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

[Moonlight]

Once again raising my argument that Red Dwarf does have an alien now because the Universe seems to be intelligent and I somehow doubt it evolved on Earth.

[Flap Jack]

The point is that no life independently evolved on another planet and all can trace their origin to Earth

Obviously I understand this. It’s just interesting how it’s not truly correct to summarise that as saying Red Dwarf has no aliens, because the common definition of ‘alien’ is a lot broader than that. “No life-forms whose existence can’t be ultimately traced back to Earth or humans in some way rule” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like “No aliens rule” does, I guess.

Once again raising my argument that Red Dwarf does have an alien now because the Universe seems to be intelligent and I somehow doubt it evolved on Earth.

Pretty compelling… although if you take its name literally, then it’s as much native to Earth as it is native to anywhere else. And if you take its name non-literally and consider it to be a creator deity that actually comes from outside the universe, then most stories which treat the existence of God as fact aren’t by default regarded as “having an alien in it”… BUT THEY SHOULD BE.

Although you could also take the easy way out and just subscribe to the fan theory that Uni was really a supercomputer or creature that was created by humans, and merely believes itself to be the universe.

[Moonlight]

The Universe is an alien and the show is ruined. Ed Bye is going to hear about this at the next DJ.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Uni could easily be sentience evolved within the computer that was trying to contact the universe after millennia alone. And once it emerged it just believed itself to be the universe.

The holovirus in Quarantine could well be an independently evolved virus. There’s nothing that indicates it has Earth origins. Just that it infects holograms. 

[Warbodog]

[Podey]

I was just watching the series 8 opening titles to see how spoilery they are for Gallifrey Gals and I have never noticed before that they use the same shot of Starbug exploding twice, at the start and at the end.  

They must be the only ones that reuse the same shot, right?

[Unrumble]

The Universe is an alien and the show is ruined. Ed Bye is going to hear about this at the next DJ.

[Technopeasant]

A desert planet, the only life-forms – the most basic single-celled protozoa – and me.

He doesn’t say the protozoa are native to Rimmerworld, merely that they are there with him. They might have also come with the seeding ship.


Which does suggest there are non-terraformed S3 planets that are still abiotic, which is what the seeding ship in Back to Reality was after,

[Warbodog]

A desert planet, the only life-forms – the most basic single-celled protozoa – and me.

He doesn’t say the protozoa are native to Rimmerworld, merely that they are there with him. They might have also come with the seeding ship.

A fair, if generous reading. How about this from the same episode then?

[Moonlight]

They’re in a very moist area of space.

[Flap Jack]

And I suppose humans also created a pan-dimensional liquid beast, right?

[Moonlight]

And I suppose humans also created a pan-dimensional liquid beast, right?

[Warbodog]

I think they just forgot during most of series VI, sometimes quickly adding a line of GELF context to an episode about aliens at the last minute.

[Dave]

[Moonlight]

Obviously discounting Quarantine because he’s not himself, Rimmer definitely never gets more insane than he does in Bodyswap. Even Bodysnatcher Rimmer isn’t as cuckoo bananas.

The closest other example is probably Meltdown but that doesn’t feel as purely deranged as Bodyswap to me, plus the line implying chewing his light bee fucked him up.

[Warbodog]

Obviously discounting Quarantine because he’s not himself, Rimmer definitely never gets more insane than he does in Bodyswap.

He’s not really himself in Bodyswap either.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

And I suppose humans also created a pan-dimensional liquid beast, right?

I was thinking, but didn’t want to say, that technically speaking Ace is an alien our universe.

[Nick R]

Also, on that note felis sapiens are especially aliens. Not only has no “current era” cat person ever had Earth as a home (and it’s unlikely any of them other than Felix have been there at all), that’s true for the entire species throughout history. Felis sapiens aren’t “from Earth”, they’re from Red Dwarf.

[Nick R]

I was thinking, but didn’t want to say, that technically speaking Ace is an alien our universe.

There’s probably an Ace Rimmer versus Nazis/Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull “interdimensional beings from the space between spaces” joke in there somewhere, if anyone wants to make one.

[Flap Jack]

There are no aliens in Red Dwarf, because all of the more fantastical beings were created by humans (Rob Grant and Doug Naylor).

[Captain Bollocks]

What does the red spectrum tell us about polymorphs, when the state of Rimmer’s and Lister’s personality-altered subconscious is for Rimmer to attempt to create C.L.I.T.O.R.I.S., while Lister just wants to get out there and twat it? 

[Warbodog]

What does the red spectrum tell us about polymorphs, when the state of Rimmer’s and Lister’s personality-altered subconscious is for Rimmer to attempt to create C.L.I.T.O.R.I.S., while Lister just wants to get out there and twat it? 

Meanwhile, Cat’s a bum and Kryten offers a detailed physical description of an asshole in a deleted scene.

[Technopeasant]

A desert planet, the only life-forms – the most basic single-celled protozoa – and me.
He doesn’t say the protozoa are native to Rimmerworld, merely that they are there with him. They might have also come with the seeding ship.
A fair, if generous reading. How about this from the same episode then?

Yes, that one occurred to me too. I suppose we were going around seeding asteroids for some reason?

Or it was a seeded planet that blew up and created an asteroid belt they happened to be in.

The Red Dwarf Wikia offers this:

“In the real world, molds have been found to be surviving on the hull of the International Space Station; the European Space Agency has sent up pods of lichens to see if they could survive the vacuum and cosmic radiation (they did); and NASA is constantly trying ways to disinfect spacecraft since microbes thrive in the environment.^“

^{https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wiki/Space_food}

[Warbodog]

I suppose we were going around seeding asteroids for some reason?
Or it was a seeded planet that blew up and created an asteroid belt they happened to be in.

Kryten jetissoned Lister’s mould ‘Albert’ into space, where it landed on a nearby asteroid, the same asteroid that Kryten subsequently crashed into on the space bike. This sent the asteroid hurtling through space, where they came across it again centuries later in Starbug and Lister ate Albert.

[Technopeasant]

I suppose we were going around seeding asteroids for some reason?
Or it was a seeded planet that blew up and created an asteroid belt they happened to be in.

Kryten jetissoned Lister’s mould ‘Albert’ into space, where it landed on a nearby asteroid, the same asteroid that Kryten subsequently crashed into on the space bike. This sent the asteroid hurtling through space, where they came across it again centuries later in Starbug and Lister ate Albert.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

No but that doesn’t work either, because they found him embedded in the asteroid and had to dig him out.

[Warbodog]

No but that doesn’t work either, because they found him embedded in the asteroid and had to dig him out.

Originally, but this could have changed in the subtly different timeline as of the end of Timeslides.

[Podey]

Perhaps the Earth had a cataclysmic giant-impact from another small planet* during the “3 million years” period Lister was in stasis and the asteroid is a bit of it that was jettisoned into space, like the theory of this being how the moon was created.

* if you really wanted to get into it, you could theorise that the planet that collided with Earth was the one Lister played pools with to block up the White Hole and that the White Hole deposited it in our solar system in some timey-wimey wormhole kinda way. 

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Perhaps the Earth had a cataclysmic giant-impact from another small planet* during the “3 million years” period Lister was in stasis and the asteroid is a bit of it that was jettisoned into space, like the theory of this being how the moon was created.

* if you really wanted to get into it, you could theorise that the planet that collided with Earth was the one Lister played pools with to block up the White Hole and that the White Hole deposited it in our solar system in some timey-wimey wormhole kinda way. 

That’s not far off the books anyway

[Formica]

HERE NO EARTH

The boys get into stasis to finally retire to Earth. They get out 3my later and find it blown to shit 

[Technopeasant]

[Warbodog]

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

That’s void space. Space between two (or more) universes. So it’s surrounded on all sides by universe. If universe is outside, then it must be inside. 

[Warbodog]

Fair enough. Kryten only says it doesn’t have time, not that it doesn’t have breathable atmosphere, balmy weather and approx 1G gravity, because why not.

[Jedi Comedian]

I don’t know if this has been brought up before, but I was watching Meltdown today and only clocked for the first time that the motorbike Rimmer rides (when he sees off his troops for the final time) has to also be a hologram, and therefore generated by his own light bee.

Which in turn raises the question, can Rimmer’s light bee generate other vehicles for him? Could it make a car, a tank, a plane? Presumably any vehicles are limited by the speed his light bee can travel, but what is that? Was he only able to pootle along on his bike at 10mph? There must also be maximum altitude, otherwise Rimmer would be able to fly.

Thinking even more broadly, what limits are there on the items Rimmer (or any hologram) can generate? In Polymorph he has a pipe and a placard after having his anger removed. In Thanks for the Memory, his triple fried egg, chilli sauce and chutney sandwich is visible, but the drinks he has down on the moon at the beginning are invisible. There are probably other examples as well, but those are the first ones that spring to mind.

[Technopeasant]

[Technopeasant]

That said, he could be simply projecting over the bike the way he does when he sits in a chair or lies in bed, but that does not answer how he travels at speed with it, unless the light bee is actually tucked into the seat or something.

In Backwards Ace notes that Rimmer could operate a forklift with just his light bee if he rammed it into the controls, but as for steering…

[Jenuall]

[clem]

Friends of mine were in Salford today, sitting outside a bar doing a crossword in the paper when they spotted Craig Charles at another table.

The next clue they filled in was 11 Down. 

[RunawayTrain]

Very cool!

[Moonlight]

Find it very odd that Can of Worms plays so much with the different colored lights in corridors in a way that otherwise in XI/XII you only briefly see in Skipper’s jumping montage.

I think the lighting is very good in these series but blue (which I suspect is very much due to the grade as well) is a bit too often the main color you see.

[cwickham]

Not in Timeslides, no.
(I think I might be able to get an entire article out of this so watch this space)

HERE YOU GO

https://cwickham.blogspot.com/2024/06/dwarfmatis-personae.html

[Warbodog]

HERE YOU GO
https://cwickham.blogspot.com/2024/06/dwarfmatis-personae.html

My sense of which series feel busier is definitely based on the “are they real though?” immersion factor. My mind goes straight to things like Timeslides, Meltdown and Holoship, but not Better Than Life, Back to Reality and Gunmen.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

HERE YOU GO
https://cwickham.blogspot.com/2024/06/dwarfmatis-personae.html

My sense of which series feel busier is definitely based on the “are they real though?” immersion factor. My mind goes straight to things like Timeslides, Meltdown and Holoship, but not Better Than Life, Back to Reality and Gunmen.

Agree. It’s definitely interesting looking at sheer number of guest cast. But I think it’d be more interesting (and accurate?) to look at actual characters. 

Is a character a new entity, met post accident?

Flashbacks (and time travel in Stasis Leak) shouldn’t count to “how busy is it”. Neither should AI that functionally already existed as far as Lister is concerned. Vending machines, toasters etc.

The Cat priest in Waiting for God, and the hallucinations in C&P are really the only new sentient beings, in their world, that are met in S01.

3 total

You could maybe count the Future Echo of Jim and Bexley but even for them that only lasts a few seconds. 

Series II Kryten, Queeg, and their alt selves in Parallel Universe are really the only few that could count. Better Than Life is a computer game and Stasis Leak is as above. Queeg is actually just Holly and their female selves are in another reality.

so arguably 1 total

Series III the Polymorph and Hudzen 10 are the only two beings they met that are new to their situation outside of two time travel episodes.

2 total

Series IV has Camille (1 being) and her husband. A computer and a monster of their own making in DNA. A computer and a stimulant in Justice. Only Ace in DJ and he leaves the dimension at the end. Meltdown I think you have to count as all sentient beings existing in their world (until they all die, which is a fairly common theme)

So at most 15 total. Perhaps more if you count the off screen characters we don’t see in Meltdown.

Series V has 6 Holoship, The Inquisitor, Landstrum in Quarentine, and Back to Reality (the Despair Squid itself, not the shared hallucination which are much less real than those in C&P). We should probably also count Terrorform as they’re kinda not much different to C&P in that the inhabitants are all born of Rimmer’s mind. So 2 girls and a monster. 

12 total 

Series VI has 2 Psirens that we know of, Legion, 2 Simulants in Gunmen (the computer game / Kryten’s mind characters aren’t at all real). Emohawk has at least half a dozen Gelfs, Rimmer goes ahead and clones himself to the of it being ridiculous. Out of Time is just their future selves.

11 plus the many thousands presumably of Rimmer.

Series VII

Tikka is all time travel, our boys meet 1 entirely different Ace, Ouroborus is alt dimension, Beyond a Joke has 3, a stimulant, Able and a Gelf. The virus in Epideme is really the last for VII unless you want to count the nanobots, but technically they all arrived with/as a part of Kryten

So only 5 total I think

Series viii speaks for itself

Back to Earth is only the Joy Squid and the rest is hallucination 

X has Howard, Sim Crawford, and potentially the All Droid shopping centre call handlers. Pree. The Beggs and Eileen, then all the Simulants plus Hoguey in The Beginning 

So about 15 I think

XI a couple of Exponoids, Snacky and Asclepius, Butler, the Gelf, and Uni, a Simulant and a polymorph 

9 total? Unless you count the two in Samsara that immediately vaporise

XII

Telford plus the droids is 5 for Cured, Siliconia is silly numbers, as is Timewave. Mechocracy and M-Corp are none, or 1 if you count the M-Corp AI. Skipper is all different dimensions  

Probably the busiest series of the lot with both Siliconia and Timewave boosting numbers.

But the TPL has them meet dozens at least Cat people.

So Dave era is a fairly well populated universe, but it starts as early as Holoship and fluctuates a bit.

[Ben Saunders]

So 2 girls and a monster

[Moonlight]

You know those iconic button-pressing beeps and boops from the middle series (namely VI)? I noticed recently that Series X actually has a little bit of those (I believe in Entangled) but XI / XII have none.

I’d kill to hear the iconic Starbug roar and other iconic sound effects again.

[Moonlight]

Have I just seen this a million times or is the little Rimmer flag massive overkill that doesn’t indicate anything that wasn’t obvious from “you’ve lost”?

[Dave]

Yeah I always found that very silly, there’s really no sensible in-universe explanation for it at all.

[Warbodog]

I always had the idea that Rimmer’s pieces were projections so he could move them himself (otherwise his opponent’s doing both), but the execution grew beyond the standard H for the benefit of excessively spelling out the gag.

[Ridley]

Just me that took it for robgranted that all of Rimmer’s pieces had his name on and the end result isn’t quite the glorious raising of banners it started as then?

[Author]

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