep for the same period of time as we did, and why did you end up going the same way we did, including (probably) a visit to Legion?”

[Renegade Rob]

There might be sort of a self-selection in the physics of the dimensional linkway in that there wouldn’t even be a connection to dimensions where the alternate crew wasn’t around to link with, so all the many other dimensions where the ship went a different way or where the crew didn’t go into deep sleep for the same period of time, those wouldn’t have connected at all. 

Also, with regards to baby Lister, in theory, any alternate Lister whose point of divergence from “our” Lister was after he was a baby, would also be a product of the same paradoxical time loop. So (and this is a stretch, mind you), is it possible that Kochanski’s holo-Lister, having realized the truth of his own birth from what “our” Lister was shouting in the linkway, eventually found a way to become human again (like there was a human Rimmer in VIII), and with leftover IVF/DNA from Kochanski, fertilized and gestated the baby in that dimension and then popped back in time to drop off the baby? Since that point in time with the pool table was pre-divergence, that point would also the same origin point for “our” Lister as well. 

So in the epilogue to Ouroboros, we’re watching a future now-human alt-Lister dropping off his baby self, which is made even more bittersweet by the fact that he lost the woman he loves as a result of this paradox but was able to achieve her dream of having her baby. 

[Renegade Rob]

(Apologies for the crappy spacing, I couldn’t for the life of me get the second and third paragraphs to double-space properly) 

[Warbodog]

[Renegade Rob]

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

A quick word outside, if you will.

[Podey]

I wonder if Kochanski’s crew also had an altercation with their future selves that resulted in absurd “dimensional anomalies”, or if in that scene she’s secretly thinking “Uterine simulator… ? It’s a shuttlecraft???”.

Kochanski’s crew were still on Red Dwarf rather than stranded in Starbug, according to unused effects shots:

We don’t know if our Starbug has a synthetic womb aboard that they used, but let’s face it, it does.

I always took Kochanski’s surprise that they’re on Starbug when she wakes up as an indication she came from Red Dwarf.

[Formica]

There might be sort of a self-selection in the physics of the dimensional linkway in that there wouldn’t even be a connection to dimensions where the alternate crew wasn’t around to link with, so all the many other dimensions where the ship went a different way or where the crew didn’t go into deep sleep for the same period of time, those wouldn’t have connected at all. 

Those two spots in parallel spacetime were just super fucking Entangled

[International Debris]

Given what happens in Dimension Jump, RD has previous when it comes to alternate versions of characters seeking each other out over time.

[Unrumble]

I always took Kochanski’s surprise that they’re on Starbug when she wakes up as an indication she came from Red Dwarf.

That makes a lot of sense, especially in light of that unused effects shot. I think I always assumed it just meant that there were superficial/structural differences to her Starbug, being from a parallel universe and all. 

[Unrumble]

A quick word outside, if you will.

I don’t actually have any beef with ‘Nanarchy’ or VII (it was the currently airing series when I was getting into Dwarf, so lives firmly in the joyous nostalgia centre of my mind), was just playing to the crowd really.

[Warbodog]

A quick word outside, if you will.

I don’t actually have any beef with ‘Nanarchy’ or VII (it was the currently airing series when I was getting into Dwarf, so lives firmly in the joyous nostalgia centre of my mind), was just playing to the crowd really.

I always felt cold to VII, but the Xtended video was the only Red Dwarf I had for a while, so

[Frank Smeghammer]

I like all of VII really. None of it is anywhere near as bad as some of The Others, and of course you know the episodes of which I speak when I say that

[Ridley]

Holoship, right.

[Ridley]

[Ridley]

I don’t think Cat/Kochanski having the antagonism could have been sustained across X amount of episodes, Cat ain’t deep enough.

[Podey]

It’s interesting in terms of just being something they didn’t do but Kochanski isn’t really presented as being vain or anything in the same way that Cat is so it wouldn’t make sense for him to see her as a rival and it does make sense for him to want to impress her.

[Ridley]

I could see it from a needy pet angle but Cat couldn’t care less what Lister thinks of him (usually).

There’s mileage to be gained from Kochanski being competent and trapped with everything being a bit crap, I feel, and yet the show’s more interested in her being every woman who ever existed.

I keep forgetting the implication that Lister deliberately sabotaged her attempt to get home. Which I’m going to handwave as Kryten being paranoid.

[Ian Symes]

Bless the Gals for making predictions as if any of this is going to be resolved in any way.

[Formica]

Watching this week’s GG reminded me of this little line:

Now I’m not going to act like it’s definitive – “a few weeks” could mean anything, it could be literal or it could be a facetious way about talk about a long time, plus not everybody always tells the truth in dreams, but it does put something of a slight crimp on any Eighteen Months Later explanations that fall between Ouroboros and Blue.

[Podey]

Bless the Gals for making predictions as if any of this is going to be resolved in any way.

Now I’m not going to act like it’s definitive – “a few weeks” could mean anything, it could be literal or it could be a facetious way about talk about a long time, plus not everybody always tells the truth in dreams, but it does put something of a slight crimp on any Eighteen Months Later explanations that fall between Ouroboros and Blue.

And bless us for trying to figure out this show’s continuity as if it has any…

[tombow]

I’ve always thought that Blue’s placement in the series is weirdly unfair on Kochanski as a character. Just as we’re getting used to her being in the crew and used to Rimmer being gone, we get an episode about remembering how funny Rimmer was. It feels like it would have been based saved for the next (hypothetical Rimmer-less) series.

[cwickham]

One wonders if that was the motivation behind switching Duct Soup and Blue in the Autumn 1997 BBC Two repeat run.

[Podey]

Interesting that the Gals think Kochanski will leave at the end of the series. I mean, they’re only one series out before that does happen but still.

[Warbodog]

Just as we’re getting used to her being in the crew and used to Rimmer being gone, we get an episode about remembering how funny Rimmer was. It feels like it would have been based saved for the next (hypothetical Rimmer-less) series.

I felt that in 1997. It felt less like a celebration and more like milking the exit of a character whose actor clearly didn’t want to be it any more. Just go away then and stop coming back unless you feel different. Then when you watch in order today, he’s back in 5 episodes anyway (spoiler) and the continuity is never referenced again, so it’s all pointless.

[tombow]

I was trying to type “best saved”, not “based saved”, btw…

[Unrumble]

I was trying to type “best saved”, not “based saved”, btw…

[Dave]

A based guess is presumably what you get from Chris Barrie’s website.

[Nick R]

As the old saying goes: a based saved is a based earned.

[Ridley]

Is there a way to bend reality so that the Gallifrey Gals’ optimism for a Rimmer/Kochanski dynamic isn’t horribly smashed against a series VIII rock?

[Author]

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