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

[Flap Jack]

I mean, fair, but like, I contest the premise of the question that this world should make sense.

I think it should make sense, to an extent. While the eventual “it’s all just a dream” context means that nothing strange or unexplained happening in it would be an outright plot hole, at that stage we as the audience are meant to see it as “the real world, except the characters from Red Dwarf have somehow come to life”. Maybe they could have got away with some extra details being weird – such as the Coronation Street shop being more like an real shop than a shop set – without giving the game away early, but there isn’t a benefit to doing that either. It wouldn’t drive the plot, or work as a clue.

As tombow says, it’s not fully realistic for all of the interior sets to just be the insides of the exterior locations, but it’s believable enough that you could imagine them doing it that way for a legitmate biopic about Simon Gregson or something.

[tombow]

and wouldn’t there have been cameras, mics and stuff in the Rovers and Kabin sets? I’m almost starting to think the despair/joy squid wasn’t really putting the thought in.

[Flap Jack]

Hey, just because we didn’t see TV equipment lying around, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. After all, by their very nature those sets are designed to be shot in without those shots picking up other TV equipment.

[GlenTokyo]

I bet softlight holograms smell like an incandescent lightbulb that’s got dust on it, the projection might be a bit warm, cooking whatever detritus it touches.

[loadoftottnumb]

Pretend like Listers lips are moving 

[tombow]

After watching the RD X documentary I’d really like to see Trojan in another form, like novel, radio-play or comic. The storyboards looked really epic, and I’d love to see both “unlimited budget” and more time spent on Arnie and Howard’s relationship. I’d love to see more detail on the “Captain Lister” timeline of Skipper as well.

[tombow]

I had a shower thought last week that “Lister’s happy ending with Kochanski” is kind of similar to the Terminator series’ Judgement Day, in that it’s a future event that once had a fixed time point (stasis leak) but keeps being pushed forward to allow for new instalments.

[Flap Jack]

What do you mean? They outright prevented Judgment Day, and that’s that.

Of course, if they ever made a third Terminator movie that could change.

[Nick R]

Of course, if they ever made a third Terminator movie that could change.

Sorry, but IMO this thing of pretending that the disliked later entries in beloved film series don’t exist is one of the most overdone and annoying jokes on the internet. 

Like it or not, there are six Terminator films, five Die Hard films, eight Alien films (including Prometheuses and vs. Predators), four Matrix films, and twelve theatrically-released Star Wars films! (And a partridge in a pear tree.)

There are, however, only ten series of Red Dwarf. ( ͡° ͜ ͡°)

[Flap Jack]

Can’t argue, sometimes that low hanging fruit is just too tempting to pass up.

But it wasn’t about the later films being disliked – from what I hear Rise of the Machines and Dark Fate were quite well received? – it’s about them continuing past the point of a pretty definitive ending.

Because the analogy was for Lister’s happy ending with Kochanski getting endlessly pushed back. If Red Dwarf actually progressed like the Terminator franchise, then the Lister/Kochanski plot would have been fully resolved at the end of Series 2 (whether they got together, or it was confirmed they never would), but then Series III would have de-resolved it after a long hiatus.

So I’m just giving Terminator 2 due credit. It didn’t kick the Judgment Day can down the road for the sake of making more sequels, even though the first movie set it up perfectly to do so. It committed to give the story a satisfying conclusion and was all the better for it.

[Dave]

No, Terminator 2 is the opposite!

It’s the first film that ties things up in a nice neat closed-loop Ouroboros timeline where everything has to keep happening in the same way to maintain the cycle of causality.

Terminator 2 actively breaks this and sets up an alternative where all range of possible futures are up for grabs depending on the choices that are made – “No Fate But What We Make”.

The ending definitely implies that Sarah and John have prevented Judgement Day, at least for now, but it isn’t definitive either way and is clear that the future is left wide open.

And I quite liked the way various sequels have played with those possibilities – T3 suggesting that T2 just postponed it rather than preventing it entirely is a decent idea, the film was just a little lacking compared to the first two. And then later films like Genisys and Dark Fate explore whole new timeline possibilities (as did the TV series).

[Flap Jack]

I see where you’re coming from, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the framing. The first 2 films were about a specific future apocalypse, and by the end of film 2 that apocalypse is definitively averted. Sure, it was “left wide open” for a different future apocalypse to still occur, in the same way that Independence Day leaves things wide open for a second group of aliens to try to conquer Earth. But in both cases the story actually being told is over.

Of course Terminator 1 wasn’t unresolved either, but once you’ve upgraded from 1’s pyrrhic “the world still ends but it’ll get better eventually” victory to 2’s total “OK, the world doesn’t actually need to end in the first place” victory, there’s nothing left to wrap up. So the sequels had to either undo the resolution or create new conflicts.

Which is fine, it just doesn’t come across that T2 was written with that in mind. If it wanted to leave it open narratively, it would have done so explicitly, not just in the broad “well the future isn’t set in stone, so I guess anything could still happen?” sense.

[Dave]

Of course, there’s also the (non-canon) deleted scene alternate ending to T2 which shows that judgement day definitely didn’t happen, and that John grew up to be a Senator in a normal America instead of a resistance leader in a dystopia future.

But the fact that Cameron chose not to use that (I think) makes the case that he wanted the film to end on an ambiguous, reflective note where we didn’t get all the answers but we’re essentially told “the future is in your hands” and nothing is set. (There must have been something in the water at the time as BTTF3 ends on a similar note.)

In general though, I think it’s kind of hard to reconcile the first two Terminator films altogether, because they take such wildly different approaches to the timeline. The first one is a single-timeline closed-loop approach where the heroes (unwittingly) do everything they need to do to make the future play out as it always did, and so create a perfect loop of a single timeline playing out again and again. But the second film explicitly suggests that the original timeline of the future war can still exist somewhere even if they change the way it all goes and avert judgement day and create a new future timeline, opening up a multiverse-style approach.

(One way that I’ve seen suggested to harmonise the two films is the suggestions that the events of the early film actually accelerate judgement day by leaving behind the Terminator skeleton for Cyberdyne to find, with this jump-starting their research – and then the events of T2 only serve to reinstate the original timing of judgement day by destroying that research. But that one seems like a bit of a stretch and I don’t think is intended.)

[Dave]

You’ve got me on to a pet subject now, can you tell.

[Dave]

[Flap Jack]

My take is that there’s no major contradiction in the ways that T1 and T2 treat the timeline, at least plot wise. They have different results – T1 is about them protecting the timeline, while T2 is about them changing it – but that doesn’t mean the outcomes that occurred were the only ones possible.

In T1, it wasn’t fate that the Terminator would fail. It genuinely could have killed Sarah and sculpted the best version of history for Skynet, but thanks to the efforts of Kyle and Sarah it failed. You end up with no real changes to the timeline, but still have genuine stakes.

It is true that the attitudes about it change, and maybe John Connor believes that only stable time loops are possible, but at the very least Reese and Skynet act as if history can be changed.

It may seem contradictory that sometimes going back in time leads only to you making history proceed exactly as it was recorded, and sometimes it leads to you changing the future and creating all manner of paradoxes, but that’s often the case for series which utilise time travel. Red Dwarf has done it and Doctor Who has done it.

The final T2 timeline is the Terminator version of Dimension Jump in a way. The Lister there – Spanners – only exists because a time traveling version of him from an alternate future dropped him off. We know that only a fraction of timelines/universes will have a Lister who actually grows up to father himself, and yet that doesn’t stop all these other divergent timelines with Listers from existing. If Arnie had won in The Terminator, it would have just created such a divergent timeline – failure wasn’t an inevitability.

[Technopeasant]

 Prometheuses vs. Predator

Now that I’d watch…

[tombow]

I’ve got a theory – probably already long thought of by others – that Dave era Rimmer has most of the memories of every previous Rimmer up till Back To Earth, but doesn’t know he was ever an Ace or about the “every Rimmer becomes an Ace” thing, probably because it would mentally screw him up, or even on Ace’s own orders. Explaining why noone mentions Ace during Skipper or Rimmer is acting like he’s never been a hero before in Promised Land.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

The only way you can really watch Dave era Rimmer is to assume he is the same person we have always been watching, with the brief exception of series VIII.  He is Ace returned, having not really made a go it.  He saves the crew in Only The Good…. (as implied in The Beginning) and maybe has the memories of VIII Rimmer if not directly patched in, then at least fully recounted to him.

It just doesn’t really make sense to watch him and think this is a 3rd version of the same character that is an amalgamation of the original and the resurrected version.  Or some other combination.  He isn’t written as such, and well, he just wouldn’t really be “Rimmer” if he wasn’t, would he.

[RunawayTrain]

The only way you can really watch Dave era Rimmer is to assume he is the same person we have always been watching, with the brief exception of series VIII.  He is Ace returned, having not really made a go it.  He saves the crew in Only The Good…. (as implied in The Beginning) and maybe has the memories of VIII Rimmer if not directly patched in, then at least fully recounted to him.

I think this is most likely, but perhaps with the additional theory of having had his memories of being Ace wiped in the course of saving them, and perhaps even replaced with the memories of nanobot-Rimmer?  (And if so, perhaps the two Rimmers worked together somehow and the original promised to take on nano-Rim’s memories when nano-Rim sacrificed himself, or something.)

[International Debris]

This year on PornHub’s most searched terms: MILF, lesbian and nano-rim.

[Nick R]

He saves the crew in Only The Good…. (as implied in The Beginning) and maybe has the memories of VIII Rimmer if not directly patched in, then at least fully recounted to him.

That fits with the ending of M-Corp, which proves that having CCTV footage of events is just as effective as having memories of the events themselves.

[Flap Jack]

I don’t think there’s any good reason for nano-Rimmer’s memories to be “patched in” to Rimmer Prime. In universe, it would be pointless at best and destructive to his psyche at worst to try and integrate incongruent memories (as Thanks for the Memory demonstrated); out of universe, why the hell would I want Rimmer to remember the events of Krytie TV. I’d prefer not to have any memory of it myself.

The rationale behind erasing his Ace memories I can understand a bit more, just because it feels weird that Rimmer seems the same as ever despite having gone through these hypothetically transformative experiences, but in my opinion it’s just too convoluted. Again there’s no reason in universe for them to remove those memories, either. It’s easier to assume he just never managed to do much as Ace Rimmer and came back with his tail between his legs.

[Ian Symes]

Or, the Series 1-VII Rimmer is still out there being Ace (or is dead and has passed the baton to another Rimmer), and the Dave era Rimmer is a new hologram that Lister chose to bring back after regaining control of the Dwarf, because he realised that he needed the moon to his sun. It’s kind of whatever you want it to be – deliberately so, which brings us to this point:

It just doesn’t really make sense to watch him and think this is a 3rd version of the same character that is an amalgamation of the original and the resurrected version.  Or some other combination.  He isn’t written as such, and well, he just wouldn’t really be “Rimmer” if he wasn’t, would he.

He’s not written as any particular version of Rimmer, he’s just written as the best and funniest version of Rimmer that Doug can muster. The specifics are irrelevant. That “Nine Years Later” caption is just a big reset button; for better or worse, the versions of the characters that we have in the Dave era don’t evolve and develop over time like they did in the original run, they’re a gestalt of whichever bits of their personalities are required in each scene.

So basically, it doesn’t matter what your headcanon is for what happened during the nine years, because Doug is never going to contradict you. As long as it ends with a Rimmer on board, it’s valid.

[loadoftottnumb]

Yeah I think ‘all the evidence’ (little though there is) points to the Rimmer from BTE onwards being the original hologram Rimmer, who left as Ace in Stoke Me A Clipper. 

He returned and ‘saved the day’ after Only The Good..’ but that was more luck than judgement. Make up your own head canon here. 

As for Nano-Rimmer, there is evidence to suggest he died, but my personal head canon is that OG. Rimmer convinced/tricked him somehow into leaving as Ace. 

[Flap Jack]

Of course all “which version of Rimmer is it in the Dave era” theories are valid, but which ones are good, is the question.

[cwickham]

Genuine line from the new Big Finish adaptation of Goth Opera (haven’t read the original book so don’t know if it’s in there or not):

TEGAN: “Aren’t there timewaves or something?”

[Warbodog]

Just read the Farscape book House of Cards (2001) where Rygel loses their ship and Pilot in a card game.

[Podey]

They only overpowered the hallucination in BtE due to their previous encounter with the despair squid, so it has to be the I-VII Rimmer.

[Podey]

(by saying “has to be” I am, of course, talking out of my recharge socket)

[Ridley]

There’s a novel in which a man’s afterlives counts as the real one. The simulation or the clone.

A character in Assassin’s Creed, Vejovis, has the potential to pull that trigger.

[Dave]

They only overpowered the hallucination in BtE due to their previous encounter with the despair squid, so it has to be the I-VII Rimmer.

Ok, but then you get people wondering about how soft-light Rimmer was affected by squid ink in BTR.

[Podey]

Or any of them, really, given the air-tight submersible ship that they were all in was still intact and not penetrated at all by the ink. 

But here’s my crazy head-canon explanation for Rimmer being effected: it is part of his programming in order to avoid the uncanny valley, like Doug’s in-world explanation for why Rimmer has “aged” in the Dave era (ie that living personnel would be freaked out if the holograms didn’t age). So he’s programmed to simulate physical reactions like smell (“Camphor wood…”), perhaps there’s hardware in his light bee or the ship itself that detects atmospheric conditions that a living human would respond to and he experiences them accordingly. That would also explain why Rimmer was hallucinating but Holly wasn’t, given she should have been just as susceptible as Rimmer.

Come to think of it, that’s a missed opportunity to involve Holly more in that ep, though granted it would have made their escape much more difficult without her outside of the hallucination.

[Dave]

Or any of them, really, given the air-tight submersible ship that they were all in was still intact and not penetrated at all by the ink. 

It was on their spacesuits. Lister gets some on his glove in the Esperanto.

[RunawayTrain]

Yeah I think ‘all the evidence’ (little though there is) points to the Rimmer from BTE onwards being the original hologram Rimmer, who left as Ace in Stoke Me A Clipper. 
He returned and ‘saved the day’ after Only The Good..’ but that was more luck than judgement. Make up your own head canon here. 
As for Nano-Rimmer, there is evidence to suggest he died, but my personal head canon is that OG. Rimmer convinced/tricked him somehow into leaving as Ace. 

Oh I like that.  I’m not sure he’d even need all that much convincing really.  Thinking about it, kneeing death in the danglies might have emboldened him to take up the opportunity.

——

It’s weird, I don’t think I really have head canon for RD, other than that Dave-era Rimmer is the original who returned and somehow saved the others (and ‘somehow’ truly is the extent of it, I’m not creative enough to come up with anything).  So these kinds of discussions are always interesting for me.  For shows where I do have headcanon obviously I enjoy discussions as well, but it’s a bit different being able to see and consider options from a more neutral starting point.  Very enjoyable too!

[Technopeasant]

This year on PornHub’s most searched terms: MILF, lesbian and nano-rim.

Surely that should be MILF, CLITORIS, and nano-rim?

[Podey]

Or any of them, really, given the air-tight submersible ship that they were all in was still intact and not penetrated at all by the ink. 

It was on their spacesuits. Lister gets some on his glove in the Esperanto.

They use the mood stabilising gas as soon as they get back on Starbug and before the group hallucination, though.

[Hamish]

Or, the Series 1-VII Rimmer is still out there being Ace (or is dead and has passed the baton to another Rimmer), and the Dave era Rimmer is a new hologram that Lister chose to bring back after regaining control of the Dwarf, because he realised that he needed the moon to his sun.

The nice thing about this idea is that it sidesteps the whole memory thing by allowing for the injection of the actual truth: the creator of the hologram simply wanted him the be this way.

[Dave]

They use the mood stabilising gas as soon as they get back on Starbug and before the group hallucination, though.

Unless that’s part of the group hallucination. 

[Flap Jack]

They use the mood stabilising gas as soon as they get back on Starbug and before the group hallucination, though.

The implication is that the group hallucination had already started by the time they thought they used the mood stabilisers.

[Podey]

The implication is that the group hallucination had already started by the time they thought they used the mood stabilisers.

It can’t have, though, because Rimmer wasn’t a part of the “group” that was originally exposed. He was on Starbug.

[Dave]

This conversation is going to ruin Back To Reality’s prospects in the next episode ranking.

[Podey]

I did see a headcanon theory on Reddit that Starbug might extract oxygen from the ocean water for air, which is how the squid’s ink reached them the second time, if that helps!

[Flap Jack]

It can’t have, though, because Rimmer wasn’t a part of the “group” that was originally exposed. He was on Starbug.

It can have, because the group hallucination doesn’t need to start at the same time for everyone (and logically it couldn’t anyway, because of how unlikely it is that even Lister, Cat and Kryten would be exposed at the same time and have the same tolerance levels). Rimmer doesn’t notice that the others are hallucinating because early on the hallucination was only slightly different from reality, and by the time he would notice, he’s been exposed to the despair ink too.

Overall the basic concept of a shared hallucination is a lot less believable than the timeline for it starting. Maybe the squid ink temporarily gives them telepathy or something.

Although perhaps I shouldn’t defend the episode like this, because it would be quite exciting for it not to win the Ruby Reckoning.

[Dave]

The campaign to rank Back To Reality below Pete Part Two and Timewave starts here.

[Unrumble]

This conversation is going to ruin Back To Reality’s prospects in the next episode ranking.

[Ridley]

Back Poo Reality

[Dave]

[Ian Symes]

Dave not confident that the new special(s) will come to fruition before 2028.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

This year on PornHub’s most searched terms: MILF, lesbian and nano-rim.

Surely that should be MILF, CLITORIS, and nano-rim?

Are you sure it’s not supposed to be GELF?

[Author]

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